Cities as Ideas

When Peter the Great visited Amsterdam in 1697, he was dazzled. It was the richest city in the world, a maritime superpower and a global trade hub—confirmation of the West’s superiority in technology, education, and the arts. The contrast between the brilliance and worldliness of Amsterdam and the dreariness and xenophobia of his own capital, Moscow, was not to be borne. He wanted an Amsterdam of his own. So he built one.

As Daniel Brook describes in A History of Future Cities, Saint Petersburg was the czar’s bid to modernize (read: westernize) his empire, and he supervised every detail of its construction. He brought in architects from Switzerland and Germany and engineers from England, Germany, and Italy. He established the empire’s first secular, coeducational university and the world’s first public museum. He introduced his people to newspapers, salons, and instrumental music concerts. In just a few years, Saint Petersburg grew into a model of European sophistication and a monument to its founder’s vision and audacity.

Peter’s accomplishment, Brook argues persuasively, illustrates the notion that cities are “metaphors in steel and stone.” Saint Petersburg—along with Shanghai, Mumbai (formerly Bombay), and Dubai, the other three cities profiled in Brook’s engaging book—served as a gateway to the West. Through it, Peter imported nonnative attitudes, approaches, and behaviors in order to build the future.

But founding visions are vulnerable. The more their realization depends on the will and power of a single leader (or a colonial power), the more likely they are to be subverted. And cities founded on ideas can suddenly, sometimes violently, come to represent entirely different ones. Saint Petersburg, Shanghai, and Mumbai, for example, all turned against the West.

Cities may be metaphors, but those metaphors are highly mutable. That’s because cities are living organisms that draw their shape and energy from the people who live and work in them. They defy top-down planning. Just think about the many failed experiments in urban renewal that theorist Jane Jacobs disparaged because they tried to impose constructs on people who wanted no part of them. The success of cities can’t be programmed or assured. They can fall as fast as they rise.

Consider Detroit. Its story has been told countless times, most recently by Charlie LeDuff in Detroit: An American Autopsy and Mark Binelli in Detroit City Is the Place to Be: The Afterlife of an American Metropolis. It’s difficult to remember, but the Motor City too was once the embodiment of an idea: the American Dream. In 1920 it was the fourth-biggest city in the United States, and by the 1950s it was per capita the wealthiest. As LeDuff notes, “It’s the birthplace of mass production, the automobile, the cement road, the refrigerator, frozen peas, high-paid blue-collar jobs, home ownership and credit on a mass scale. America’s way of life was built here.” Detroit was where people could get ahead if they worked hard. The city democratized capitalism.

But we all know what happened in Detroit, and therein lies the cautionary tale. The city is now in ruins, undermined in many ways by its own success. The high-paying jobs that drew thousands also enabled the workers to purchase cars and move out to the suburbs, which the white ones did in droves. Business fled as well, in search of lower costs. The nasty spiral continues: The city that was once the symbol of 20th-century U.S. industrial hegemony now leads the nation in unemployment, poverty, foreclosure, illiteracy, violent crime, and a host of other dystopian indicators. “It was the vanguard of our way up,” LeDuff says, “just as it is the vanguard of our way down.”

Detroit need not be a metaphor for America’s decline, however. The city’s disintegration was no more inevitable than the weak, often corrupt leadership that failed to prevent it. Binelli, for one, sees reason for hope. “Postindustrial Detroit could be an unintentional experiment in stateless living, allowing for the devolution of power to the grass roots,” he writes. Sure, that explains the rise of gangs and vigilantism, but it also paves the way for increasing numbers of homesteading artists, entrepreneurs, and even urban farmers who are bringing vitality back.

“While Shanghai and Bombay [now known as Mumbai] were intended to be familiar and comforting to the Westerners who designed them, to their Chinese and Indian inhabitants these strange new buildings and the cosmopolitan cities themselves were, by turns, confusing, threatening, and inspiring.”

Binelli isn’t alone in his optimism. A growing cadre of experts think that 21st-century cities will experience positive change. In her forthcoming The End of the Suburbs, Leigh Gallagher, an editor at Fortune magazine, argues that demographic trends, such as the decline of the nuclear family, are contributing to an urban renaissance, while urban scholar Alan Ehrenhalt’s 2012 book, The Great Inversion and the Future of the American City, traces the revitalization of specific city centers (Chicago; Philadelphia; Washington, DC; Atlanta; and Houston) where the affluent are moving in and the poor and newcomers are settling on the outskirts. We’ve seen this pattern before. Ehrenhalt writes, “Chicago is gradually coming to resemble a traditional European city—Vienna or Paris in the nineteenth century, or, for that matter, Paris today.”

Cities are, as the architect Rem Koolhaas has said of Dubai, “the ultimate tabula rasa on which new identities can be inscribed.” That suggests that they have the capacity to reinvent themselves—just as Saint Petersburg, Shanghai, and Mumbai have. But it’s not czars or colonial overlords or other single leaders who get to decide what any city will symbolize from one decade (or century) to the next. It’s the people who still flock to them in search of one thing: the opportunity to create their own individual and collective futures.