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Who is this book for?
- People who want to know why housing is so expensive and how cities develop
- Readers interested in urban economics, housing policy, and urban planning
- People who care about the environment and want to rethink whether living in the city or the suburbs is greener
- People who work in real estate, architecture, and public policy
Who is the author?
- Edward Glaeser, professor of economics at Harvard University who specializes in urban economics
- The book was published in 2011; its English subtitle is "How Our Greatest Invention Makes Us Richer, Smarter, Greener, Healthier, and Happier"
- It was named a best book of the year by several media outlets
More by this authorSurvival of the City (with David Cutler)
Book notes
The City Is Humanity's Greatest Invention
Glaeser believes that the city is humanity's greatest invention and the key to the future of civilization. The power of the city comes from density: when people are close together, knowledge, ideas, and capital can flow quickly, and innovation happens as a result.
In the past, some predicted that technological progress would make face-to-face contact unnecessary and that cities would lose their meaning; but Glaeser points out that the opposite is true: the more knowledge-intensive the era, the more people need to be together. The data he cites show that workers in large metropolitan areas earn about thirty percent more than those who do not live in metropolitan areas; and a country's degree of urbanization is closely related to its wealth.
Cities Make People Healthier and Happier
Slums Are Not Necessarily Failures
Detroit: A Cautionary Tale
Houston and New York: The Secret of Housing Prices
The Cost of Preserving Landmarks
Living in the City Is Actually Greener
California's Contradiction and the Choices of Developing Countries
Policy Recommendations
Reviewers' Doubts
Bottles that drifted to this book
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Voyager's Guide
The world
The Sea of Books has 24 real islands, one for each subject. Every building on an island is a book.
What you can do now
- Tap an island on the chart to go ashore
- Tap a building to read the notes on that book
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Coming soon
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