The City of the Future

At Noah Smith’s Substack artist and architect Alfred Twu waxes poetic on the American city of the future. Here’s a snippet:

Renovating the City of Today
The city of tomorrow has many familiar streets and sights of the city of today – after all, it’s a remodel, not a rebuild. While other countries have the option of building new cities or neighborhoods beyond the edge of existing ones, the US already used up most land within commuting distance in the 20th century on low density suburbs. Most of us will live in places that already exist today, but with changes.

The Economy of the Future
Healthcare, education, and technology are expected to continue to be among the fastest growing jobs over the next couple of decades, especially when it comes to high paying jobs. Related to this, and also expected to grow, are two other categories of people: students and retirees. Both those providing and those using education and healthcare services want to be close to colleges and hospitals.

While high tech / green tech manufacturing will also grow, due to automation the factories themselves are not major employment centers, and due to the massive amounts of space needed, are located outside the city.

The Lifestyle of the Future
With people changing jobs on average every four years, it pays to be close to lots of them. This is one of the biggest feature of living in a city, especially for households with multiple people: you want to be able to change jobs without forcing your family to move.

This will be especially true for multigenerational households. Already making up nearly a quarter of the population, multigenerational households as well as other forms of group living are likely to grow in popularity in the future as rising productivity in the rest of the economy makes childcare and home healthcare, which are notoriously hard to automate, much more expensive to hire someone to do.

I would like to think that he’s right but I think he’s wrong. Let’s consider three models which illustrate why I think that: San Francisco, Detroit, and Paris.

Today’s San Francisco can be summarized as apartments and condos too expensive for any but the well-to-do to afford and homelessness, crime, and filth everywhere. Yes, that’s an oversimplification but I’m dealing in archetypes here.

Detroit is my next example. In 1950 Detroit’s population was almost two million people. Now it’s just over a half million. In many ways Detroit is like a ghost town. Grand buildings now dilapidated; mile after mile of abandoned buildings and empty lots where houses used to be. I’m sure that Detroit still has many nice neighborhoods but its modern day reality is that it has shrunk, abandoned.

My third example is Paris of 40 years ago. I haven’t been back recently but forty years ago the central city was quite lovely and, indeed, loved. That central city was surrounded by miles of dreary, rundown suburbs or banlieux as they call them.

In many ways Chicago is coming to be something like that. The Loop, the Gold Coast, and Lincoln Park are all still great. The South Side is coming to resemble Detroit and close-in suburbs like Maywood, Melrose Park, and Oak Park are becoming dreary and rundown.

So, contrary to Mr. Twu that’s what I think the city’s of America’s future will be like. The new cities will be increasingly divided between haves and have nots and the old cities will either be abandoned or ringed by poor, rundown suburbs.