Book review: Triumph of the City
Triumph of the City, by Edward Glaeser, is a thrilling and very readable hymn of praise to an invention so vast and so effective that it is generally taken for granted. More than half the global population already live in urban areas and, every month, five million more flood into the cities of the developed and developing worlds. The crowds and poverty of some of these modern cities may horrify us. They shouldn't, says Glaeser: they are signs of growth, energy and aspiration. Cities are our best and brightest hope.
This idea has had more than two hundred years of resistance. Not long after the Industrial Revolution began in Britain, the Romantic poets turned away from the smoke and factories of their cities to celebrate the air and light of untouched nature. In 19th-century America, the writer Henry David Thoreau retreated to the wilderness of Walden Pond to live the solitary, simple life, and convinced generations of Americans that cities were bad and nature was good.
They had, Glaeser admits, a point. The early industrial cities were dirty, since they lacked efficient waste disposal systems, and disease spread rapidly among the population. But more importantly, they were profitable, and there were enormous commercial incentives to make them work, as well as political ones. Their transformation could be achieved at a stroke: in the second half of the 19th century, the French Emperor Napoleon III gave Baron Haussmann unrestricted power to turn the slum-infested city of Paris into one of the wonders and delights of the modern world. Or the transformation could be done by trial and error. Glaeser gives a brilliant account of the stop-start progression of New York to its late-20th-century position as the cultural and economic centre of the world. Either way, Paris, New York and other cities developed because they were truly effective markets of ideas and innovation.
For these and many other reasons, we should not be so upset by the spectacle of urban poverty. The poor flock to cities in the hope of becoming richer (which, by and large, they do). They also reinvigorate the economy of the city. It is folly to drive them away by forcing property prices to soar with unreasonable planning regulations. Instead, cities should build more houses and thereby hold property prices in check.
It can go wrong, of course. In Glaeser's view, this is primarily because municipal authorities fail to understand the principal virtues of their cities. The heart of Paris, as many Parisians say, is turning into a museum because of the desire to preserve Baron Haussmann's 19th-century boulevards. Glaeser defends their preservation but argues that, in the 1950s, the French made a mistake in establishing a huge high-rise commercial development—La Défense—on the outskirts of the city. Far better, he says, to have turned the central area of Montparnasse into a new commercial district. This would have revitalised much of the city centre without destroying its fabric. In India, Mumbai could save itself from ever-more inefficient sprawl over the surrounding area simply by relaxing the rules presently imposed on the height of new constructions.
In America, it is the suburbs that have proved to be the real disaster. Glaeser is repentant on this subject himself. He moved to the suburbs when he had children. His entirely legitimate excuse is that the government made him (and millions like him) do it. By under-taxing petrol and imposing tight planning restrictions on inner cities that drove up the cost of property, it made flight to the suburbs more or less inevitable for the middle classes.
This is a disaster because nothing is more inefficient than a suburb. Suburbanites mingle less and lose the face-to-face contact that makes being an urbanite so much more creative. Moreover, houses are costlier to heat and cool than flats, and suburbanites drive thousands more miles per year than city dwellers. Every aspect of life involves more consumption. This leads to the strongest and newest argument in favour of cities—they are good for the environment. To live in the country or the suburbs is to have a vastly larger carbon footprint than any urbanite.
Full of characters and accessible information, this is a tremendous book, not least because, like me, you will find yourself constantly seeking reasons to disagree. Like the poor in the city, this is a sign of success. If you hate the city and get moist-eyed at the thought of the country, then, one way or another, Glaeser is the man you will have to take on.
Should space be explored by robots or by humans?
A The advisability of humans participating directly in space travel continues to cause many debates. There is no doubt that the presence of people on board a space vehicle makes its design much more complex and challenging, and produces a large increase in costs, since safety requirements are greatly increased, and the technology providing necessities for human passengers, such as oxygen, food and water, must be guaranteed. Moreover, the systems required are bulky and costly, and their complexity increases for long-duration missions. Meanwhile, advances in electronics and computer science allow increasingly complex tasks to be entrusted to robots, and unmanned space probes are becoming lighter, smaller and more convenient.
B However, experience has shown that the idea of humans in space is popular with the public. Humans can also be useful; there are many cases when only direct intervention by an astronaut or cosmonaut can correct the malfunction of an automatic device. Astronauts and cosmonauts have proved that they can adapt to conditions of weightlessness and work in space without encountering too many problems, as was seen in the operations to repair and upgrade the Hubble Space Telescope. One human characteristic which is particularly precious in space missions, and which so far is lacking in robots, is the ability to perform a great variety of tasks. In addition, robots are not good at reacting to situations they have not been specifically prepared for. This is especially important in the case of deep-space missions. While, in the case of the Moon, it is possible for someone on Earth to ‘tele-operate’ a robotic device such as a probe, as the two-way link time is only a couple of seconds, on Mars the two-way link time is several minutes, so sending instructions from Earth is more difficult.
C Many of the promises of artificial intelligence are still far from being fulfilled. The construction of machines simulating human logical reasoning moves towards ever more distant dates. The more the performance of computers improves, the more we realise how difficult it is to build machines which display logical abilities. In the past it was confidently predicted that we would soon have fully automated factories in which all operations were performed without any human intervention, and forecasts of the complete substitution of workers by robots in many production areas were made. Today, these perspectives are being revised. It seems that all machines, even the smartest ones, must cooperate with humans. Rather than replacing humans, the present need appears to be for an intelligent machine capable of helping a human operator without replacing him or her. The word ‘cobot’, from ‘collaborative robot’, has been invented to designate this type.
D A similar trend is also apparent in the field of space exploration. Tasks which were in the past entrusted only to machines are now performed by human beings, sometimes with the aim of using simpler and less costly devices, sometimes to obtain better performance. In many cases, involving a person in the control loop is a welcome simplification which may lower the cost of a mission without compromising safety. Many operations originally designed to be performed under completely automatic control can be performed more efficiently by astronauts, perhaps helped by their ‘cobots’. The human-machine relationship must evolve towards a closer collaboration.
E One way this could happen is by adopting the Mars Outposts approach, proposed by the Planetary Society. This would involve sending a number of robotic research stations to Mars, equipped with permanent communications and navigational systems. They would perform research and establish the infrastructure needed to prepare future landing sites for the exploration of Mars by humans. It has also been suggested that in the most difficult environments, as on Venus or Jupiter, robots could be controlled by human beings located in spaceships which remain in orbit around the planet. In this case, the link time for communication between humans and robots would be far less than it would be from Earth.
F But if space is to be more than a place to build automatic laboratories or set up industrial enterprises in the vicinity of our planet, the presence of humans is essential. They must learn how to voyage through space towards destinations which will be not only scientific bases but also places to live. If space is a frontier, that frontier must see the presence of people. So the aim for humankind in the future will be not just the exploration of space, but its colonisation. The result of exploring and living in space may be a deep change in the views which humankind has of itself. And this process is already under way. The images of Earth taken from the Moon in the Apollo programme have given humankind a new consciousness of its fragility, its smallness and its unity. These impressions have triggered a realisation of the need to protect and preserve it, for it is the place in the solar system most suitable for us and, above all, it is the only place we have, at least for now.
The dark side of the technological boom
What are the effects on the individual of working in modern technological workplaces?
Changes in the way we work and how our offices are structured come at us faster and faster. Waves of state-of-the-art information technology and instant telecommunications let us reach anyone, anywhere, and speed is the key. Most of us are too busy struggling to keep pace with ongoing innovations to question the implications of our new electronic authority figures. According to a number of psychologists, however, the need to stay on top of the information flow and the vast degree to which we remain in touch with our offices exact a profound toll on us as individuals.
Mass exposure to technological innovations in the workplace has come too recently for psychologists to reach a consensus on its societal implications. Many agree, however, that one of the first signs of the struggle to adapt to the electronic office is often ‘technostress’, a cognitive shift that results from an over-identification with information systems. Psychologist Craig Brod says people become accustomed to the patterns set by electronic tools—accelerated time and yes/no logic—and internalise these patterns. When they leave the office or go home, Brod says, they need complete isolation to recover from the effects of the technology.
Brod warns that over-reliance on electronic tools could also have serious repercussions on our ability to think creatively and develop new ideas. Because we don't create in a vacuum, he points out, we need to avoid the temptation to replace informal gatherings for bouncing ideas off colleagues with electronic networking. It is also more difficult to spot errors or even evaluate the shape of a project displayed in a flat, two-dimensional way on a screen.
Electronically networked offices can also make it increasingly difficult to convince ourselves that we're doing an adequate job and accumulating enough information to make informed decisions. Philosopher Daniel Dennett points out that modern technology eliminates the possibility of unavoidable ignorance. As the opportunity to amass information grows larger, the obligation to make accurate predictions—the right decisions—becomes more onerous. Instead of consoling ourselves that we're doing as good a job as we can, we are tormented by the knowledge that the world of information is limitless.
For executives near the top of the office pyramid, the benefits of the electronic revolution—like telecommuting and flexible scheduling—may outweigh the disadvantages of being continuously on call. But in Workplace 2000, authors Joseph Boyett and Henry Conn describe a future in which millions of people now charged with analysing information and making routine decisions will be replaced by less skilled workers using ‘intelligent’ software to make decisions for them. They predict that a cult of performance excellence will engulf most businesses.
The millions of people on the bottom levels of electronic hierarchies are increasingly likely to spend their days in an isolated no-man's land, subservient to intelligent information systems that report their progress to unseen supervisors far away. Because computers measure quantity more than quality, such systems tend to reward employees who work faster more than those who work better.
Service people on the telephone or at a cash register curtly terminate attempts at idle conversation because their performance is being electronically monitored. Once judged on their ability to troubleshoot unexpected situations, they're now evaluated by the number of transactions they complete in a shift or the number of keystrokes required to draft a document. In these electronic ‘sweatshops’, the computers are running the people, not the other way around.
‘I think people are going to feel an increased fragmentation of self. They won't be able to hold the pieces together,’ human resources consultant Philip Nicholson says. ‘How do you keep a coherent space if you're going in and out of spaces that don't exist?’ He likens the psychic numbing of electronic information overload to symptoms of post-traumatic stress syndrome, a mental disorder following a horrific event. In office ‘wars’, people become overwhelmed by the sheer amount of information available, internalise the diversity of the world outside, and fear losing control of their own lives.
If we are to survive the challenges of information-driven, hardwired offices, says Nicholson, we need to provide psychological support systems. As no one has yet measured the social cost of the workplace revolution, some psychologists are mobilising efforts to pool information as it is derived. Nicholson started the Technostress International Information Network in Massachusetts to foster an exchange of data and ideas on the effects of computerisation and information technology. Meanwhile, Brod wants to examine the parallels between electronic work environments and ‘sealed-cabin ecologies’ like space capsules or submarines, both totally automated artificial worlds in which people live in highly confined circumstances surrounded by technology that dictates the tenor of their days as well as their survival. He is petitioning other psychologists to convince the American Psychological Association to form a specialised study group.
In addition, Brod suggests that we re-examine our value systems and that we make greater allowances for privacy in order to circumvent potential revolts against technology. ‘We need to coevolve with technology,’ he says. ‘These are wonderful tools, but if we exploit them without imposing appropriate values on their use, they become alienating and dangerous.’