Book Review: The Human City

Sometimes you read a book where you feel like you and the author have a common set of values in some distant sense, but utterly divergent senses of the history of the problems facing society and the ways of evaluating solutions to them.

Such a book was The Human City by Joel Kotkin, for me.

At the core of the book's self-advertising is a claim I sympathize with: that cities should serve what people want out of them, rather than an idealized form independent of people's desires. 

This is important: cities are for people, and urban form is for city-dwellers (since "citizens" has been coopted for a different meaning).

But I find the way Kotkin approaches this issue baffling, which speaks to the fundamental differences in how we think about cities and about how to assess people's desires.

1. Slotkin acts as if market choices are unconstrained

The fundamental claim of The Human City is that because people continue to move to the suburbs, suburban living as currently constituted must be preferable to urban living. As a consequence, he looks down on density and its advocates, since suburbs are typically not dense; similarly, he advocates for expanding suburban spaces and sees not only nothing wrong with "sprawl" but an active good.

The basis for this is a standard conservative, economics-based claim: that market choices reveal people's desires.

This is a theoretical claim in a free, unconstrained market. But the housing market famously has massive constraints: on construction, development, land use, land acquisition, and so on. A good example of the issue this creates is that Slotkin will simultaneously complain about unaffordable housing in inner cities and turn around and claim that people don't want to live there. But the same free market principles he draws on should indicate that in fact this is a sign of high demand. He never really resolves this tension: that people may be moving out not because they don't want to stay downtown but because they can't. He consistently conjures up the slums of historical cities and certain contemporary ones as if all density is slums, and doesn't really engage with other denser urban forms that are viewed as more livable.

He also neglects, or more accurately explictly disclaims, the role of the last fifty to hundred years of car-centric design on suburban preference, as if governmental rules don't influence what housing is available and affordable in ways that skew his larger argument.

This connects to another major issue I have with Slotkin's mode of argument.

2. He conflates "urbanist" arguments

It's difficult to take seriously a case about contemporary urbanism that conflates current approaches to increased density with the work of Le Corbusier in the early 20th century -- a tradition contemporary urbanists generally blame for a lot of the issues facing cities today. In other words, Kotkin is trying to pin on urbanists he disagrees with the views of someone they also disagree with. It's not an intellectually generous or consistent argument, and it animates a large portion of the book. This makes his historical analysis of urbanism highly suspect and disinclines me to trust his account of causes, effects, and potential solutions to problems.

3. He is weirdly obsessed with childbirth

There's a lot in here about how we get people to have babies, which...is a choice. There's a clear but never-quite-explicitly-stated distaste for immigration here, in a way I don't find appealing. And there's also a belief that urban form is what causes people to choose to reproduce that seems to me to neglect a host of complicating factors. All in service of claims that again, are not convincing in regard to people's supposed preferences. 

That said, I think it's always valuable to read the works of people interested in a common topic, even if from different angles or with different assumptions. I just don't find his convincing -- but it's important to know what urban forms someone endorsed by the conservative blurbs on the back of the book believes in.