Edward Glaeser's Triumph of the City explained: build up, and help people climb

Edward Glaeser thinks the city is the best thing humans ever built. The Harvard economist made that case in Triumph of the City, published by Penguin in 2011 with a subtitle that promises a lot: how our greatest invention makes us richer, smarter, greener, healthier and happier. Taurus published the Spanish edition, El triunfo de las ciudades, the same year. On our programme's housing week it is the book that most plainly says successful cities should be allowed to grow, and it gives radical centrism a lot to work with in Spain, where Madrid keeps filling up while thousands of villages empty.

Cities are people close together

Glaeser's starting point is proximity. In the review by the sociologist Richard Ocejo for Metropolitics, his definition of a city is the absence of physical space between people and companies. Being near each other lets people copy, compete and collaborate, and that is why density drives productivity and new ideas. He tells the story through places: Bangalore, Boston and Palo Alto grew around clusters of skilled people working near each other.

Education is the thread that runs through it. John Buntin's review for Governing reports one of Glaeser's figures: a 10 percent rise in the share of residents with college degrees goes with a 22 percent rise in per capita output for a metro area. Detroit is the warning. In 1970 its income per head was higher than Boston's or Minneapolis's, but it depended on one industry that discouraged education and small firms, and as skills grew more valuable the city fell behind.

Detroit's answer was to build. Glaeser calls the faith in building-centric urban renewal a folly, with General Motors' Renaissance Center downtown as his example, and draws the rule that gives the book its best-known line. Public policy, he writes, "should help poor people, not poor places." He also turns urban poverty on its head. Poor people move to prosperous cities because that is where jobs and mobility are, so a city full of poor newcomers is often a city that works, and they usually fare better there than the rural poor.

Let successful cities build up

The housing argument follows directly. If cities are valuable, the cardinal sin of a successful one is to limit how many people can live in it. Glaeser goes after zoning, height limits and historic-district rules. Buntin notes that New York's Landmarks Preservation Commission oversees about 25,000 buildings and 100 historic districts, roughly 15 percent of Manhattan's land outside parks. Glaeser estimates that freer building on the Chicago model could cut the cost of a typical 1,200-square-foot high-rise flat from about $1 million to roughly half. He takes on Jane Jacobs too: keeping old buildings to keep rents low, he says, misreads how supply and demand work. Mumbai's strict height limits come in for the same criticism. His alternative to a height cap is a price: developers pay fees for the real costs of a tall building, such as lost light and views.

The green chapter turns the usual environmental instinct round. Dense cities emit fewer greenhouse gases than sprawl, so blocking towers in a city pushes the same households out to places where they burn more carbon. Buntin quotes Glaeser saying that anyone worried about global warming should see dense urban living as part of the solution. He also backs congestion charges. He calls himself a progressive libertarian, which fits the mix.

The fair objections

Ocejo finds the mobility story too American. The immigrant ladder Glaeser describes was built on industrial, often unionised jobs, and today's service economy offers fewer rungs. He also thinks Glaeser treats residents who defend their neighbourhoods as obstacles and skips what they value; preservation helps Paris draw visitors and investment, for one. Buntin, broadly sympathetic, thinks Glaeser misreads Jacobs, who defended Boston's dense North End.

The sharpest European answer comes from Andrés Rodríguez-Pose at the LSE. In a 2018 paper he describes "places that don't matter": regions with persistent decline and few prospects, told that growth now depends on big agglomerations. Their discontent has come through the ballot box as populism with territorial roots. His remedy is better place-sensitive development policy, one that taps each region's own untapped potential and moves away from the welfare transfers and big investment projects of the past. That last part, notably, agrees with Glaeser about Detroit.

What it means for Spain and Europe

Spain shows both sides of the book. The INE puts the population at 49,128,297 on 1 January 2025, up 1.0% in a year. The Madrid region gained 104,618 people in 2024, and only Extremadura lost residents. Of Spain's 8,132 municipalities, 4,975 have fewer than 1,000 inhabitants, together home to 3.0% of the population, while 40.9% of people live in municipalities of more than 100,000. People are voting with their feet for the big cities. Glaeser's prescription for Madrid, Barcelona or Málaga is the one our explainer on Alain Bertaud reaches by another road: more height and density where demand is, with heritage protection kept for buildings that truly deserve it.

Europe already spends heavily on places. Spain's share of EU cohesion funds for 2021–2027 is €35.562 billion, the third largest after Poland and Italy, according to La Moncloa. Glaeser's lens asks how much of that money ends up in people's skills and their ability to move to opportunity, and how much in projects meant to make a place look revived.

The radical-centre position takes all of this together. From the left comes the idea that cities are where poor newcomers get a chance, so the schools, transport and public services that let them climb deserve real investment. From the market-liberal tradition comes the demand to let successful cities grow and build up, scrapping height limits and overextended heritage rules that ration space. And from neither comes a deal that tidies up the people-versus-places quarrel: tie support to people's skills and mobility, keep growing cities open to whoever wants to come, and give the emptied interior development policy built on what each area can actually do, judged by results. For the supply side of that deal, see housing in Spain: the solution is to build.