Triumph of the City

Book Review

3/7/2018
Global Business Environment
Nishtha Halwai - 16020341178
1. Edward Glaeser, in the book, makes a skewed, but strong, contention for urban
density and mass commercialization of city centres by providing a multitude of
fascinating examples of "successful" and "unsuccessful" urban communities from
around the globe.
2. The book plainly passes on that the writer has invested a great deal of energy in
attempting to discover how urban areas function and what their centrality is in
human life.
3. The book uses various concepts of Urban Economics in numerous examples of cities
and their stories of becoming hubs of economic and social wealth.
4. The author also compares various cities of the world by citing their journey from
being poor to becoming prosperous and in this manner tries to distinguish the
explanations behind the same.
5. The author places adequate accentuation on how people and proximity together
make a city and define its network, connectivity, reach and dynamics with the rest of
the world.
6. The author is also successful in expressing drearily in his work that cities are the
major means of bringing progress in the world through a better connected world.
7. The dialect used in the book is suitable for readers who have basic knowledge of
global economics and related jargon, not making it a universal read.
8. The book lauds enough the urban life by highlighting the city-dwellers’ kind,
productive and incentive nature.
9. The book is loaded with new, unheard thoughts relating to governance of such cities,
policy proposals and regulations for urban areas which challenge the current status-
quo in most developed as well as developing countries.
10. The author is very descriptive of his views on cities and urbanisation and has used
words like splendour, greatness, fascinating, greatest creation, and hope for the
future, etc. for describing them.
11. Unlike the beliefs of majority, the author tries to explain how greater density of
population, high rises and urbanisation is better than the less populated suburbs,
which he feels are a waste of resources like space.
12. The book seems to be lacking an implementation perspective and is only full of bits
of insights rather than containing probable solutions which consider the politics
involved in running a province.
13. The author time and again debates continuously on three aspects of cities – urban
poverty, heights of towers and area of the cities, to reinforce and fortify his
thoughts.
14. The book suggests that cities which are human inventions adequately depict their
own way of life, workmanship and innovation to the world.
15. The book takes us on a journey through the birth and demise of various big and small
cities of the world, enabling us to get a gist of how they function and what needs to
be done to save them enroute.