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> no matter how dismal the slum, it's still better than the farm

I think I'd rephrase that. It's generally not that bad on the farm, but it's a dead end. People (especially young people) will almost always choose to be uncomfortable if it results in a chance of a better life.

I used to hang out for a while in a native bar in Winnipeg. Virtually everybody there was just scraping by. Quite a few were homeless and were spending whatever money they had got begging on a beer. Every single person that I talked to told me that the reserve (with all its faults) was dramatically better than the streets of Winnipeg. But having talked up a big story about how they were going to go to the city and makes something of themselves, most were embarrassed to go back to the reserve. Quite a few of them got caught up with addiction, etc and couldn't save enough for the bus ticket back (Manitoba is a big province and some of these guys were from a long way away).

As a bit of an aside, the first time I went to that bar, I was dragged kicking and screaming by a colleague. I was scared to death to go in there. But it ended up being one of the nicest, friendliest bars I've ever had the privilege of being in. A culture shock, to be sure, but not at all in a bad way.

Being a rural peasant farmer in a region with an undiversified economy can be very bad. Within people’s living memory rural peasant farmers in many parts of the world were literally starving.

Rural peasants have been getting screwed by wealthy local aristocrats since the beginning of agriculture thousands of years ago. Peasants have their wealth stolen, get pressed into forced labor, get killed or raped on a whim, have their agricultural output seized while they don’t have enough food for themselves, have their land stolen and given to someone more powerful or better connected, ....

But the big outward migrations from rural places come when there is massive population growth but no commensurate growth in jobs. People’s choice ends up being to either starve or move. The first stop is the nearest big city.

For more on peasants getting screwed since forever, see Against The Grain by James Scott. (also author of Seeing Like a State, mentioned elsewhere in this comment thread)

I am a huge Jacobs fan. She is so right on so many points. But her followers have taken on cult-like tendencies to the point where anything that isn't a block of five-floor walk-ups with stores on the ground floor by definition is wrong.

I'll draw on Hong Kong as an example, as I'm very familiar with it. Society is flawed, and property developers are de facto rulers, taxing people through rent. That is unsustainable and horrible. Now that has been established, let me talk about the things that do work.

New towns have been built over the last several decades, both by the government and private developers. 30-50-storey residential towers on top of a podium/park, a mall and bus station underneath alongside rail stations, and underground parking space below that. It's far from perfect, but it uniquely solves a number of problems in elegant ways.

It funnels customers effectively through the malls (effectively streets). There is room for recreation on the podium floors and through various services in the mall. They tend to contain lots of family-oriented businesses like daycare centers. Schools and public transit are within short walking distance. Commuters are quickly spirited to various town centers and business districts. Local businesses are thriving in a vibrant business landscape as they have a solid customer base and easy foot traffic.

The very dense nature of the residential towers has allowed Hong Kong to keep its nature parks which are only a short ways away from a large segment of the population. (Yes, this has come at the expense of living space in cramped apartments).

I could go on, but my point is this: It is possible to plan cities that work. It has been done, and it doesn't have to be for rich people.

Hong Kong has learned this lesson through decades of trial and error. The early housing projects didn't really work. But aside from the luxurious investment-geared developments, Hong Kong is seeing a continuous supply of new towns built for the middle class, and (too little) public housing built for the rest. And these are places people enjoy to live in. I think Jane Jacobs would approve

Living in a space, smaller than a prison cell and paying millions for it is not exactly a successful model of living. All those people loitering in shopping malls and spending majority of the time outside not with kids or family is a result of such cramped up space.

Funny part is all the frustration of no jobs, no opportunities, and prison cell home is blamed on China and the discontent which needs to be pointed towards the 14 real estate billionaires controlling every aspect of Hong Kong person's life and freedom is very nicely directed towards China as if they made things so bad in Hong Kong. Reality is Hong Kong relied too much on real estate and traded living in prison cell houses for getting rich quick scheme. So the current situation is created by it. After living in Hong Kong for over a decade as an expat can understand pretty well when living in a expat bubble it's hard to see things for majority. Hopefully no city in the world follow Hong Kong model of development will result in same protest and violence be it democracy or autocracy.

I thought I'd prefaced my comment sufficiently. It's not perfect, far from it. Hong Kong has unique quality of life problems, as you point out. But that doesn't discredit the urbanization model on its own. Don't throw the baby out with the bathwater.

This is not throwing baby out with bathwater but making sure the water is not too hot and the space is enough for baby to breath. Urbanization model's first principle is to provide decent living spaces in harmony with nature to its residents. Any other model which tries to forget this first principle is not a good model. Hong Kong urbanization model failed miserably and resulted in a prison size space which makes people reluctant to spend time at home with family.

If you want to look at the model go across in Singapore, they have done a wonderful job learning public housing from Hong Kong. They have done wonders with overall urbanization.

So I am not sure how to defend Hong Kong where the repercussions of this form of urbanization is manifested in the form of protest and discontent.

Glaeser is also a big Jacobs fan, and also thinks she got the part about five story walk-ups wrong. Don't get me wrong, they are great, but given rising population, our cities need either vertical growth or horizontal growth.

I agree with this view. You still need gardeners, maintenance staff, custodians, plumbers, electricians, drivers and shop staff. They cannot afford to live inside current smart cities.

Most middle-class and rich think of smart cities as just large gated communities. But unlike a gated community, a city needs a large number of lower middle class workers. If you "sweep them under the rug" by relegating them outside, you might end up with slums anyway, albeit outside the boundary.

SF is starting to have some issue getting lower wage workers to commute & work in the city.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/25/dining/san-francisco-rest...

I believe it. FWIW, I think this problem has been a theme of SF politics & transportation reporting since the 90's. I predict that it won't be solved until the SV/SF tech money bubble deflates some day.

I found Seeing Like A State even better at really elucidating the problems with planned cities. Some portions of it were heavily influenced by Jacob’s work and was completely eye-opening to me in many ways, not least of which is how most such large scale planned initiatives are doomed to failure at the outset by plans that don’t account for the real world.

Glaeser speaks approvingly of at least one planned city, namely Baron Haussmann's reconstruction of Paris in the late 19th C.

If these large scale planned cities are doomed to failure, will they simply be completely abandoned in 20..40 years.. or will they be repurposed, perhaps surrounded by tent cities or shantytowns, and find a way forward?

They’re no more doomed to failure than other planned cities like Milton Keynes[1] in the U.K., Pudong District[2] in Shanghai or Almere[3] in the Netherlands. Sometimes urban planning is done really well, as in Singapore or in the original planning of Manhattan. Sometimes it’s just a disaster, as in Dubai where there’s no municipal sewerage network and there aren’t really street names and addresses as normally understood are useless or non-existent. Sometimes governments let people who hate people design cities because they’re famous, like Le Corbusier and Brasilia. All of these cities work to different extents. They may have glaring problems but people live in them and there’s enough economic activity that they’re growing.

Large scale planner cities are not doomed to failure. Some of them will be done well and thrive and some will be utter disasters, losing all the investors’ money and plentiful public funds. But given the pace of urbanisation in the developing world massive planned city building or expansion of the existing cities is inevitable.

[1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milton_Keynes

[2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pudong

[3]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Almere

I have noticed that the main failing of planned cities seems to be the megalomania and misguided sense of organization trying to decide how it will be used specifically - often out of some misguided ideal of efficiency instead of leaving it to the people to decide. It brings to mind having a single restuarant outside every cul de sac and expecting residents to go only for the nearest restaurant.

Sanity calls for embracing the non-deteminism. Wall Street wasn't intended as a world financial center but that is what it wound up as.

I suspect a "modular garden" approach works best as a balance of setting up infastructure and zoning for purposes to be filled on demand. Japan at least has apparently had luck with building train/subway line loops, selling land to developers and renting out retail spaces in and near stations.

The point of the book was not that they had to fail, but they would fail if they designed in isolation and didn’t take into account how cities are used and the processes that allow them to grow and change.

Half way through reading this now actually and can't recommend it enough.