The Density Debate

Raum Emanuel, the White House chief of state and Chicago mayor wannabe, was in town late last month for the Richard J. Daley Global Cities Forum, which brings mayors from around the world to discuss problems of modern cities. One thing that Emanuel said caught my attention -- that the workable city of the future will be a dense city, with less sprawl and more people living and working in the core.

This issue of urban density has received a lot of attention recently. Some cities, like New York or Chicago, have an increasing number of people living and working downtown: in other words, are becoming more dense. Other cities are more spread out, less dense. This includes relatively booming Midwestern cities like Indianapolis, Omaha and Columbus, and troubled cities, like Detroit and Buffalo.

Many urban thinkers say that density is the key to a global city. Modern communications, like the Web, theoretically erases distance: supposedly, you can move to some mountainside, where the air is pure and the traffic non-existent, and stay in touch just fine with the rest of the world. But these thinkers say a globalizing world doesn't work this way. They say that the people who run this world need more information than they can get from their computers. These people need the latest information, the tips on what's going to happen tomorrow -- and they can only get this face-to-face.

This, they say, is why the global economy is run from the jam-packed centers of global cities, in neighborhoods like lower Manhattan, The City in London, or Shinjuku in Tokyo -- or the Loop in Chicago. These are the places where global movers and shakers meet face to face, and they're willing to put up with a lot of congestion and bad air to do it.

It also, incidentally, why business travel remains strong. No business travelers would put up with airports like O'Hare or Heathrow if they didn't have to. But obviously they feel they have to, if only to be across the lunch table from the kind of people they need to know.

This theory explains the revival of many center cities in the global era. But there's been a backlash against this thinking. Aaron Renn, who writes the Urbanophile blog, wrote in a recent post ("Density Reconsidered," April 15) that density may be necessary for big cities like Chicago or New York "because they are huge and getting around is difficult." But driving and parking in smaller cities is so fast and easy that people really don't need to live or work so close to each other.

"Think about Columbus, Ohio," Renn wrote. "It is fairly straightforward for someone downtown to have lunch with someone in the Polaris area -- just drive up there. Anyone can have lunch with anyone in Columbus easily. The city has a favored quarter development pattern, so the talent is clustered in the north side. OSU is conveniently located in the middle."

I'm told that folks in Omaha call their town "the 15-minute city" because you can get from anywhere to anywhere else in 15 minutes. And Omaha seems to be doing fine.

I think we're talking about two different cities here, and both theories are right. Smaller, less congested cities can lack density and still function well. But bigger, busier cities need density. And it's this very density that ensure that these bigger cities are going to be the global cities. Density, in this case, equals power. Less dense cities will be satellite cities, not global cities, good places to live and work but not where the real action is.

So far, so good. But is there another argument for density beyond this meeting of the minds? I think this is what Raum Emanuel had in mind when he said that dense cities are simply more efficient. We need urban density, he said, "'to get things done."

In this argument, sprawl is simply wasteful of resources we can't afford to waste. An excellent post on this appeared recently (April 27) on Joe the Planner (www.joeplanner.blogspot.com), written by a Buffalo blogger named Chuck Banas. Planner Joe noted that the Buffalo metropolitan region's population has stayed about the same for the last 60 years-- but the region itself has tripled in area. That means the same number of people occupying three times as much space.

This means more commuting: residents of the Buffalo region now drive 53 percent more miles than they did thirty years ago. At the same time, Joe said, the same number of people have to pay for "three times the roads, power lines, water lines, sewer systems, gas service, schools, fire stations, police, etc." That's a lot of money spent just to keep this big but decaying area from decaying further. The same amount of money, spent in a more compact and dense area, could pay for first-class urban infrastructure.

Bruce Katz of the Brookings Institution has run the same numbers in Ohio. Time and again, Katz found Ohio cities that are losing population but gaining area. In short, they're sprawling. Cincinnati's population declined 9 percent in the 1990s, but its region grew 13.5 percent. In Cleveland, population was down 5.4 percent, but the region grew 7 percent. Akron dropped 3 percent in population but grew 7 percent in region.

Columbus is the one success story -- sort of. The Columbus region's population grew 12.5 percent in the '90s but region's area grew even faster. Result, Katz said: a hollowed-out city. Columbus is the one Ohio city that is thriving -- but it's paying a bigger price than it needs to.

So what does all this tell us about the pluses and minuses of density?

First, probably, that it's not the determining factor for success for most cities. For big global cities, yes, density is vital. But a city like this is going to be dense by nature. Most other smaller cities can do without a compact center: distance in these places is no barrier to a vibrant economy.

But second, density counts, as Raum Emanuel said. Common sense dictates that it costs more to keep up a big area than a small one. The more people live in a dense area, the more they share services, for a lower per capita cost.

In this era of tight budgets, successful cities increasingly are going to be dense cities, simply because they can more easily pay for what a city needs to do.

For more information on economic development in the Midwest, visit the In the News section of the Global Midwest Web site.

Comments

[Chris Barnett]

"Common sense dictates that it costs more to keep up a big area than a small one. The more people live in a dense area, the more they share services, for a lower per capita cost."

NYC budget per capita = $5213
Chicago = $2067
LA = $1825
Indianapolis = $1530

Raw statistics (city budget/population) would seem to indicate a result counter to "common sense": budget per capita is higher in the more-dense cities. Budget was the most-recent available on each city's website; population in each case was the July 2008 estimate.

More in-depth review is warranted. Some "city" services included in one city's budget may not be included in another, such as public schools, libraries, transit authorities, stadium authorities, water and sewer utilities, etc.

[Aaron M. Renn]

NYC has the closest thing to a fully consolidated budget there is. It's schools are included in the city budget (though not the Port Authority or the MTA). Chicago has more and better services than Indianapolis.

Places like Indy need more densification in my view in order to renew their urban neighborhoods. Without it, I don't see how the urban core ever survives. But I don't think it needs to be Chicago style. Just enough to create basic walkability.

Clearly, furthering suburbanization while your metro area is shrinking is a loser's game.

I just don't believe density is needed to enable face to face communication in smaller cities where transport is a breeze.

[BruceMcF]

There are two main points that immediately jump out.

The first is that the relative cost of sprawl is not a static constant, but a variable, and a systematic determinant is energy cost. Cheaper energy makes for cheaper driving, cheaper asphalt, cheaper pipe ... across the board, the differential cost of sprawl is lower the cheaper that energy is.

The second is the that county scale density can only be used as a proxy for neighborhood level density when there is no active promotion of walkable suburban village centers, since if there is, then many of the resource efficiency benefits of greater density can be gained without requiring that density to be uniform across an area.

That is, the dichotomy between densely settled urban areas and the sprawling suburbs does not exhaust the available possibilities, but merely describes a couple of samples of possibilities that were actively promoted by transportation and residential construction policies over the past century.

And since those samples were under technological and resource conditions that are not going to be replicated in the century ahead, it seems a serious mistake to restrict our policy options to choices between the two most recent dominant paradigms.

[John Morris]

"I'm told that folks in Omaha call their town "the 15-minute city" because you can get from anywhere to anywhere else in 15 minutes. And Omaha seems to be doing fine."

The question isn't that a place is doing fine at one density level, but whether it might do better, if it was more dense at least in some places.

By the way, density as most people use it means convenience. What this means in practical reality is that the more diverse land and business uses in a small area, the greater the potential for convenience. That should include all land uses, including parks and playgrounds, small scale cultural experiences and gathering places as well as schools, businesses, homes and stores.

The problem is that we are so clueless about how to do this. The first lesson of building something, is to stop destroying it and that means taking a serious look at the main land use in American cities--which is granted to roads and parking.

The first rule of medicine is "First Do No Harm" and it should be the same with government policy.