Reading — 2026 Jan–Apr Recall Set 15

Triumph of the City, by Edward Glaeser, is a thrilling and very readable hymn of praise to an invention so vast and so effective that it is generally taken for granted. More than half the global population already live in urban areas and, every month, five million more flood into the cities of the developed and developing worlds. The crowds and poverty of some of these modern cities may horrify us. They shouldn’t, says Glaeser; they are signs of growth, energy and aspiration. Cities are our best and brightest hope. This idea has had more than two hundred years of resistance. Not long after the Industrial Revolution began in Britain, the Romantic poets turned away from the smoke and factories of their cities to celebrate the air and light of untouched nature. In 19th-century America, the writer Henry David Thoreau retreated to the wilderness of Walden Pond to live the solitary, simple life, and convinced generations of Americans that cities were bad and nature was good. They had, Glaeser admits, a point. The early industrial cities were dirty, since they lacked efficient waste-disposal systems, and disease spread rapidly among the population. But more importantly they were profitable, and there were enormous commercial incentives to make them work, as well as political ones. Their transformation could be achieved at a stroke: in the second half of the 19th century, the French Emperor Napoleon III gave Baron Haussmann unrestricted power to turn the slum-infested city of Paris into one of the wonders and delights of the modern world. Or the transformation could be done by trial and error. Glaeser gives a brilliant account of the stop-start progression of New York to its late 20th-century position as the cultural and economic centre of the world. Either way, Paris, New York and other cities developed because they were truly effective markets of ideas and innovation. For these and many other reasons, we should not be so upset by the spectacle of urban poverty. The poor flock to cities in the hope of becoming richer (which, by and large, they do). They also reinvigorate the economy of the city. It is folly to drive them away by forcing property prices to soar with unreasonable planning regulations. Instead, cities should build more houses and thereby hold property prices in check. It can go wrong, of course. In Glaeser’s view, this is primarily because municipal authorities fail to understand the principal virtues of their cities. The heart of Paris, as many Parisians say, is turning into a museum because of the desire to preserve Baron Haussmann’s 19th-century boulevards. Glaeser defends their preservation, but argues that in the 1950s the French made a mistake in establishing a huge high-rise commercial development — La Défense — on the outskirts of the city. Far better, he says, to have turned the central area of Montparnasse into a new commercial district. This would have revitalised much of the city centre without destroying its fabric. In India, Mumbai could save itself from ever-more inefficient sprawl over the surrounding area simply by relaxing the rules presently imposed on the height of new constructions. In America, it is the suburbs that have proved to be the real disaster. Glaeser is repentant on this subject himself. He moved to the suburbs when he had children. His entirely legitimate excuse is that the government made him (and millions like him) do it. By under-taxing petrol and imposing tight planning restrictions on inner cities that drove up the cost of property, it made flight to the suburbs more or less inevitable for the middle classes. This is a disaster because nothing is more inefficient than a suburb. Suburbanites mingle less, and lose the face-to-face contact that makes being an urbanite so much more creative. Moreover, houses are costlier to heat and cool than flats, and suburbanites drive thousands more miles per year than city dwellers. Every aspect of life involves more consumption. This leads to the strongest and newest argument in favour of cities — they are good for the environment. To live in the country or the suburbs is to have a vastly larger carbon footprint than any urbanite. Full of characters and accessible information, this is a tremendous book, not least because, like me, you will find yourself constantly seeking reasons to disagree. Like the poor in the city, this is a sign of success. If you hate the city and get moist-eyed at the thought of the country then, one way or another, Glaeser is the man you will have to take on.

The Talbot Park in Auckland, New Zealand was once described as a state housing ghetto, rife with crimes, vandalism and other social problems. But today it has undergone an urban renewal makeover. A The buildings in Talbot Park are eye-catching now and quite different from other state-built ones. “There is no reason why public housing should look cheap in view,” says Design Group architect Neil. The bricks and wood-built houses and apartments are tidy. B Talbot Park is a triangle of government-owned land bounded by Apirana Ave, Pilkington Ed and Point England Rd. In the early 1960s it was developed for state housing built around a linear park that ran through the middle. Initially, there was a strong sense of a family-friendly community. Former residents recall how the Talbot Park reserve played a big part in their childhoods—a place where the kids in the block came together to play softball, cricket, leapfrog and bulrush. “It was all just good fun,” says George Thompson. “We had respect for our neighbors and addressed them by the title Mr. and Mrs. so and so,” she recalls. C Quite what went wrong with Talbot Park is not clear. The community began to change in the late 1970s as more immigrants such as Pacific Islanders and Europeans moved in. The new arrivals didn’t integrate with the community, a “them and us” mentality developed, and residents interacted with their neighbors less. What was clear was that the buildings were deteriorating and shabbier. The rate of crime was on the rise and the reserve—focus of fond childhoods memories—had become a wasteland and was considered unsafe. But it wasn’t until 2002 that Housing New Zealand decided the properties needed upgrading. D Some controversial views arose when the program started and actually, the program made the density of the people greater. As the building in the park included free-standing houses, semi-detached or low-level apartments, the state took the mix and match strategy which involved different architects and prevented the buildings from being the same. And the interiors such as the kitchen and bathroom were made comfortable and not over the budget. The walls in the community were cancelled and showed the people with see-through openness. E The community is comprised of different races: Pacific islanders, Maoris, New Zealand Europeans. The tenants also include other races from Asia, Ukraine and Iran. The design of buildings should be accommodated to the ethic cultures. F People who lived in the park are in low socio-economic level. Of the 5000 households there, 55 percent are state houses, 28 percent privately owned (compared to about 65 percent nationally) and 17 percent are private rental. The area has a high concentration of an income in the $5000 to $15000 and very few with an income over $70000. That’s in sharp contrast to the more affluent suburbs like Kohumarama and St. John’s that surround the area. G There’s no doubt that good urban design and good architecture play a significant part in the scheme. But probably more important is a new standard of social control. Housing New Zealand calls it “intensive tenancy management.” Others view it as social engineering. “It is a model that we are looking at going forward,” according to Housing New Zealand’s central Auckland regional manager Graham Bodman. “The focus is on frequent inspections, helping tenants to get to know each other. That includes some strict rules—no loud parties after 10 pm, no dogs, no cats in the apartment, no washing hung over balcony rails and a requirement to mow lawns and keep the property tidy. Housing New Zealand has also been active in organizing morning teas and street barbecues for resident to meet their neighbors. “It’s all based in the intensification,” says Community Renewal project manager Stuart Bracey. “We acknowledge if you are going to put more people living closer together you have to actually help them to live together because it creates tension—especially for people that aren’t used to it.”

It’s not every scientist who writes books for people who can’t read. And how many scientists want their books to look as dog-eared as possible? But Patricia Shanley, an ethnobotanist, wanted to give something back. After the poorest people of the Amazon allowed her to study their land and its ecology, she turned her research findings into a picture book that tells the local people how to get a good return from their trees without succumbing to the lure of a quick buck from a logging company. It has proved a big success. A The book is called Fruit Trees and Useful Plants in the Lives of Amazonians, but is better known simply as the “fruit book”. The second edition was produced at the request of politicians in western Amazonia. Its blend of hard science and local knowledge on the use and trade of 35 native forest species has been so well received (and well used) that no less a dignitary than Brazil’s environment minister, Marina Silva, has written the foreword. “There is nothing else like the Shanley book,” says Adalberto Veríssimo, director of the Institute of People and the Environment of the Amazon. “It gives science back to the poor, to the people who really need it.” B Shanley’s work on the book began a decade ago, with a plea for help from the Rural Workers’ Union of Paragominas, a Brazilian town whose prosperity is based on exploitation of timber. The union realised that logging companies would soon be knocking on the doors of the caboclos, peasant farmers living on the Rio Capim, an Amazon tributary in the Brazilian state of Pará. Isolated and illiterate, the caboclos would have little concept of the true value of their trees; communities downstream had already sold off large blocks of forest for a pittance. “What they wanted to know was how valuable the forests were,” recalls Shanley, then a researcher in the area for the Massachusetts-based Woods Hole Research Centre. C The Rural Workers’ Union wanted to know whether harvesting wild fruits would make economic sense in the Rio Capim. “There was a lot of interest in trading non-timber forest products (NTFPs),” Shanley says. At the time, environmental groups and green-minded businesses were promoting the idea. This was the view presented in a seminal paper, Valuation of an Amazonian Rainforest, published in Nature in 1989. The researchers had calculated that revenues from the sale of fruits could far exceed those from a one-off sale of trees to loggers. “The union was keen to discover whether it made more sense conserving the forest for subsistence use and the possible sale of fruit, game and medicinal plants, than selling trees for timber,” says Shanley. Whether it would work for the caboclos was far from clear. D Although Shanley had been invited to work in the Rio Capim, some caboclos were suspicious. “When Patricia asked if she could study my forest,” says Joao Fernando Moreira Brito, “my neighbours said she was a foreigner who’d come to rob me of my trees.” In the end, Moreira Brito, or Mangueira as he is known, welcomed Shanley and worked on her study. His land, an hour’s walk from the Rio Capim, is almost entirely covered with primary forest. A study of this and other tracts of forest selected by the communities enabled Shanley to identify three trees, found throughout the Amazon, whose fruit was much favoured by the caboclos: bacuri (Platonia insignis), uxi (Endopleura uchi) and piquia (Caryocar villosum). The caboclos used their fruits, extracted oils, and knew what sort of wildlife they attracted. But, in the face of aggressive tactics from the logging companies, they had no measure of the trees’ financial worth. The only way to find out, Shanley decided, was to start from scratch with a scientific study. “From a scientific point of view, hardly anything was known about these trees,” she says. But six years of field research yielded a mass of data on their flowering and fruiting behaviour. During 1993 and 1994, 30 families weighed everything they used from the forest – game, fruit, fibre, medicinal plants – and documented its source. E After three logging sales and a major fire in 1997, the researchers were also able to study the ecosystem’s reaction to logging and disturbance. They carried out a similar, though less exhaustive, study in 1999, this time with 15 families. The changes were striking. Average annual household consumption of forest fruit had fallen from 89 to 28 kilograms between 1993 and 1999. “What we found,” says Shanley, “was that fruit collection could coexist with a certain amount of logging, but after the forest fire, it dropped dramatically.” Over the same period, fibre use also dropped from around 20 to 4 kilograms. The fire and logging also changed the nature of the caboclo diet. In 1993 most households ate game two or three times a month. By 1999 some were fortunate if they ate game more than two or three times a year. F The loss of certain species of tree was especially significant. Shanley’s team persuaded local hunters to weigh their catch, noting the trees under which the animals were caught. Over the year, they trapped five species of game averaging 232 kilogrammes under piquia trees. Under copaiba, they caught just two species averaging 63 kilogrammes; and under uxi, four species weighing 38 kilogrammes. At last, the team was getting a handle on which trees were worth keeping, and which could reasonably be sold. “This showed that selling piquia trees to loggers for a few dollars made little sense,” explains Shanley. “Their local value lies in providing a prized fruit, as well as flowers which attract more game than any other species.” G As a result of these studies, Shanley had to tell the Rural Workers’ Union of Paragominas that the Nature thesis could not be applied wholesale to their community – harvesting NTFPs would not always yield more than timber sales. Fruiting patterns of trees such as uxi were unpredictable, for example. In 1994, one household collected 3,654 uxi fruits; the following year, none at all. H This is not to say that wild fruit trees were unimportant. On the contrary, argues Shanley, they are critical for subsistence, something that is often ignored in much of the current research on NTFPs, which tends to focus on their commercial potential. Geography was another factor preventing the Rio Capim caboclos from establishing a serious trade in wild fruit: villagers in remote areas could not compete with communities collecting NTFPs close to urban markets, although they could sell them to passing river boats. I But Shanley and her colleagues decided to do more than just report their results to the union. Together with two of her research colleagues, Shanley wrote the fruit book. This, the Bible and a publication on medicinal plants co-authored by Shanley and designed for people with minimal literacy skills are about the only books you will see along this stretch of the Rio Capim. The first print run was only 3,000 copies, but the fruit book has been remarkably influential, and is used by colleges, peasant unions, industries and the caboclos themselves. Its success is largely due to the fact that people with poor literacy skills can understand much of the information it contains about the non-timber forest products, thanks to its illustrations, anecdotes, stories and songs. “The book doesn’t tell people what to do,” says Shanley, “but it does provide them with choices.” The caboclos who have used the book now have a much better understanding of which trees to sell to the loggers, and which to protect.