Triumph Of The City Summary

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What is a city?
A city is a large agglomeration of people who have permanently settled in a particular area. The density of these settlements affords inhabitants great amounts of interaction and connectivity, ultimately creating hubs of social, economic and cultural activity. However, this high concentration of people also brings about issues related to the health and safety of citizens. A number of these problems are explored in Chapter 4 of Edward Glaeser’s book Triumph of the City: How our Greatest Invention Makes us Richer, Smarter, Greener, Healthier, and Happier. While many cities in developed countries have been able to implement systems to reduce the incidence of such issues, they can still struggle with other challenges relating to the fast pace of urban growth present in the 21st century.

Why do people live there?
People live in cities as they are hubs of economic, social and creative activity, and they offer citizens a lot of choice. Transportation and proximity make it really easy …show more content…

Some of the challenges include: the provision of safe and clean drinking water to citizens in order to minimise the spread of disease; ensuring public spaces are clean and inviting for residents; maintaining levels of connectivity in the city by reducing the number of cars on the streets, utilising measures such as congestion pricing and an increase in public transport services; and keeping crime rates low despite population growth by introducing harsher penalties for crimes and increasing police force numbers and concentrations to raise the probability of arrest and deter crime. While developed cities have largely resolved these challenges through the solution explained above, Glaeser contends that developing cities such as Mumbai and Kinshasa require massive public and government support in order to execute similar

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