How Cities Can Survive: Look to the Renaissance

The future of America’s cities may lie in the urban past. Instead of attempting to salvage the great mass-industrial centers of the 20th century, with their bulging populations, smokestacks and gleaming high-rise towers, today’s cities would do better to emulate the cities of the Renaissance and the early modern period--Venice, Florence and Amsterdam. These relatively small but dynamic urban centers created the forms, attitudes and patterns of commercial interaction that have shaped--and continues to shape--our civilization.

Rarely has the need for such a reassessment of urban strategies been more critical. Despite occasional hype about the “comebacks” of various cities, the reality of the 1990s has been a continuing out-migration of middle-class people, companies and opportunities from most urban centers. Gallup polls show a diminishing percentage of Americans--as few as one in eight--desiring to live in cities.

To make cities appealing again, they must, as Japanese economist Jiro Tokuyama once observed, “unlearn the secrets” of their most immediate success. For nearly a century, cities grew according to a mass-industrial model, with economies based on large-scale manufacturing and the housing of vast corporate bureaucracies. Today, cities most dependent on this model--Detroit, Chicago, St. Louis, Newark--are precisely those that have been shrinking most rapidly, both in population and economic importance. Since 1980, for example, Chicago has lost nearly 9% of its population; Detroit’s has dropped by more than 17%.

By contrast, cities or parts of cities still serving the more traditional functions as centers of cross-cultural trade, artisanship and creativity--San Francisco, Seattle, Boston, Manhattan and West Los Angeles--have performed markedly better. Their populations are relatively stable, and because of surging employment in high-end services, specialty manufacturing, entertainment and trade, they command among the highest rents and have the lowest office-vacancy rates in the nation.

Although these cities’ commercial, artisan and creative activities have roots in the origins of urbanity in Mesopotamia, North Africa and the ancient Mediterranean, it was the great Renaissance cities that perfected these urban roles and helped lay the foundation for what historian Martin Thom has dubbed “the age of cities.” Venice, Florence and Genoa were essentially trading states that used their international connections to secure a lucrative role at the center of burgeoning commerce between the great cultures of the Levant and a still-awakening Europe. They also developed the second major pillar of urban economics--a highly evolved craft-based economy. The Venetians divided up their neighborhoods along functional lines, with specific residential and industrial communities for ship building, munitions and glass-making. Finally, the Renaissance city-states, with Venice in the lead, benefited from the fostering of economic, technical and cultural contacts with the outside world, particularly the highly evolved societies of the early Islamic Middle East. This openness to outsiders was then, and remains today, one of the critical components of a successful urban economy.

With their diverse populations, huge trade complexes and design-based industries, Los Angeles, New York, Houston and San Francisco, as well as some other cities, can fill these classic urban roles in the 21st century. Toward that end, their urban leadership must “unlearn” their success. The economic bulwarks of the 20th-century industrial city--mass-production industries and giant corporate bureaucracies--are shrinking in size and retreating to more pliant, less complex edge cities. Most surveys of corporate relocation suggest these trends will continue, even accelerate.

Faced with the loss of so much of their traditional economic base, cities must increasingly seek to exploit niches where they enjoy a comparative advantage. Ports, airports, rail lines--the essentials of maintaining a role as a center of cross-cultural trade--must be bolstered. At the same time, cities need to find better ways to stimulate growth of creative industries, such as multimedia, movies, television and theater. One critical element, understood instinctively by the Renaissance Italians, is the creation of the city as a work of art. Filled with pride in their accomplishments, the Venetians and their Renaissance rivals vied with each other in fashioning the most arresting urban landscapes.

Such cultural amenities help keep creative and educated populations from leaving. The appeal of cityscapes, interesting neighborhoods, museums and cultural attractions to such workers are among the reasons why West Los Angeles, lower Manhattan, San Francisco’s South of Market district or downtown Seattle have nurtured burgeoning industries.

But keeping creative twenty- or thirtysomethings happy will not, by itself, create workable cities. For the great urban agglomerations such as New York, Chicago, Los Angeles and Houston, economic opportunities must be developed for their largely minority and largely immigrant populations. At their height, cities like Venice provided work not only for merchants and artistes, but also for the vast legions of artisans, mechanics and semi-skilled workers who constituted the great majority of urban dwellers.

Writing about the highly successful New York of the 1950s, urbanologist Jane Jacobs observed: “A metropolitan economy, if it is working well, is constantly transforming many poor people into middle-class people . . . greenhorns into competent citizens. . . . Cities don’t lure the middle class, they create it.”

Right now, the biggest obstacle to developing an enterprising civic spirit lies in what urban historian Thom has called the “pandemonium of ethnic cleansing,” in which tribal rivalries undermine any overall sense of common purpose. For cities to flourish again, all their disparate groups--from business elites to labor, from tony districts to middle- and working-class immigrant communities--must realize a sense of common purpose and destiny.

Traditionally, such attitudes reflect not only political or economic values, but also transcendent and spiritual ones. Many of the great cities of antiquity--Ur, Sumer, Athens, Rome, Venice, Constantinople--were built around universal structures of profoundly religious significance. In much the same way, today’s cities should identify themselves not in the proliferation of soulless towers of steel and glass, but through the construction of soaring new cathedrals, mosques, Buddhist or Hindu temples and synagogues that reflect the common spiritual values of their inhabitants.

In this respect, a new Los Angeles skyline, anchored to a new cathedral, would suggest a welcome return to classical and Renaissance notions of urbanity and of a more nuanced, more human and sophisticated sense of the proper role of a central core. If constructed with that loving and appropriate sense of space that characterizes Renaissance cities, secular structures such as arenas, special market districts, museums and concert halls could also contribute to recovering the much-diminished sensibility of commonality and civic pride.

But even more than the most spectacular constructs of steel and glass, such an undertaking would resuscitate the sense of urban citizenship that may prove more critical to the future of cities than anything else. As the philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau observed: “Houses make a town but citizens make a city.” Without active and caring citizens, Rousseau suggested, a city is just a place, a territory without intrinsic value or meaning; its residents have no reason to struggle for its sake.

Like the citizens of Rousseau’s hometown, Geneva, today’s New Yorkers, Angelenos, Chicagoans, San Franciscans or Houstonians have in their hands the tools to forge a bright future for their cities--if they dedicate themselves to the effort. In this effort, they may also determine whether we sink into a fragmented, disjointed high-tech version of the Dark Ages or initiate our own new Renaissance, in which our cities are the source not of our despair, but symbols of our highest aspirations.