Paris

France and America's Cold War

Gary Girod — Sun, 13 Apr 2025 20:28:38 -0400

French president Emmanuel Macron had an unusually good relationship with US president Donald Trump during the latter’s first term. There are numerous photos of them smiling and laughing together as the businessmen-turned-presidents coordinate global policy. During a visit to Paris, Mr. Trump watched a Bastille Day military parade and later decided he wanted a similar event at home.

The ‘bromance’ did not last. Mr. Trump increasingly acted without, and even against, European interests in his economic and foreign policy dealings. In late 2019 the US president supported the Turkish military’s operations against the Kurds in Syria; a move which frustrated other NATO members as the Kurds were a crucial ally in the fight against ISIS. Mr. Trump’s decision led Mr. Macron to say that NATO was suffering “brain death.” While the French president did not mention the United States, everyone knew what he meant, given the US’ traditional role as leader of the military alliance. The next time the two met in London Trump quipped that he would give ISIS fighters to European countries to deal with, prompting Macron to respond, “Let’s be serious,” and urge the US not to abandon the fight in Syria.

In hindsight the two look practically chummy compared to their current relationship. The returned president has entered the White House with fire and fury, launching (and quickly abandoning) trade wars against multiple countries and even threatening to annex some of America’s allies.

Even before Mr. Trump returned to power Mr. Macron had originally called for a pan-European army in September 2017, to muted response. Following the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022 eleven countries joined the French-led European Intervention Initiative, a military organization meant to coordinate European forces. On 28 February 2025 the French president used some of his strongest language yet, saying that Europeans cannot accept a “happy vassalage” from Washington. This statement was in reference to the longstanding Cold War order wherein Washington dictated world policy and Europeans nodded along as the US defended Western Europe from the USSR. Furthermore, America’s high military spending allowed Europeans to allocate their money to infrastructure and generous welfare states, ensuring that they enjoyed the highest living standards in the world.

Mr. Trump’s isolationist policies, combined with Russian threats to European security, have finally woken sleeping Europeans to the reality of their situation. A poll taken in March found that three-quarters of Germans do not believe the United States is a trustworthy partner (an all-time low). A similar poll found that 73% of French citizens no longer consider the United States an ally. There is widespread sentiment across Europe that America is at best an untrustworthy partner, possibly a rival, and potentially an enemy.

How abysmal are relations between America and Europe? One shocking (and under-reported) incident tells a dramatic story. In a press conference at Mar-a-Lago on 7 January, Mr. Trump refused to rule out using military forces to annex Greenland. In response, the French government quietly began negotiations with Denmark, asking if the European country would allow French troops to station themselves on the island to deter an American invasion. The Danish government ultimately rejected the idea. However, the fact that French officials seriously believe the United States may invade their allies and fellow NATO members demonstrates that Europeans have lost all faith in the US as a partner.

After spending roughly eighty years under the American aegis Europeans may finally have the will to defend themselves from foreign threats. Defense spending across European Union member states remained level between 2005-2014 at around €150 billion. Following the Russian annexation of Crimea that spending more than doubled to €326 billion and is expected to increase another €100 billion by 2027. This alone is not enough in the face of a nuclear threat. Russia currently possesses an estimated 5,889 nuclear weapons, something which President Vladimir Putin has regularly reminded his adversaries.

This is where France takes center-stage, as Mr. Macron jockeys to replace the United States with France as the shield of Europe. In a speech given on 5 March the French president declared that “France has maintained a nuclear deterrence since 1964,” and “that deterrence needs to apply to all our European allies.”

Since taking office Mr. Macron has adopted a similar stance to foreign policy as Charles de Gaulle, the legendary leader of Free France during World War 2 and president of the republic from 1959-1969. De Gaulle famously urged the French nation to pursue its own independent foreign policy. He famously vetoed Britain’s entry into the European Economic Community because he believed the island nation was too dependent on the US. The old general did not oppose the United States but firmly believed that France could not be subject to another country’s power. Under de Gaulle France developed an independent strike force for its nuclear weapons, something which US President John F. Kennedy openly mocked (when France lent the Mona Lisa to the United States, Mr. Kennedy quipped that the US would address its woeful gap in culture by developing an ‘independent artistic force’).

De Gaulle’s foresight seems more prescient than ever. With the fourth-largest nuclear arsenal in the world, France has the ability to rattle any other power and has clearly done so, given Putin’s icy response to Macron’s proposal to create a nuclear shield for Europe. What separates France from Britain, the other non-Russian European country with nuclear weapons, is that France has a fully-independent military whose Rafale jets, Triomphant-Class submarines, missiles and detection technology are all manufactured within the country.

While Britain builds its own nuclear warheads, the Trident II D5 missile bodies are leased from the US and maintained at Kings Bay Naval Base in Georgia. Britain’s dependence on US defense manufacturing is currently a major cause for concern in London given how much of its military capacity relies on a currently unreliable partner.

Given its military strength, France is a natural choice for leader of Europe as Russia threatens the east and the US retreats from the world. While many French voters will tell you Mr. Macron is no de Gaulle, the president is currently attempting to draw upon Gaullism to create a new order. The former general dogmatically asserted that a united Europe was the only defense against dominance by the United States and the Soviet Union. His calls to arm and oppose greater cooperation with the US were often met with derision from a younger generation tired of the old man stuck in a World War 2 mindset. Now his cryptic words appear prophetic: “No country without an atom bomb could properly consider itself independent.”

In an increasingly divided world, France aims to become the military leader of a strong Europe. Though Europeans themselves might wish to live under ‘happy vassalage,’ the threats posed by the United States under president Trump and Russia under President Putin are forcing a continent to remake itself. It is Mr. Macron’s aim to make France the preeminent leader of this emerging Europe.

Dr. Gary Girod is an assistant professor of history at Oklahoma Panhandle State University. He is the author of Domestic Surveillance and Social Control in Britain and France during World War I (Routledge: 2024) and host of The French History Podcast, a large-scale digital and public history project with over 200,000 followers on social media.

Photo: White House Archive via Flickr in Public Domain.

The 15 Minute City: An Idiotic Dream

Randal OToole — Thu, 16 Mar 2023 20:28:58 -0400

One of the arguments against single-family zoning is that separating housing from other uses forces people to drive to shops, work, and other destinations. Urban planners want to redesign cities so that people can walk to most of those destinations. They even have a name for it: the 15-minute city, meaning everyone can reach all of their primary destinations within a 15-minute walk.

In a paper published in January, urban analyst Alain Bertaud has demolished this goal. Noting that Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo made this goal a part of her re-election campaign in 2020 and continues to promote it in office, he looked at the city to see what would need to be done to meet this goal.

Bertaud starts out by calculating that a person can reach about 740 acres in a 15-minute walk on city streets. Based on the average population of the municipality of Paris (as opposed to the urban area), an average of 77,000 people live in any given 740 acres of land. Within this 740 acres, there are an average of 59 bakeries and 197 food stores. There are also enough elementary schools to be within 15 minutes of every part of the city. Thus, there is no need to “create” a 15-minute city; Paris already is one.

So why, then does anyone drive in Paris? Bertaud notes that Paris has 1.6 jobs for every worker, with more than 51,000 jobs within a 15-minute walk of typical residents. Yet lots of people drive to work and more than half the workers take more than 30 minutes to get to work. Only 12 percent take 15 minutes or less.

The problem, of course, is there may be 51,000 jobs within walking distance of your home, but that doesn’t mean that your job is within a 15-minute walk from your home. Commuting makes up less than 20 percent of trips in the United States, and it is probably similar in France. That means, when people decide where to live, their work location isn’t necessarily the controlling factor.

No doubt the same logic applies to other possible destinations. I grew up within a 15-minute walk of one of Portland’s most prestigious high schools, but I decided to go to a different school that was a one-hour bus ride away. There might be 197 food stores within 15 minutes of where I live, but they might also be expensive and I’d prefer to save money by shopping at a hypermarket that is several miles away.

Bertaud fears that, when cities achieve the dream of putting everything within 15 minutes of every resident and these residents continue driving anyway, the cities will impose more draconian regulation to try to reduce driving. The mayor of Paris, for example, wants to make it illegal to drive through central Paris. France has also forbidden large booksellers from selling books at a discount so as to preserve the viability of small bookshops within walking distance of everyone’s homes.

Considering the kind of regulations we already have in the United States — such as the Oregon rule forbidding landowners in most rural areas from building a house on their own property unless they own at least 80 acres, actively farm it, and earned $80,000 a year from farming it in two of the last three years — it isn’t hard to imagine similar kinds of rules being imposed here.

Even if Paris already is a 15-minute city, the 15-minute policy would be a lot harder to implement in American cities. Other than Manhattan, no city in America has Paris-like densities of more than 66,000 per square mile. American urban densities averaged under 2,400 per square mile in 2010. That’s not dense enough to put all the services people need within a 15-minute walk.

For example, the nation has about 38,000 supermarkets, nearly all of which are located in the 105,000 square miles of urban areas. That about 2.75 square miles per supermarket, which is about 1,760 acres, more than twice the amount of land within a 15-minute walk. Thus, even if supermarkets were perfectly evenly distributed across the urban landscape, more than half the people wouldn’t be within 15 minutes of one of them. That’s one reason why planners have such a mania for increasing urban densities.

We’re not going to double urban densities, especially when the doing so will fail to eliminate driving anyway. As urban economist Edward Glaeser once wrote (as quoted in Bertaud’s paper), the 15-minute city “should be recognized as a dead-end which would stop cities from fulfilling their true role as engines of opportunity.”

This piece first appeared at Frontier Centre for Public Policy.

Randal O'Toole, the Antiplanner, is a policy analyst with nearly 50 years of experience reviewing transportation and land-use plans and the author of The Best-Laid Plans: How Government Planning Harms Your Quality of Life, Your Pocketbook, and Your Future.

Photo: Dr. Bob Hall via Flickr under CC 2.0 License

France Bans Rail Competitors

Randal OToole — Tue, 20 Dec 2022 20:28:58 -0500

Supposedly, European high-speed trains are so successful that the airlines stop operating when new high-speed rail corridors open. The reality is much more dismal: in order to guarantee customers for its trains, France is banning airline flights in corridors served by high-speed rail. This is a tacit admission that government-owned trains can’t compete without forcibly shutting down competitors.

Under the new rule, commercial air flights are banned in corridors where trains can make the same journey in under 150 minutes. So far, this is limited to Paris-Bordeaux, Paris-Lyon, and Paris-Nantes. The French government wanted to extend it to five more city pairs, but the European Commission ruled that France could only ban air travel in corridors that had not just fast but frequent rail service. Members of France’s Green Party also want to extend it to corridors where trains make the journey in under 240 minutes.

Paris-Lyon is supposed to be the most successful high-speed rail corridor in Europe, one that supposedly makes a profit. The Antiplanner has questioned such claims because the state-owned rail company hasn’t published actual numbers, but France’s effort to legislate away the competition suggests that the trains aren’t doing as well as people claim.

Of course, the goal of banning air travel is not to make trains profitable but to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Advocates of high-speed trains are quite hypocritical when it comes to greenhouse gases. On one hand, they ignore the possibility of fueling air travel with biofuels.

On the other hand, France and Italy are building a 36-mile-long tunnel under the Alps to connect Lyon with Turin. I wonder how many millions of tons of greenhouse gases that project will emit? When the tunnel is done, which won’t be until the end of this decade, the greenies will no doubt advocate an end to air service between France and northern Italy, then they’ll brag about the great success of the new train line.

This piece first appeared at The Antiplanner.

Photo: courtesy The AntiPlanner

The Working Classes Are a Volcano Waiting to Erupt

Joel Kotkin — Wed, 20 Apr 2022 20:28:38 -0400

Whatever the final outcome, the recent French elections have already revealed the comparative irrelevance of many elite concerns, from gender fluidity and racial injustice to the ever-present ‘climate catastrophe’. Instead, most voters in France and elsewhere are more concerned about soaring energy, food and housing costs. Many suspect that the cognitive elites, epitomised by President Emmanuel Macron, lack even the ambition to improve their living conditions.

The French elections reflect the essential political conflict of our time. On one side, there is a powerful alliance between the corporate oligarchy and the regulatory clerisy. On the other, there are two beleaguered and angry classes – the small-business owners and artisans, and the vast, largely unorganised service class. The small-business class generally tends to favour the populist right, whether in America, Australia or Europe. These people want the government out of their business and to be left alone. Meanwhile, workers tend towards the populist left, which promises to relieve their economic pain.

The common feature is the politics of anger and resentment. In the first round of the French elections, a majority voted either for Marine Le Pen and other rightist candidates, or for the old Trotskyist warhorse Jean-Luc Mélenchon and other candidates of the hard left. The establishment parties, like the centre-left Parti Socialiste and the Gaullist Républicains, were left way behind. The ultra-green Parti Socialiste mayor of Paris, Anne Hidalgo, won less than two per cent – a pathetic performance from the onetime ruling party. Intriguingly, voters under 35 went first for Mélenchon and then Le Pen, leaving the technocrat Macron in dismal third place among the young. Macron only won decisively among voters over 60.

We may, as de Tocqueville put it during the early stages of the Industrial Revolution, be ‘sleeping on a volcano’. A still inchoate rebellion from below against the concentration of wealth and power above seems to be gathering momentum. Across the 36 wealthier countries of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), the richest citizens have taken an ever-greater share of national GDP in recent years as the middle class has become smaller. Heavily in debt, mainly because of high housing costs, the middle class ‘looks increasingly like a boat in rocky waters’, suggests the OECD.

One key indicator of the declining middle class is rates of home ownership, which are stagnant or plummeting, particularly among the young, in the United States, the United Kingdom and Australia. In the United States, the chance of middle-class earners moving up to the top rungs of the earnings ladder has dropped by approximately 20 per cent since the early 1980s. Life expectancy in the US has dropped to the lowest levels in a quarter of a century.

This growing class division is a global phenomenon. In 1974, the proportion of global corporate income that went to labour was about 64 per cent. It dropped to 59 per cent by 2012. This pattern has applied not only to wealthy markets in the West, but also to labour-rich markets like China, India and Mexico. In 2017, the Pew Research Center found that poll respondents in France, Britain, Spain, Italy and Germany are even more pessimistic about the next generation than those in the United States. Such sentiments are shared in countries like Japan and India, where many new college graduates fail to find decent employment. Well over two thirds of Mumbai youths are pessimistic about their prospects.

This erosion of opportunity sets the stage for a potential combustion of class anger, particularly as the pandemic and now Russia’s invasion threaten to make things worse. The unemployment rate reached 32.5 per cent in South Africa during the pandemic years, with almost two thirds of young people with no job in sight. The story is unfortunately similar elsewhere in Africa, with regional powers such as Kenya and Senegal reporting over 40 per cent unemployment. This is a recipe for chaos. Several Latin American, African and Middle Eastern countries have also defaulted on long-term loans and more may follow.

Even China seems poised for an outbreak of class warfare. Since 1978, China’s Gini coefficient, a key measurement of income inequality, has tripled. China has gone from being highly egalitarian to becoming more stratified than Mexico, Brazil or Kenya, as well as the United States and virtually all of Europe. China, notes one observer, is now developing ‘something resembling a permanent caste system’.

Read the rest of this piece at Spiked.

Joel Kotkin is the author of The Coming of Neo-Feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class. He is the Roger Hobbs Presidential Fellow in Urban Futures at Chapman University and Executive Director for Urban Reform Institute. Learn more at joelkotkin.com and follow him on Twitter @joelkotkin.

Photo: Olivier Ortelpa via Flickr under CC 2.0 License.

The Last Utopia: The 15-Minute City

Alain Bertaud — Fri, 04 Feb 2022 20:28:58 -0500

Mayors and urban planners have crucial roles in the management of cities. They must help cities adapt rapidly when confronted with external shocks—the pandemic is only the latest one of these. To be a prudent and efficient janitor is the main task of mayors.

However, mayors and urban planners feel obliged to invent more glorious tasks to demonstrate their creativity during political campaigns. Mayors must now have a "vision" rather than simply being competent managers of the capital represented by urban infrastructure and facilities. Urban planners often promote this confusion about mayors' missions. They pretend that a city is a complex object that must be designed in advance by brilliant specialists. They would then impose their design on the city's inhabitants who lack vision and genius.

In recent years, the mayors' vision expressed itself through qualifiers that changed like fashion: sustainable development, the smart city, the resilient city, the livable city, and more recently, the post-pandemic city. These slogans had the advantage of having a positive connotation without incurring a quantifiable obligation on the politician who proclaimed them. Of course, no one can be against sustainable development or cities being smart. But there are no measurable indicators to prove that a proposed urban policy guarantees sustainable development more than another. Thus planners can easily justify initiatives that tend—for instance—to either increase urban density or reduce it, all in the name of sustainable development, livability, or resilience.

Therefore, we should welcome the innovation coming from the Municipality of Paris, which, by promoting the city of 15-minute, proposes a "vision" that already contains its performance indicator. Carlos Moreno, "Professor of Universities, expert in cities," is the inspiration and leading promoter of the 15-minute city that has become the official policy of Anne Hidalgo, Paris' mayor, since her reelection campaign in March 2020.

Why should we bother to test the feasibility of a political slogan used during a campaign for the reelection of a Paris mayor, even if this campaign was successful? Because strangely enough, the idea of a 15- minute city is taken very seriously across the urban world. It is becoming the motto of many cities and the object of many articles in prestigious press like the New York Magazine, the Washington Post, The Guardian, and the Financial Times.

The 15-minute city idea has been repeated in many forms by mayors and planners worldwide—the latest, by an unsuccessful mayoral candidate for New York City during his primary campaign in May 2021.

Even a prominent urban economist like professor Ed Glaeser has been sufficiently alarmed by the spread of the 15-minute mania that he felt obliged to comment on it. In a blog, he wrote that the 15-minutes city "should be recognized as a dead-end which would stop cities from fulfilling their true role as engines of opportunity."

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Alain Bertaud is an urbanist and, since 2012, a senior research scholar at New York University's Marron Institute of Urban Management. He has published a book about urban planning, Order Without Design: How Markets Shape Cities. The book was published by MIT Press in November 2018.

Bertaud earned the Architecte DPLG diploma from the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris.

Bertaud previously held the position of principal urban planner at the World Bank. After retiring from the Bank in 1999, he worked as an independent consultant. Prior to joining the World Bank, he worked as a resident urban planner in a number of cities around the world: Bangkok, San Salvador (El Salvador), Port Au Prince was (Haiti), Sana’a (Yemen), New York, Paris, Tlemcen (Algeria), and Chandigarh (India).

Bertaud’s research, conducted in collaboration with his wife Marie-Agnès, aims to bridge the gap between operational urban planning and urban economics. Their work focuses primarily on the interaction between urban forms, real estate markets, and regulations.

Photo: Ville de Paris, Bois de Boulogne and La Defense, Paris from the Eifel Tower, by Wendell Cox

Focusing on World Megacities: Demographia World Urban Areas, 2021

Wendell Cox — Thu, 29 Jul 2021 20:28:58 -0400

The 2021 edition of Demographia World Urban Areas includes current population estimates for the 985 identified built-up urban areas (Note 1 describes the background and methodology) with at least 500,000 population.This is a smaller number than last year, due to a methodology that rendered somewhat lower populations for some urban areas. Demographia World Urban Areas has largely converted (80%) to estimates based on the 250-meter grid square population estimates from the European Commission Global Human Settlement (GHS2015) 250-meter database.

The 500,000 and over urban areas have a combined population of 2.24 billion, about 51.4% of the world’s urban population or 28.9% of the combined world urban and rural population.

The Megacities

The most populous urban areas are the 36 megacities, each with more than 10 million residents. Megacities receive outsized attention due to their influence in media, finance and tourism, but they have only 14.8% of the urban population and 8.3% of the world population. The other urban areas in Demographia World Urban Areas (between 500,000 and 10 million) account for 20.5% of the world population, while smaller urban areas have 27.3% and rural areas 43.9% (Figure 1).

Figure 2 shows the 2021 estimated population for the megacities. The three largest megacities are considerably larger than the others. Tokyo continues its lead as the world’s largest urban area, with 39.1 million residents.Tokyo has been ranked as the world’s largest urban area since 1955, a 75 year record that falls somewhat short of London’s century long primacy, but is more than double the three decade reign of New York (below).

Tokyo holds a nearly 10% lead over second ranked Jakarta, at 35.4 million. Population estimates for the Jakarta urbanhave usually not reflected the entire built-up urban area (Note 2: Underestimation of urban area densities), Jakarta is nearly 10% larger than third ranked Delhi (31.9 million), which has emerged over the last decade as India’s largest, now holding a 10 million (30%) lead over perennial leader Mumbai.

There is a much larger 25% gap between Delhi and fourth ranked Manila (24.0 million), an urban area that, like Jakarta, has often had its population substantially under reported (Note 2). Manila is six percent larger than fifth ranked Sao Paulo, with a population of 22.5 million), which is South America’s largest urban area as well as in the Western Hemisphere.

From sixth rank on, the margins between adjacently ranked urban areas is smaller. The population gap between fifth ranked Sao Paulo and tenth ranked Guangzhou-Foshan is less than five percent. Seoul, ranked sixth with 22.4 million has also been characterized by other sources as having a much smaller population (Note 2).

Mumbai, which some predicted would become the world’s first or second largest urban area, ranked well below that, at 7th in 2021. Mumbai’s 2021 population was a full three million short of a 2020 forecast made in the mid-2000s.

Shanghai is eighth, with 22.1 million. This is well below the United Nations 2020 projection made mid-decade (27 million), population growth was virtually stopped by public policy. The Guardian attributes “gentrification” to be a major cause both in Shanghai and Beijing (below), as lower income areas are redeveloped with newer, less dense housing.

Mexico City, another urban area that had been predicted to become the world’s largest had been forecast before 1980 to reach 31 million residents by 2000. Yet, Mexico City’s 2021 population is only 21.5 million and still ranks only 9th largest in the world.

Guangzhou-Foshan continues to grow strongly and is now estimated to be China’s second largest urban area and 10th largest in the world at 21.5 million. New York, which was the world’s largest urban area for about three decades (starting in the 1920s). ranks 11th, at 20.9 million. New York is a combined urban area that includes the continuous urbanization stretching to New Haven, Connecticut.

Cairo, at 19.7 million ranks 12th and is the largest urban area in Africa. Beijing ranks 13th, with 19.4 million and like Shanghai, had its population growth slow due to population control policies.Beijing had been the world’s largest agglomeration in the early 19th century, and reached one million residents at that time.

Kolkata, which had been India’s largest urban area until 1975, ranked 14th, at 17.8 million. Moscow ranked 14th has 17.7 million, and is the largest urban area in Europe.

Los Angeles ranked 21st, at 15.5 million, dropped out of the top 20 for the first time since before 1950. Los Angeles stood as 12th in 1950, and reached as high as 6th largest from 1965 to 1975. London, with all of the urban area inside the greenbelt (urban growth boundary), has been growing in recent years and achieved megacity status for the first time. London ranks 34th and has a population of 11.2 million, having replaced #35 Paris as the largest urban area in Western Europe. London had been the world’s largest agglomeration for about 100 years to the 1920s.

Highest and Lowest Megacity Densities

Megacity urban population densities (Figure 3) range from a high of 36,900 per square kilometer in Dhaka (95,700 per square mile) and Kinshasa (Democratic Republic of the Congo) at 33,200 per square kilometer (83,600 per square mile) to the least dense megacity (Figure 2, above), New York, at 1,700 per square kilometer (4,500 per square mile). In recent years, considerable peripheral development has been occurring in Dhaka, which used to have a population density well above 40,000 per square kilometer (100,000 per square mile).

Seoul has the highest urban population density among the high-income megacities, at 8,100 per square kilometer (20,900 per square mile). The highest density urban areas in the high income world are in China, Macau (27,300 per square kilometer or 70,600 per square mile) and Hong Kong (25,500 per square kilometer or 66,100 per square mile).

Largest and Smallest Urban Footprint (Urban Land Area)

New York --- often seen as the epitome of dense urbanism --- in reality has the largest urban footprint of any built-up urban area, covering 12,100 square kilometers (4,700 square kilometers). New York covers nearly 50 percent more land area than much larger Tokyo-Yokohama and 90 percent more land area than Los Angeles and 27 times the land area of Dhaka.

Dhaka has smallest urban footprint, at 456 square kilometers (176 square miles), followed closely by Kinshasa, with 466 square kilometers and 180 square miles (Figure 4).

Disruptions: The Pandemic and Remote Work

There are reports that the Covid-19 pandemic has severely impacted large urban areas, with many households relocating to smaller urban areas elsewhere or nearer the urban fringe. Much of this has to do with the rise of remote work, the practicality of which was proven by its success, and muted the economic losses that would have occurred had remote workers lost their jobs rather than continuing to work. In the years to come, pandemic related disruptions to the world’s largest urban areas will become clearer. We will continue to follow these developments.

Description of Tables

Demographia World Urban Areas contains five tables that provide summary and ranking information:

Schedule 1: World Summary: Built-Up Urban Areas Over 500,000

Schedule 2: Largest Built-Up Urban Areas in the World
Schedule 3: Built-Up Urban Areas Ranked by Land Area (Urban Footprint)

Schedule 4: Built-Up Urban Areas Ranked by Urban Population Density

Schedule 5: Alphabetical List of Built-Up Urban Areas

Note 1: Demographia World Urban Areas is in its 17th year of publication. It was established to provide consistency to the estimation of urban density, in the all too frequent erroneous anecdotal data. The built-up urban area is the only level at which there is sufficiency consistency and sufficient data to estimate the densities of the urban organism at anything approximating international standards.

There continues to be considerable confusion about the measurement of urban densities. The key is in comprehending the differences between urban areas and metropolitan areas. Built-up urban areas are continuously built-up development that, by definition excludes rural lands (all of the world’s land is either in urban areas or rural). This is illustrated by the Paris built up urban area and the Paris metropolitan area in Figure 5. Built-up urban areas are the city in its physical form, as opposed to metropolitan areas, which are the economic or functional cities (the labor and housing markets). These terms are defined by Cheshire, et al. of the London School of Economics (see: “People rather than places, ends rather than means: LSE economists on urban containment”).

Demographia World Urban Areas uses base year population estimates, principally from the European Commission Global Human Settlement (GHS2015) 250 meter database (grid square estimates). National statistical authority base year estimates are used where identified and consistent with international definitions.These figures are then adjusted to account for population change forecasts, principally from the United Nations and the national statistics bureaus for a current year estimate.

Demographia combines extensions of continuously built-up areas, where they are a part of a larger labor market (such as New York, Bridgeport-Stamford and New Haven, Los Angeles, Riverside-San Bernardino and Mission Viejo and Toronto, Hamilton and Oshawa).

Demographia World Urban Areas is a continuing project providing “state of the art” data. Revisions are made as more accurate satellite photographs and population estimating resources become available. As a result, Demographia World Urban Areas is not intended for trend analysis.

Note 2: Underestimation of urban area populations: Demographia World Urban Areas was the first to identify the under-estimation of population in some of the largest urban areas, by other sources. For example, Demographia’s early population estimates for the Jakarta, Delhi, Manila, Seoul-Incheon and Kuala Lumpur built-up urban areas were far higher than reported by others at the time. Other sources have revised their estimates upward. The earlier, lower estimates of others were, in actuality, municipal estimates that did not sufficiently take into consideration the spread of urbanization beyond city or other geographical limits. Demographia’s larger population estimates resulted from satellite map examination to determine the extent of individual built-up urban areas.

Wendell Cox is principal of Demographia, an international public policy firm located in the St. Louis metropolitan area. He is a founding senior fellow at the Urban Reform Institute, Houston, a Senior Fellow with the Frontier Centre for Public Policy in Winnipeg and a member of the Advisory Board of the Center for Demographics and Policy at Chapman University in Orange, California. He has served as a visiting professor at the Conservatoire National des Arts et Metiers in Paris. His principal interests are economics, poverty alleviation, demographics, urban policy and transport. He is co-author of the annual Demographia International Housing Affordability Survey and author of Demographia World Urban Areas.

Mayor Tom Bradley appointed him to three terms on the Los Angeles County Transportation Commission (1977-1985) and Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich appointed him to the Amtrak Reform Council, to complete the unexpired term of New Jersey Governor Christine Todd Whitman (1999-2002). He is author of War on the Dream: How Anti-Sprawl Policy Threatens the Quality of Life and Toward More Prosperous Cities: A Framing Essay on Urban Areas, Transport, Planning and the Dimensions of Sustainability.

Photograph: Cover, 17th Annual Demographia World Urban Areas: Buenos Aires: Retiro Railway Station with the Rio de la Plata in the background (by author)

France's COVID Fall

Hügo Krüger — Wed, 25 Nov 2020 20:29:01 -0500

The coronavirus virus initially started in China, but it quickly made its way to the European Continent with France reporting its first case on the 24th of January. Like other countries the world over, the French people were asked to make a sacrifice for the common good as the government implemented public health care measures such as imposing a ban on mass gatherings, instituting handwashing protocols, enforcing social distancing, mandating masks and implementing other non-pharmaceutical measures.

When the news of the virus broke, many citizens were encouraged to practice self-isolation, companies gave their employees the opportunity to work from home, and restaurant owners, schools and other businesses started preparing for a closedown. As cases kept on climbing, the French President Emmanuel Macron declared a war against the Coronavirus. Yet despite these steps, France, like the United Kingdom, Italy, Spain and Belgium, has experienced COVID-fatalities at roughly the same rate or higher as the U.S., and also shared in the recent surge as well.

France’s initial lockdown started the 17th of March and lasted until the first weeks of the European summer. The government acted quickly to implement measures to prevent the potential economic damage. Macron’s government increased its workers compensation scheme for any job losses due to the pandemic and in Paris, the local government went further by imposing a ban on landlords to evict their tenants during the cold months.

In contrast to other countries such as the United States and South Africa, France briefly had the situation under control. Unfortunately, as cases started to rise in Paris, life became unbearable in the small crowded boxed homes and an estimated 17% of the population fled to the countryside. Unfortunately, the virus went with them. Healthcare and front-line doctors, many of who are foreigners, put their lives on the front line and as a display of gratitude for their service, the French Minister of the Interior decided to put them on an accelerated path to citizenship.

The French government’s response was rather sensible, but in most large European countries, outside of Germany, the results have been no better than those in the US.

Pandemic Preparedness

In 2003 following the SARS outbreak, the French authorities asked their esteemed Microbiologist Professor Didier Raoult to investigate France’s pandemic preparedness and biodefense capabilities. Raoult’s report criticized France’s unpreparedness for the pandemic, but his findings were ignored by the political establishment.

Raoult did manage to raise the money to build IHU Marseilles that has since the pandemic started becoming the beacon of research and information regarding COVID19. When the pandemic struck the patients in the port city could get tested and treated early, consequently Marseilles reported a statistically insignificant excess mortality in 2020.

But the story generally was pretty disappointing. When COVID-19 hit, the French government despite its well celebrated public health system, found themselves short of medical Personal Protective equipment, masks and the ability to perform a large scale population testing.

In terms of Urban Planning, French City Planners will also have to rethink their dedication to high dense cities as recent a study from INSEE shows that these areas were the hardest hit by COVID-19.

Treatment

In France, COVID-19 patients were initially told to stay home if they develop flu-like symptoms. They could only go to hospital after 7 days if they developed heavy symptoms such as difficulties to breathe. As in the USA many patients with respiratory problems were immediately put on a ventilator, but this official protocol might have killed the patients as the COVID-19 disease has a unique symptom among respiratory diseases that coagulates the patient’s blood. Patients could have survived if they were put only on oxygen. When a New York Emergency Doctor Cameron Kyle Sidell first pointed out the COVID-19 might not cause ARDS, he was relieved of his duties, but later his recommendations were implemented.

On the French social media rumors started circulating about a magic cure called Hydroxychloroquine. Videos of Dr. Didier Raoult, the world’s most cited expert in communicable diseases, began to circulate where he claimed that he replicated the results of Chinese scientists that already treated patients with the antimalarial.

Hydroxychloroquine (HCQ) branded as Plaquenil is not new to anyone, like me, from Africa, as we often take it without prescription to enter Malaria zones, and it certainly is not dangerous. In 2019 patients could get the drug in France without prescription, but in early January 2020 the French government changed the prescription guidelines to avoid self-medication and the government insists that that the change has nothing to do with the coronavirus.

Dr. Raoult pioneered treating respiratory diseases with hydroxychloroquine almost 20 years ago and he was aware of the limits of the drug that according to his protocol only works during the early stage of the disease. By implication, patients already hospitalized might find little benefit from HCQ and the 7-day waiting protocol would make HCQ rather pointless. Later word spread to the United States and when President Donald Trump tweeted about HQC all hell broke loose when the medication got politicized, and scientific truth went completely out of the window.

Dr Raoult has since then treated over 7000 patients with Hydroxychloroquine with a case fatality rate of 0.5%. Similar results were also obtained in the United States by Dr. Zelenko in New York and Dr. Stella Immanuel in Texas, and many medical professionals in Senegal, Morocco, Algeria, and India. Yet the Western Press went out of its way to discredit the treatment. Currently over 100 Peer Reviewed publications support the use of the HCQ for early treatment. Moroccan scientist Jaouad Zemmouri estimated that 78% of Europe’s coronavirus-related deaths could have been avoided if European states had mirrored Morocco’s chloroquine strategy.

Yet, despite this record, HQC was soon withdrawn by the WHO from their recommendations. Later this year, the French medical body Agence nationale de sécurité du médicament et des products de santé (ANSM) issued an official ban on the use of HQC, and they only authorized Remdesivir as a potential treatment.

Diet

The COVID19 disease has been linked to Nicotinamide adenine dinucleotid(NAD+) depletion in patients. Low NAD+ allows for the virus to utilize the Mtor pathway that was discovered 25 years ago by John Hopkins Researcher David Sabatini. Researcher Roben Huizenga, showed a massive improvement in the outcome of elderly patients when he treated them with a cheap cocktail that could increase their NAD+ levels.

The pathway and its association has been identified in mice and human studies and a cost effective way to increase a patients NAD+ would be to adopt a higher protein medium fat low glycemic carbohydrate diet, but this goes in contradiction to the official US and French nutritional guidelines.

COVID-19 deaths has been heavily associated with diabetes, heart disease and all chronic disease that are associated with insulin resistance. South African sport and medical scientist, Prof Tim Noakes pointed out that a low carb high fat diet (known as Ketogenic in the United States and Banting in South Africa) can effectively treat insulin resistance and reverse type 2 diabetes and thus better prepare patients to be resistant to COVID-19.

With all the healthcare measures that were imposed, and freedom curtailed, not a single public health official, even in food centric France, focused on necessary dietary change. This practical step may have lessened the high death rate due to COVID-19 in the industrialized west.

Computer Models

France was unprepared for the coronavirus as the country suddenly discovered that it has no available PCR testing equipment. As in the case of the UK and America, the government’s initial response was to heavily rely on computer models, later proven to overestimate the risk of COVID-19. The models were driven by Imperial College’s Prof. Neil Ferguson, but when experts started analyzing his predictions, the code became unreadable. Ferguson has a long history of wrong predictions, yet his predictions were taken as prophesy.

If only the modelers looked at the already available data and three full population groups in particular, the Diamond Princess Ship, the Charles De Gaulle Aircraft Carrier and the U.S. Franklin D. Roosevelt then they could better estimate the populations that were at risks of dying. Early in March Stanford University’s Dr. John Ioannidis showed that a simple proportionate calculation from one of these ships would estimate the highest risk of death to around 625 in a hundred thousand people, around 5 times deadlier than seasonal influenza.

By October, this year the United States, the UK and France all had around 600 in a hundred thousand deaths from COVID-19. Ioannidis’s approach was spot on, simple high school mathematics proved better than a sophisticated mathematical prophesy.

The Role of Propaganda and Big Tech

The most disturbing aspect of the pandemic, in France and elsewhere, has been the deliberate propaganda by governments the world over and their complex interconnection with big tech. Twitter and Facebook started expanding its censorship against anyone that dares to question the WHO’s official guidelines, despite the WHO’s dark history of incompetence. The WHO leader Tedros Adhanom has deep ties with the Marxist inspired Tigray People's Liberation Front that has been responsible for human rights abuses in his native country Ethiopia. The WHO was also caught faking the Swine Flu Pandemic in 2008 and the Film Trust WHO that exposes the corruption was subsequently removed from YouTube and Vimeo when the pandemic started.

Early on in the pandemic, President Macron created a scientific advisory body known as L'ordre des Medecins et le conseil scientifique and initially including the famous Doctor Raoult, but after a fallout with the other scientists he eventually quit, saying that his advised is undermined by other interests. A study by the Swiss Prof. Patrick-Yves Badillo, director at the University of Geneva’s communication, media and digital sciences department showed that the French Media took a completely partisan stance on hydroxychloroquine and an ideological position against any dissenting voices such as Doctor Didier Raoult.

Conclusion

As in the United States, the French people were told to stay indoors, wear masks, and just go along until the authorities say that the situation is safe. Physical exercise and the buying of necessities were restricted to once per day. These measures seemed rather sensible compared to South Africa that banned alcohol and rather proportionate compared to Brazil and Tanzania that simply ignored the danger, or in the Philippines were the police shot people for not respecting the social distancing rule.

The public was told that the non-pharmaceutical interventions were meant to protect them, but a recent report by Prof. Vincent Jarnier at the Sorbonne University cast serious doubt if any of the non-pharmaceutical interventions, with the possible exception of early testing, actually stopped the pandemic from following its natural course.

A report at Paris’s institute of Epidemiology (IRMES) showed what no sensible person would have expected before COVID19 hit the world, i.e. that countries in the Western World such as France and the United States that have the highest incomes and life expectancy would have suffered the highest loss of life.

Although some Americans see COVID’s wrath in that country as proof of incompetence, particularly under President Trump’s admittedly chaotic leadership, the French experience shows the limitations and even misdirection are not unique to Washington. When we finally have the data to examine what happened, we will likely find much failing not only by the Potomac but the Seine as well.

The official government narrative is that the response of the pandemic has left a few unanswered questions and sensible citizens should deeply interrogate them if we care about uncovering the truth in the post COVID-19 world.

Hügo Krüger is a Structural Engineer with working experience in the Nuclear, Concrete and Oil and Gas Industry. He was born in Pretoria South Africa and moved to France in 2015. He holds a Bachelors Degree in Civil Engineering from the University of Pretoria and a Masters degree in Nuclear Structures from the École spéciale des travaux publics, du bâtiment et de l'industrie (ESTP Paris). He frequently contributes to the South African English blog Rational Standard and the Afrikaans Newspaper Rapport. He fluently speaks French, Germany, English and Afrikaans. His interests include politics, economics, public policy, history, languages, Krav Maga and Structural Engineering.

Photo: data from Google News.

Demographia World Urban Areas, 2020: Tokyo Lead Diminishing

Wendell Cox — Fri, 26 Jun 2020 20:29:01 -0400

For the first time in more than six decades the world’s second ranked built-up urban area has reached within 10% of leader Tokyo. The 2020 edition of Demographia World Urban Areas reports that Jakarta has reached a population of 34.5 million, behind Tokyo-Yokohama’s 38.0 million (Figure 1). The report can be downloaded here (Note 1). Yet Tokyo’s growth has slowed, a reflection of Japan’s overall demographic implosion, although it is still adding people while the country is losing population.

Background

Built-up urban areas are continuously built-up development that excludes rural lands (Note 2) are formally defined by a number of nations, using relatively similar criteria. Demographia develops urban area definitions (urban perimeters) based on satellite images for all known built-up urban areas for which there is no formal national census authority definition. Demographia combines extensions of continuously built up areas (as designated by census authorities), where they are a part of a larger labor market (such as New York, Bridgeport-Stamford and New Haven, Los Angeles, Riverside-San Bernardino and Mission Viejo and Toronto, Hamilton and Oshawa).

Demographia World Urban Areas provides pre-COVID-19 population estimates for all of the 1,055 identified built-up urban areas with 500,000 or greater population. The list includes a total population equal to 51.7% of the estimated world urban population (Figure 2).

Population estimates are based on national statistical authority estimates for built-up urban areas consistent with international practice are available. Beginning with this year, most other larger built-up urban area populations are estimated based on small area grids that provide population estimates that are tailored for the urban perimeters (Note 3).

Demographia World Urban Areas contains five tables that provide summary and ranking information:

Table 1: World Summary: Built-Up Urban Areas Over 500,000
Table 2: Largest Built-Up Urban Areas in the World
Table 3: Built-Up Urban Areas Ranked by Land Area (Urban Footprint)
Table 4: Built-Up Urban Areas Ranked by Urban Population Density
Table 5: Alphabetical List of Built-Up Urban Areas

The Principal Challenger: Jakarta

Jakarta’s urban area now spreads from the Special Capital Region, to Tangerang and South Tangerang to the West, the city of Bogor to the south and to Karawang Regency to the East. Even with this massive land area of 3,540 square kilometers (1,367 square miles), Jakarta covers less than one-half the territory of Tokyo-Yokohama. But Jakarta’s population density is 9,800 per square kilometer (25,300 per square mile), more than double that of Tokyo-Yokohama’s 4,600 per square kilometer (12,000 per square mile).

However, storm clouds threaten Jakarta’s future growth. The present city site has extreme environmental challenges, such as sinking due to ground water extraction, as well as some of the world’s worst traffic congestion. The government has announced plans to move the capital by 2024 (video) to the sparsely populated province of East Kalimantan on the island of Borneo (about 1,300 kilometers or 800 miles from Jakarta).

A 2024 move date is very aggressive and even if achieved may not slow Jakarta’s pursuit of the number one spot (assuming continuation of present projected growth rates). Previous national capital moves do not appear to have materially reduced the growth in the urban areas the capitals have deserted. For example, Brasilia is perhaps the most successful post-World War II new national capital, measured in terms of its population growth. In the two decades following its 1960 opening, Brasilia struggled to reach 1.3 million residents, while Rio de Janeiro added 4.3 million.

India’s Largest Megacities

However, if in the unlikely event that Jakarta should falter, fast growing Delhi, the world's third largest built-up urban area should pass Tokyo-Yokohama by 2035. Delhi has a population of 29.6 million residents and a density of 13,300 per square kilometer (34,400 per square mile). Delhi should continue to widen the gap over Mumbai that currently stands at 6.5 million. Mumbai used to be India’s largest built-up urban area.

Even so, Mumbai ranks as the fourth largest built-up urban area in the world, with a population density of 24,800 per square kilometer (64,200 per square mile), making it the second densest megacity (built-up urban area over 10 million) in the world, trailing only Dhaka. It is also slightly less dense than Hong Kong, which is the densest high-income world built-up urban area (25,300 per square kilometer 65,600 per square mile).

Other Population Leaders

Manila is now the fifth largest built-up urban area, with 23.1 million residents. Manila has a population density of 12,300 per square kilometer (31,900 per square mile). The top ten built-up urban areas are rounded out by Shanghai, Sao Paulo, Seoul-Incheon, Mexico City and Guangzhou-Foshan.

Largest Urban Footprint (Urban Land Area)

New York has the largest urban footprint of any built-up urban area, covering 12,100 square kilometers (4,700 square kilometers). New York covers about 50 percent more land area than much larger Tokyo-Yokohama and 90 percent more land area than Los Angeles.

Highest Urban Density

Dhaka, ranked 19^th with a population of 15.4 million, continues to have the highest urban population density, at 33,900 per square kilometer (87,700 per square mile). This is 19 times as dense as the New York built-up urban area. Kinshasa is the second densest, at 28,500 per square kilometer (73,900 per square mile).

Decline of the West

For the first time, the high-income West is not represented in the 10 largest urban areas (Figure 3). In 1950, four such cities — New York, London, Paris and Chicago — were on the United Nations list. New York, which had been the largest built-up urban area from the 1920s to 1950, fell to 11^th place, while the others had long ago fallen out. Chicago has suffered the largest drop, from 8^th to 41^st. That is despite a near doubling of its population from 1950 to 2020. The Los Angeles built-up urban area, which ranked 12^th in 1950, nearly quadrupled its population, but fell to 20^th, after having reached 6^th largest from 1965 to 1975.

Note 1: Demographia World Urban Areas was the first to identify the under-estimation of population in some of the largest urban areas, by other sources. For example, Demographia’s early population estimates for the Jakarta, Delhi, Manila, Seoul-Incheon and Kuala Lumpur built-up urban areas were far higher than reported by others at the time. Other sources have revised their estimates upward. The earlier, lower estimates of others were, in actuality, municipal estimates that did not sufficiently take into consideration the spread of urbanization beyond city or other geographical limits. Demographia’s larger population estimates were the result of examining actual satellite maps to determine the extent of individual built-up urban areas.

Note 2: Demographia World Urban Areas is in its 16th year of publication. It was established for the purpose of bringing some consistency to the subject of urban density, in hopes of replacing often grossly invalid anecdotal comparisons between cities. The built-up urban area is the only level at which there is sufficiency consistency and sufficient data to estimate the densities of the urban organism at anything approximating international standards.

There continues to be considerable confusion about the measurement of urban densities. The key is in comprehending the differences between urban areas and metropolitan areas. Built-up urban areas are continuously built-up development that excludes rural lands. This is illustrated by the Paris built up urban area and the Paris metropolitan area in Figure 4. Built-up urban areas are the city in its physical form, as opposed to metropolitan areas, which are the economic or functional cities (the labor and housing markets). These terms are defined by Cheshire, et al. of the London School of Economics (see: “People rather than places, ends rather than means: LSE economists on urban containment”).

Demographia World Urban Areas uses base population figures, derived from official census and estimates data, to develop basic year population estimates within the confines of built-up urban areas. These figures are then adjusted to account for population change forecasts, principally from the United Nations or the various national statistics bureaus for a 2018 estimate.

Note 3: Demographia World Urban Areas is a continuing project providing “state of the art” data. Revisions are made as more accurate satellite photographs and population estimating resources become available. As a result, Demographia World Urban Areas is not intended for trend analysis.

Photograph: Cover, 16^th Annual Demographia World Urban Areas (Guangzhou: Zhujiang New Town).

Wendell Cox is principal of Demographia, an international public policy firm located in the St. Louis metropolitan area. He is a founding senior fellow at the Urban Reform Institute, Houston and a member of the Advisory Board of the Center for Demographics and Policy at Chapman University in Orange, California. He has served as a visiting professor at the Conservatoire National des Arts et Metiers in Paris. His principal interests are economics, poverty alleviation, demographics, urban policy and transport. He is co-author of the annual Demographia International Housing Affordability Survey and author of Demographia World Urban Areas.

The Urban Project: Urbanization, Urbanisms, and the Virus – A Historical Take

Fanis Grammenos — Wed, 17 Jun 2020 20:29:01 -0400

Observing and writing 20-some years before the oil embargo (1974) and 30 years before the stern Brundtland report (1987), Jane Jacobs (1961) resolved that density comes in “good” and “bad” varieties. That temporal distance from two of the tectonic events of the 20th century was inescapably reflected in Jacobs’s assessment: “Good” density was unrelated to fuel consumption, or “climate change”; “good” was a social and an urban life-quality yardstick spanning the range between “liveliness, vitality” and the “Great Blight of Dullness” as well as between “concentration” and “overcrowding.” Jacobs shed light on ways that concentration (aka density) could generate liveliness, conviviality, diversity, safety, and economic vitality—not on its potential for reducing CO₂ emissions. The recent painful event, a massive viral infection that has drained all liveliness from cities, implicates concentration and, as a result, the “density debate rages alongside the pandemic.”

Why the rage? This piece explores probable causes and also views on the issues that surround the debate’s principal trigger—density.

The apparent general cause is the search for and attribution of culpability for death—a loaded task. In the virus case, the link to planning is arguably indirect and this circuity raises doubts, which heighten the debate’s tenor. Its roots, however, lie in a takeover.

Figure 1. Urbanization in plain sight: New York City’s population grew 25-fold during the first 100 years and more than doubled in the next 100. The growth rate has generally been decreasing. Between 2010 and 2019 population growth declined further and entered population loss territory in 2016. This growth path is common to most imperial, national, or regional capitals since Rome—all are people magnets. It is unclear from this chart at what points New York’s “urbanism” began, peaked, or declined. (Data: Wikipedia- Demographics of NY)

A Friendly Takeover

City planners, architects, and transportation experts embraced Jacobs’s unequivocal and hopeful “urban” message and, as the climate-change issue overtook the city planning field with fierce urgency, combined the emissions reduction issue with her influential exposition, now tagged “urbanism.” This newborn conceptual amalgam “urbanism plus environmentalism” expectedly acquired undeniable moral authority; after all, humanity’s survival was at stake. Driven by such compelling duty, researchers looked for, and found, evidence that “bad” density contributes inadvertently to the planet’s demise and to a decline in the wellbeing of its inhabitants. Onwards from that unsettling assertion, research outcomes are slotted as: “urbanist” or “anti-urbanist” and, invariably, “right” and “wrong” or, alternatively, “objective” and “biased.” The “urbanism” movement casually subsumed the environmental imperative and hence took an adjudication role.

With the merger complete, the outcome is a sustained rage. Rage between -isms of all stripes and from all corners: suburbanism, liberalism, big-brotherism, urbanism, modernism, anti-gigantism, back-to-earth-ism etc. etc. with their mutually suspect moral or intellectual shortcomings: A weighty mantle adorns all discussants, replete with intolerance and covert patronizing.

Figure 2. Plateauing, homeostasis or optionality. From the 1920s on, three boroughs in New York City gained no population or lost some (a combined million). This slow growth/loss coincides with the proliferation of new transport means (subways, buses, and cars), unavailable in the 1800s. (Data: Wiki historical data)

Urbanization and Urbanism

“Urbanization” can be easily grasped: People move to cities, and cities grow (Fig. 1). The forces propelling this move and the resulting, often chaotic, settlements have largely been understood. As Jacobs intuited in 1969 (simplified by C. Abrams): ”Import and export or die.” And, invariably, “produce!” (or work), the strongest appeal of cities. Economic activity sustains their growth and survival. It also boosts collective and personal wealth and expands choice; all irresistible tendencies.

“Urbanism” by contrast is elusive; impossible to trace its historical progression using actual city examples. It evokes a desirable end state (as in “egalitarianism”) but lacks the active or descriptive forms (as in “urbanize” and “urbanized”) that capture process and final outcome. Due to this vagueness, it has spawned numerous personas: “60 urbanisms” each encapsulating either a process (i.e. “Tactical Urbanism” and “Guerrilla Urbanism”) or outcomes (i.e. “Agricultural Urbanism,” “Neotraditional”). However, the one recurring, stable component of all “urbanisms” that can be traced historically and measured accurately is density, hence the persistent focus of current debates on the subject. S. Handy (2017) made a forceful case for its centrality in achieving environmental goals: “Compact development cannot reduce driving very much on its own, but we cannot reduce driving very much without it.”

Is There a ‘Bad Density’?

The urban project, with density as its focus, advances in earnest. Not the project of urbanization, which proceeds organically with mathematical inevitability (Fig.1), but the project of urbanism, which needs to be brought about with concerted, conscious effort. Urbanization is circumstantial, collateral, bottom up, and messy, while urbanism would be largely intentional, deterministic, orderly and rule-bound, and, consequently, programmatic.

The urban project would inject purpose into urbanization: First and foremost, reduce its impact on climate change, but also reduce inequality, enhance opportunity, and improve health outcomes. It would create the good town, the convivial city, the exciting metropolis, and, perhaps, even a just society. Simple, profoundly inspiring, emotionally engaging, and entirely ahistorical (see UN’s 17 Sustainable Development Goals).

To achieve such goals, Jacobs mused about density: "I should guess, roughly, that it is apt to hover at about 200 dwellings to the net acre"(page 217, 1961). A prime example of the good city was Greenwich Village of the 1950s, that she praised profusely. It had a density of 381 p/ha (154 per acre) (Fig. 3).*

Figure 3. From five Boroughs to five Neighbourhoods: densities in Manhattan with a focus on Greenwich Village (Column). Like the Boroughs’ populations, the density of these neighbourhoods fluctuated widely through time and stabilizing after 1980 in a band between 244 and 505 p/ha (99 and 204 per acre). The band of all 22 neighbourhoods stretches between 138 and 505 p/ha, a three-fold plus range. (Data: The rise and Fall of Manhattan’s Densities, 1800 -2010 by Shlomo Angel and Patrick Lamson-Hall PDF)

Evidently, Greenwich Village (Fig.3) experienced wide swings in density: tripling from 1900 to 1910, then falling stepwise to less than half of the 1910 mark and almost doubling again in the next ten years. Neighboring West Village had at the time (1950), and now, only two thirds of its neighbor’s density (246 vs 381 p/ha). All five neighbourhoods, most remarkably the East Village and the Upper West Side, experienced fluctuations. The latter had almost twice the density of Greenwich in the ‘50s (706 vs 381 p/ha). Fluctuations, variability and impermanence permeate these five; these are typical attributes of all 22 neighbourhoods.

Two main questions about density arise from this limited historical tableau: Are all these densities from the extreme high (1323 p/ha) of East Village and lows of Greenwich (201 p/ha) “good” or only a select number of them and, if the latter, which? Are there any upper or lower bands of density that are “bad” and, again, which?

These questions remain open. But what can be distilled from the fluctuation and wide range is an insight that Manhattan (and cities in general) can be viewed as large ecosystems that contain many microsystems, each adapted to a range of local conditions (a port, a park, a square, a thoroughfare and so on) that shape its density and other characteristics. The city then appears more like an organism than a malleable artifact, just as Jacobs implied (page 433, 1961).

The second question, central to this discussion, is whether density can be deliberately commandeered to upper or lower levels (an order of magnitude apart!) or whether densities are a collateral outcome of urbanization acting in tandem with other conditioning variables. Is there a known top-down process or system ultimately capable of inducing specific density levels district by district? This quick historic recount suggests that density ranges represent bottom-up choices not top-down interventions.

Figure 4. Admired Parisian-like “urbanism” in Manhattan—among skyscrapers that Paris prohibits

If “bad” population density is hard to frame, an unambiguous “good” density with a clear upper threshold does exist, yet it rarely enters the discussion of the good city—job density per employable population. It gives a city its livelihood and liveliness but remains invisible—just a number—hence it receives only perfunctory mention as a planning topic. A jobless city is a ghost city, just like a city under viral quarantine.

Intermission: Manhattan and Paris

Research in a variety of complex systems clarifies that “[…] a complex system is a system that exhibits all of the conditions for complexity and at least one of the products emerging from the conditions.” (link in caption for Figure 5) An example of self-organization and robustness of order in cities has been hiding in plain sight.

A Curious, Surprising Variant

Comparing paragons of density and “urbanism” sheds light to the question of programmatic density planning: Manhattan and especially Paris are generally acknowledged as supreme examples of urbanism. Ideas like “the more strangers the merrier” (Jacobs page 40,1961) and “bumping into each other” generally serve as a casual placeholder definition of “urbanism” (not Jacobs’s term.)

Residents may have a different perception. Significantly, Manhattan, the densest borough of New York City, shed nearly 700,000 people since 1910. So did Paris (663,000) in roughly the same period. Both figures surpass the entire population of many U.S. cities (e.g., Portland), Lyon of France, and imperial Rome itself. Put simply, Manhattan and Paris each shed an entire city from their respective densest districts. The causes of this outflow are partially understood and a matter of speculation. What’s relevant here, is that these outflows were spontaneous, not induced or regulated. This points once more to the city as a self-organizing complex-system. Figure 5 shows that Paris’ uncontested “urbanism” registers densities at the district scale that are consistently lower than those of Manhattan and, arguably, sufficient to achieve its status.

Figure 5. Densities of local neighbourhoods (or districts) of NY City, Central Paris in descending order of density. (Data: NY- Shlomo Angel, Paris - APUR -La Metropole du Grand Paris)

The Crux

We witnessed the unstoppable process of urbanization and the resulting city growth. We also saw that, in this process, districts within cities gain or loose populations, gain or loose density and, similarly, change land uses; as a result, their density and diversity fluctuate. It appears that internal factors, such as social tensions, income disparities, and property values, among others, trigger these changes. External influences also play a part. These emerge unpredictably: new modes of transport and communication, novel manufacturing and building technologies, and demand for labour—from manual to managerial.

None of these changes and the forces that induce them are commandeered—they are dispersed, uncoordinated initiatives attributable to thousands of individuals seeking, finding, and making personal life choices. One universal choice is the amount of space that each individual consumes: from cramped to abundant. Taken together, these choices shape the city and its densities. Densities have and will always fluctuate temporally and geographically.

At any population density, however, people need to and do make direct contacts. These can be either utilitarian (a transaction), altruistic (helping out), or pleasurable (amusements), some obligatory others discretional. Discretional contacts can be reduced and replaced in an epidemic setting. The one direct contact that cannot be reduced without risking a city’s very existence is reporting for work, the fundamental reason why people gravitate to cities in the first place.

And therein lies the crux. To survive and flourish, a city must work: produce, import, and export. Work invariably necessitates direct contact, so providing a livelihood in a viral environment becomes a threat to life. Families that have at least one provider, no matter where they live or at what density, have, consequently, a potential vector in both directions. To sidestep work and focus on population density as a cause of or defense against virus spread is, at best, pointless chatter. If a city is at work, so is the virus.

Planners have learned this lesson before. A fierce debate erupted after 9/11 about the need for and benefits of tall buildings, only to subside in acquiescence to be followed by an oversupply of such buildings. The same will happen after Covid-19 regarding population density; it will follow its organic evolution, whatever the talk.

* Densities in the article are given in people per hectare (and acre) to be consistent with the data sources.

Photo credit: Athens urbanization at 3,170k (by author).

Fanis Grammenos is the director Urban Pattern Associates in Ottawa, Ontario and the author of Remaking the City Street Grid: A Model for Urban and Suburban Development. (i.e. The fused grid.) Reach him by email with questions or comments.

Passenger Travel in Europe and the US: More Similar than Different

Wendell Cox — Tue, 06 Aug 2019 01:30:38 -0400

Probably one of the most enduring myths about the differences between Europe and the United States is that Europeans travel mainly by trains and transit, while Americans cling to their cars and airplanes. This misunderstanding comes in part from what I have called "Louvre Syndrome".

Tourists, journalists and urban planners are often smitten with what might be called the "Louvre Syndrome." This occurs when Americans sit at Paris cafes in view of the Louvre and imagine why it is that the United States does not look like this. In fact, most of Paris doesn't even look like this, nor do other European urban areas.

An overseas tourist can wrongly assume that what they see in the core of Paris reflects the rest of the city. But, in fact, the functional city Paris (the "aire urbaine" or metropolitan area, also called the labor market), covers over an area as large as metropolitan Los Angeles. To get around this expanse, you need a car. Despite their differing histories, Paris and Los Angeles have more similarities than many would assume.

Car Dominated Societies

And, of course, there are differences. But the overwhelming share of urban and intercity travel in both Europe and America depends largely on cars. According the Eurostat's 2018 edition of EU Transport in Figures, there was a less than 10 percent difference in the market share of cars between the EU and the United States. The publication reported on 2016, when 78.8 percent of passenger travel (in passenger kilometers) was by car in the United States (Figure 1). Residents of the EU nearly equaled that figure, at 72.4 percent, only eight percent less than in the United States (Figure 2). Car travel continues to increase, capturing 45 precent of the growth from 2010 to 2016, with most of the rest by domestic airline. Europe, it turns out, is more like the United States than many retro-urbanists, not to mention casual tourists, assume.

Airlines

The "lower 48" states of the US cover nearly twice as much land area as the EU. It would therefore be expected that longer travel distances would result in higher airline market shares for Americans. That is indicated by the data. In 2016, 13.4 percent of travel in the US was by air. However, despite its smaller land area, and far more comprehensive rail systems, the European market share was still a substantial 10.7 percent. Air accounted for 39 percent of travel growth from 2010 to 2016.

Trains

Not surprisingly, the EU rail share is much higher than in the US. In the EU, the rail market share is 6.7 percent, while in the US it is 0.5 percent. The European advantage in rail is, at 6.2 percent, approximately the same as the US advantage in auto travel.

Perhaps most surprisingly, despite aggressive high-speed rail building programs in France, Spain, Germany and elsewhere, planes are increasing their market share. Rail market shares have not budged in 20 years. In 1995 airline and rail market shares in the EU were about equal. Today, the airlines command a nearly 60 percent market share advantage over all rail and carry six times as much volume as high-speed rail. Since 2010, airlines have added passenger volumes that are more than 15 times as large that of high-speed rail. It is clear that much of the impact of high-speed rail has been to improve service for existing users, not to attract travelers from cars or planes (Figure 3).

Urban Transport

The EU publication does not provide sufficiently disaggregated detail to accurately estimate the differences in urban transport. Rural and urban auto use is not separated. Suburban (commuter) rail, which is really urban transport, is largely in the overall rail figures. The bus data is both urban and rural. The one specifically urban category is "Tram and Metro" (streetcar, light rail and subways), where Europe's share relative to all travel is 1.6 percent, while the US is 0.3 percent.

Passenger Transport in Europe and the US: More Similar than Different

All in all, the automobile dominates both the United States and the European Union. In both geographies, airlines have a strong hold on second place. Naive visionaries who want to see a radical transport transformation such as imagined in “the Green New Deal” literally have no models.

For the casual observer sitting in a cafe across the street from the Louvre, this may not be obvious, but it's the data that tells the less romantic, but real story.

Wendell Cox is principal of Demographia, an international public policy and demographics firm. He is a Senior Fellow of the Center for Opportunity Urbanism (US), Senior Fellow for Housing Affordability and Municipal Policy for the Frontier Centre for Public Policy (Canada), and a member of the Board of Advisors of the Center for Demographics and Policy at Chapman University (California). He is co-author of the "Demographia International Housing Affordability Survey" and author of "Demographia World Urban Areas" and "War on the Dream: How Anti-Sprawl Policy Threatens the Quality of Life." He was appointed by Mayor Tom Bradley to three terms on the Los Angeles County Transportation Commission, where he served with the leading city and county leadership as the only non-elected member. Speaker of the House of Representatives appointed him to the Amtrak Reform Council. He served as a visiting professor at the Conservatoire National des Arts et Metiers, a national university in Paris.

Photograph: Boulevard Peripherique, Paris (by author)