Urban (Economic) Success Is Never a Straight Line

Chapter 1 is in part autobiographical and invites the reader on four urban journeys. First, we go to New York, whose decline and subsequent resurgence are recounted through the author’s eyes: In this journey, we revisit the violent neighborhoods of 1950s Westside Manhattan, and we also show how New York’s unequaled concentration of human and institutional resources allowed the city to rebound. We then travel to Vienna, which went from imperial grandeur to urban hell, losing its intellectual elites and historic hinterland, only to rise up again. The voyage to Port au Prince follows, introducing us to a Third World city and the struggles of daily life under conditions of extreme poverty and institutional dysfunction, whose roots take us back to Haiti’s sad history. The final stop is Buenos Aires, which was once in the same league with New York and London but is now reduced to the status of a Third World city, providing the textbook example of the power of national government to undermine even the greatest cities.