1. At the start of the twentieth century, visionaries like Fritz Lang imagined a world of increasingly vertical cities with streets darkened by the shadows of immense towers. Brilliant architects, like William Van Alen, designed great skyscrapers like the Chrysler Building, and others, like Le Corbusier, planned a world built at staggering heights. But twentieth-century urban America didn't belong to the skyscraper; it belonged to the car. Transportation technologies have always determined urban form. In walking cities, like central Florence or Jerusalem's old city, the streets are narrow, winding, and crammed with shops. When people had to use their legs to get around they tried to get as close as possible to each other and to the waterways that provided the fastest way into or out of the city. Areas built around trains and elevators, like midtown Manhattan and the Chicago Loop, have wider streets often organized in a grid. There are still shops on the streets, but most of the office space is much further from the ground. Cities built around the car, like much of Los Angeles and Phoenix and Houston, have enormous, gently curving roads and often lack sidewalks. In those places, shops and pedestrians retreat from the streets into malls. While older cities usually have an obvious center, dictated by an erstwhile port or a rail station, car cities do not. They just stretch toward the horizon in undifferentiated urban sprawl.
  2. Today, information technology is changing the world, making it more idea-intensive, better connected, and ultimately more urban. Improvements in information technology seem to have increased, rather than reduced, the value of face-to-face connections, which might be called Jevons's Complementarity Corollary. The nineteenth-century English economist William Stanley Jevons noted that more fuel-efficient steam engines didn't lead to less coal consumption. Better engines made energy use effectively less expensive, and helped move the world to an industrial era powered by coal. The term Jevons's paradox has come to refer to any situation in which efficiency improvements lead to more, not less, consumption -one reason why low-calorie cookies can lead to larger waistlines and fuel-efficient cars can end up consuming more gas.
  3. In most American cities, there are also reversals where the poor live closer to the center than the rich. When a single transportation mode, like driving or taking the subway, dominates, then the rich live closer to the city center and the poor live farther away. But when there are multiple modes of transit, then the poor often live closer in order to gain access to public train sit. The U.S. poverty line for a four-person household in 2009 is $22,050. In 2008, a typical nonurban household spent $9,000 on car-related transporta tion. How in the world could a two-adult family with $22,000 of income afford two cars?
  4. In Mumbai, there are supposedly more than a thousand inhabitants for every working toilet, so it is common to see people defecating in the streets. Tuberculosis is the second leading cause of death and its ravages help make the life expectancy there seven years lower than in the rest of India. (on another note) It can easily take you ninety minutes to drive the fourteen miles from the airport to the city's old downtown. There is a train that could speed up your trip, but few Westerners have the courage to brave its crowds during rush hour. In 2008, more than three people each day were pushed out of that train to their death.
  5. Plague came to Athens in 430 B.C. through its port of Piraeus and may have killed one out of every four Athenians. The city's leader, Pericles, was one of its victims. Plague came to Constantinople about 970 years later and, accord ing to the historian Procopius, killed more than ten thousand people every day at its height.
  6. While inns and taverns are ancient, restaurants - meaning places that actually attract people by their cooking - came into their own in Paris in the late eighteenth century. Mathurin Roze de Chantoiseau is today credited as the first restaurateur. The odd use of the word restaurant to describe an eating establishment arose because Roze was selling healthy soups that were meant to restore, or restaurer, Parisians to robustness.
  7. The average gas tax in France over the past thirty years has been about eight times higher than average gas taxes in the United States the mid-1990s, when the average price for a gallon of gas in the U.S. was de to $1, the average price per gallon in Italy or France was close to $5.
  8. As countries move from having low gas taxes to high gas taxes, the density of development increases by more than 40 percent. Vehicle ownership, unsurprisingly, falls as well. Despite higher gas taxes, as Europeans have gotten wealthier, they've started driving more like Americans. In Italy there are about 6 cars for percent of passenger every 10 people, the comparable numbers for France and Germany are 5 and 5.66. The United States still has more cars-there are 7.76 cars for Americans.
  9. Residing in a forest might seem to be a good way of showing one's love of nature, but living in a concrete jungle actually far more ecologically friendly. We humans are a destructive species, even when we're not trying to be. We burn forests and oil and inevitably hurt the landscape that surrounds us. If you love nature, stay away from it. In the 1970s, Jane Jacobs argued that we could minimize our damage to the environment by clustering together in high-rises and walking to work, and this point has been eloquently argued by David Owen in his book Green Metropolis. We maximize our damage when we insist on living surrounded by greensward. Lower densities inevitably mean more travel, and that requires energy. While larger living spaces certainly do have their advantages, large suburban homes also consume much more energy.