Big Cities are Humanity's Dead End
Urban densification is killing human society by destroying fertility in its pursuit of pleasure and productivity rather than family and community
“The planners hypothesized that the ideal family size was four and that adults needed no more than 225 square feet of living area plus 50 to 75 square feet per child. Based on this, they proposed apartments of 600 square feet per family, which was what was built throughout the Soviet Union and numerous eastern European countries.”
The planners here were living in the Soviet Union back in 1965 and they set out their ideas in a book called “The Ideal Communist City” but we can glimpse our own class of planners, supposedly operating in a free society, in the words above. Indeed Randall O’Toole who wrote those words went on to say:
“Much of the rhetoric in this book sounded very familiar: suburbs were evil, driving was evil, and government-imposed density was the solution.”
The Soviet government was, at least rhetorically, pro-natalist - having lots of babies was celebrated and rewarded - but the reality of people’s lives in those blocks of flats was very different. The “stalinist baroque” (a term I first heard from a Hungarian tour guide) of Soviet and East European cities should stand as an argument against this idea of a compact city filled with compliant peons living in tiny apartments designed by architects who, I’m sure, don’t have any plans to live in such an environment.
From the 1960s soviet fertility rates barely touched replacement rates despite the state’s desire for population growth backed by free childcare and (supposedly) subsidised housing. And when the Soviet Union collapsed fertility rates plummeted further - Russia literally became a dying nation.
Yet the planners and architects persist in their desire to pull us into ever denser cities arguing that this is good for the economy, that it is more efficient and that it is really what people want (despite them voting with their feet given the least opportunity):
“Households clearly have taken notice of Toronto’s horrendous housing affordability. Between 2016 and 2021, Statistics Canada data indicates, a net flow of 270,000 residents moved from Toronto to other parts of the province, including Barrie, Branford, Guelph, Hamilton, Kitchener-Waterloo, Ottawa, Peterborough and St. Catharines-Niagara, where housing is considerably less expensive and the detached and semi-detached housing households prefer is more readily available.”
The last part of this comment is telling - Canada is a very big place and there is no justification at all for urban containment yet that is what Toronto did, it imposed a green belt. And, as Wendell Cox the demographer who wrote that comment also observed:
“International research shows that policies of urban containment, such as greenbelts and growth boundaries, are associated with large price increases. The eight-nation Demographia International Housing Affordability Survey that I have been publishing for 18 years showed, in the last pre-pandemic year (2019), that all markets with severely unaffordable housing had urban containment policies.”
Yet whenever I look at the planning and urban design orthodoxy in Britain and the USA, I see that no lessons are learned from looking at past urban development. Dense cities with small apartments, communal open space and crowded public transport may get called ‘gentle density’ but these ideas are little different from that “stainist baroque” of the 1960s soviet planners.
That picture is from Halle Neustadt in the former East Germany but connoisseurs of 1960s and 1970s urbanism (or indeed the inhuman brutalist planning from earlier ‘visionaries’ like Le Corbusier and Abercrombie) will have seen the same disasters in Easterhouse, Douglass-Harrison or Le 93. The architects’ pictures of these projects may look good, filled with happy families living their good life, but the lived experience we now know was horrendous - high rise slums not cities in the sky. So why, in cities like London, are we planning to build thousands more high rise developments and turn every family home into flats?
For some, like the Centre for Cities, urban density is needed because it is the only way to make public transport systems, especially fixed rail systems, efficient enough to be worth the money. For others, such as the mayors of London and Manchester, it is about using that Le Corbusier idea of ‘cities in the sky’ to prevent the city growing in size thereby relieving the pressure on the 25% or so of those cities that are protected green belt. All of this is washed over with a gentle green watercolour, with talk of sustainability, walkability, the end of car dependence and chatter about biodiversity.
It isn’t going to work. We know it isn’t going to work because we can look at past attempts to implement this vision of the dense megacity and all we see is more crime, poorer health, more crowding and congestion, higher prices for everything, and a world largely devoid of children. In San Francisco and Berkeley over 70% of households are childless. And the same goes for London where Westminster has only 13% of households with at least one dependent child and inner boroughs see the numbers of children plummeting - falling by 50% between 2011 and 2021.
For London the contrast with suburban development is stark:
“Barking and Dagenham…saw a 34 per cent increase over the period, spurred by low land prices and an enormous programme of housebuilding that has seen the borough’s population grow by almost 20 per cent over the 2010s, the second largest increase in London.”
If you want more families the solution isn’t flats in big urban towers or even beautiful walk up mansion blocks, it is suburban family homes. And I hate to say to all those who think it terrible that ordinary people have cars, these suburban homes will come with a place for the family to keep their car as well as a garden big enough for mum to send the kids into while she’s making sunday dinner.
Of course, the most important thing here is that there is a mum and kids, because there literally is no future if we don’t have families. Fertility matters and, while we have a genuine housing crisis, we can’t fix that crisis by developing anti-family environments like high rise blocks of flats. Or rather we can fix the crisis but at the expense of creating a new crisis, a crisis of fertility.
There are many causes of reduced fertility rates, we typically hear about educating women and the availability of low cost birth control. Others talk about how economic growth precedes these causes making it a more important factor in driving fertility declines. Few speak about perhaps the biggest factor in the world’s declining fertility rates - urbanisation. Put simply, family size is in large part determined by the space available for those families. As O’Toole put it “(p)eople being stuck in these tiny apartments made more space available by having smaller families”.
I fear, however, that the very fact of the city and its appeal represents a drug from which humans won’t recover. We are told, often by young childless men, that agglomeration is the only thing that matters in economic development. The Centre for Cities, for example, invests a great deal of effort telling us that British regional cities should be more like Milan or Barcelona (dense and compact) when the evidence from a far wealthier place tells us that compact, dense cities are not more successful that sprawling suburban places. The compact (Centre for Cities use the term 30 Minute City) may be more superficially attractive - Houston isn’t as pretty as Milan - but it is hard to argue that these places are more successful because they have lots of flats and a tram system. And over 30% of Houston’s households have children, nearly twice the proportion in Milan.
Containing cities, especially when there are other economic and social pressures affecting family formation and size, is quite simply the worst possible policy if you want to have a stable and sustainable population. In Britain the problem has been masked by immigration, we’ve backfilled the lack of people, but if we look at Japan we can see how our fetishing of urban density devours and destroys a society.
“…homes increasingly sit abandoned, becoming overgrown and run-down in the process. Government statistics as of 2018 consider 13.6 percent of properties in the country to be ghost houses. Put another way: By 2040, the total size of abandoned properties in Japan is estimated to equal the land size of Austria”
Yet every YIMBY tells us to emulate Japan pointing to Tokyo's constant urban redevelopment. This is the model to follow, they say, as they post a picture of the megacity’s bright lights. I understand this but, leaving aside the reluctance to build permanence in a land plagued by earthquakes, do we really want to copy a place that expects its population to decline by a third over the next 40 years? Do we really want our great city to have almost no children? And to be dominated by questions about the care of old people? This seems to me as something of a dead end for humanity.
A while ago I wrote about the “Great City of the West”, a dream of mayor-led wonderment, at least according to Benjamin Barber, a leading city booster and author of “If Mayors Ruled the World”. I begged to differ:
“There's no actual reason, other than our sociable nature, for us to live in those 'Great Cities of the West'. Indeed, they're filled with untypical humans. There are the brave few who upped sticks and travelled thousands of miles to live poor quality lives on the fringes of the gleaming, sparkly city hoping for a lucky chance. We've the fortunate beneficiaries of inheritance or beauty who can skim across the surface of the city enjoying its lights and pleasures while affording the means to avoid its darkness. And there's a vast mass of clever, skilled, hard-working people who turn the wheels of the city's economy but can't get a stake in the city, can't find the means to settle and have a family, and who justify this on the basis that they can get to see the beauties in their plays, galleries and stadiums.”
For all their magic and excitement, cities don’t work. Yes they give a sense of crowded busy-ness and collections of superlative culture but these glories are as nothing beside the blessings of family life and all that economic benefit is pointless if there is no future generation to enjoy it. Or indeed that the producers of that benefit, those clever, skilled, hard-working people, do not even now see any benefit - beyond pride in a job well done - from their productivity. The rent’s too damned high, the price of everything is crazy and there’s not a cat in hell’s chance of them ever joining older generations with a real cash stake in society.
Without a new suburbia, without places built around family and community, most people in the city are mere peons in a new feudalism. And mankind in these places will have entered a slow death spiral mitigated only by the hedonistic pleasures of the city and the illusion of economic success. Imagine instead a world where the sort of space we offered to working class families in the 1950s is available again?
We can have this world (and it is the world people want) if we set aside the policy obsessions of those single men in inner city flats who like that life. We can build a new suburbia that is walkable, cyclable and car-friendly. We can have homes that are energy efficient in places that promote biodiversity. We can plant new woods, build new playgrounds, invest in sport and the leisure of the ordinary worker. And we can connect these places together with roads, buses, railways and trams. We can have an age where the measure of people isn’t ‘what is their job’ or ‘how much do you earn’ but rather is their life lived well. We might have an age where housing costs are such that you don’t need two middle-class incomes to afford a mortgage. But to get this we need to break the stranglehold of the city on our economy and culture, to build a new suburbia fit for a future generation of families.