Cities of Tomorrow

The Next
Hundred Million

Dallas skyline, 2005

America in 2050
by Joel Kotkin
Penguin, 320 pp., $25.95

My wife and I spent a delightful weekend with our twin children in New York City as the school year ended. Being only seven, our young Texans had never set foot in New York. But they knew about it, thanks to Eloise’s haunts at the Plaza. New York held a special fascination for our daughter after she read umpteen jillion Eloise books and watched hours of Eloise DVDs with her brother.

Many people hate New York, but it has a special draw for other Americans. Put me in that camp. I love its density, crowds, and pace. But the reality is that the typical American city is moving away from the model of New York, especially Manhattan. Many Americans, including those of us who love New York, are choosing to live in newer cities such as Phoenix, Denver, Atlanta, and Dallas. (The latest census data show Dallas-Fort Worth is America’s fastest-growing metropolitan area.)

They operate with a set of arrangements that contrast with the European-style city you see in New York, Chicago, or San Francisco: walkup apartments, towering skyscrapers, pedestrian traffic. Those feed the pulse of Manhattan, Chicago, and San Francisco, much as Paris and London thrive around the clock with restaurants, groceries, and shops that residents walk to on their way home, or stop by late at night. As Joel Kotkin expertly explains here, American cities are mostly operating on a new template. They are “multipolar, auto-car-dependent, and geographically vast,” he writes. Kotkin contends that these decentralized cities benefit from their vast geography and “smaller constellation of subcenters.”