2 NATION’S CITIES WEEKLY
February 21, 2011
COLUMNIST
Cities As Global Stars
by Neal Peirce
Mahatma Gandhi once
wrote that “the true India is to
be found not in its few cities,
but in its 700,000 villages.”
Thomas Jefferson celebrated
rural life, inveighing against
cities as “sores” on the body
politic.
And it is cities, which make it so easy to watch and listen
and learn from so many other players, that enable the
collaboration, the constant flow of new information and
ideas, to make humanity shine most brightly.
need to be uprooted “to encour-
age people to live in modestly
sized urban aeries” instead of
widening suburban rings, and
to “stop idolizing homeown-
ership which favors suburban
tract homes over high-rise
apartments.”
A new compactness impera-
tive means, he insists, removing
cities’ many restraints on high
buildings, saving some historic
buildings and places but allow-
ing a rapid turnover of yester-
day’s urban land for tall struc-
tures that can house thousands,
not hundreds, of people per
square block.
If the U.S. does this, he sug-
gests, it will be on firmer ground
in urging India and China, with
their immense populations and
growing wealth, to build high,
dense cities — not sprawl as we
have. If the Chinese and Indian
per capita carbon emissions
should rise to American levels,
Glaeser notes, the world’s total
carbon consumption would
soar 139 percent.
Neal Peirce’s e-mail address is
nrp@citistates.com.
© 2011, The Washington
Post Writers Group
The opinions expressed in this
column are not necessarily those of
the National League of Cities or
Nation’s Cities Weekly.
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Nation’s Cities Weekly
Volume 34 Number 7 | ISSN 0164-5935 | February 21, 2011
Official publication of the National League of Cities
Helping City Leaders Build Better Communities
Donald J. Borut, Executive Director
Publisher: Donald J. Borut; Editor: Amy Elsbree; Managing Editor:
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