M osher Street, on the west side of Baltimore, could serve as the set for a feature film on urban entropy. Drive through and you’ll see block after block of century-old row houses, most of them long without residents, in mid-crumble. Endless eyesores cause headaches for a cash-strapped city like this one: among them fire, a potential for collapse, damage to occupied homes next door, and use by criminals or drug addicts.
Even more, what they call “vacants” here — around 17,000 of them — present city leaders with a persistent challenge: How do you build a vibrant city, or even renew a small part of it, when so much of it is falling apart?
In this special report, we look at the role urban universities play — for better and worse — in their communities, new insights into the history and future of cities, and the barriers that get in the way of good research.
Recently a Johns Hopkins statistician named Tamás Budavári, supported by the university’s new 21st Century Cities Initiative, came up with an idea: Why not use data from the city’s water system to determine which homes are newly vacant, and then inform city officials? Given a heads up, officials would have a chance to intensify homeownership incentive programs in the area or offer neighborhoods help in maintaining a property. Keeping a newly empty house from becoming an abandoned one could save the city tens of thousands of dollars in renovation or demolition costs, as well as stave off blight.
Meanwhile, graduate students in computer science, economics, finance, and mathematics at New York University took a look at data from an online city-services portal and found that two neighborhoods in Brooklyn weren’t using the website as often as those elsewhere in the city, resulting in those neighborhoods’ getting fewer services. Because of the students’ work, the city created an ad campaign to market the portal in Brooklyn, increasing the numbers of people who visit it. “It was a great way to use existing data to improve lives,” says Steven E. Koonin, director of the Center for Urban Science and Progress (CUSP), a theoretical physicist and NYU research center.
As part of a growing movement to better understand how urban areas work, many research universities have begun to funnel big money into cross-disciplinary programs that will mine large data sets for clues as to how to fix cities.
Hopkins made its new project a capital-campaign priority five years ago and has since raised tens of millions of dollars from foundations and individuals, including former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg. Responding to an applied-sciences challenge he issued, NYU has pledged to raise hundreds of millions of dollars for CUSP, which acts as a consultant to the high-tech, $25-billion Hudson Yards project in Manhattan. Other research universities, including the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, have poured money into “human cities” and “smart cities” programs.
We’re at the stage now where we’re kind of like where biology was early on... We need to look inside a real body or two.
Several more are planned for the near future. In July the University of Chicago will open a $35-million center to be headed by Luis Bettencourt, a physicist and urbanologist at the Santa Fe Institute. Computational, natural, and social scientists there will investigate the basic science of a city: how it grows and maintains itself, almost as an organism would. And at the University of Toronto, a “school of cities” that will combine 11 academic divisions is being planned. It will include the noted urbanist Richard Florida on its faculty, as well as several members from hard-science departments.
The infusion of big data and big dollars into urban studies has led to a significant shift in the field. But scholars who have long focused on cities say the new urban science has yet to develop enough workable theories or overarching models to predict how any city around the world will change or grow. What’s more, with researchers coming from disciplines as different as anthropology, data science, economics, and urban policy, a common language has yet to emerge.
“We have a lot of new info, but we’re not developing new insight,” says Karen C. Seto, a professor of geography and urbanization sciences at Yale University. “This tsunami of data has not necessarily helped us understand what makes a city vibrant and sustainable.”
The new urban science arrives with a sense of urgency. Growing inequality within and between cities — think of the gulf between Detroit and San Francisco — threatens to create or widen political divides that could lead to violence around the globe, some researchers warn. Governments and international organizations have begun to view cities as an answer to global problems like climate change, as well as potential sites to increase sustainability and stave off ecological disaster. Other phenomena, including an explosion in refugee movements from rural to urban areas — in China, it’s the single largest migration from farms to cities that the world has ever seen — have scientists on notice that they need to find some answers to the riddles of city life, and fast.
Even with all of the excitement over new tools and the help they can offer to individual cities like Baltimore and New York, urban science is still feeling its way toward creating models that government leaders can put to use.
“I tell policy makers, ‘We’re designing a plane after it’s taken off,’ " Seto says.
“Can we make the changes quickly enough? That’s the big question,” adds Bettencourt. “We’re still in the Wild West of this field. People from many different backgrounds are approaching it from different angles. It’s a lot to pull together.”
Scholars in the vanguard of an up-with-the-city movement that began a generation ago agree that the goals will be hard to reach. But they say that the time is now for a well-researched and pan-disciplinary view of cities.
“I think we’re at the inflection point of creating a new discipline and linking it to the actual profession and practice of urbanism,” says Florida.
T he energy and money behind this new discipline signals a big swing from city-science’s barely inhabited beginnings. Modern urban studies began about a half-century ago, when the city-as-subject was purely the realm of the social scientist.
Though without a degree, Jane Jacobs used sociological concepts to argue in her 1961 classic, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, against urban-renewal plans that wrecked communities. Several of her ideas — cities are for people, not cars, she famously said — still resonate with researchers. During the 1970s and ’80s a small group of social scientists, most notably David Harvey, a geography professor then at Johns Hopkins, examined how cities served the needs of capitalism, even as many of their residents suffered crushing poverty. Meanwhile, urban planners and policy experts investigated the best ways to collect trash, move people around, and redevelop blighted areas.
The city was hardly a popular subject for scientists, or anyone else. Generally speaking, postwar American cities were not thought of as desirable places to live. They were places to leave.
“Thirty years ago, we had no idea that the city would be so important to the 21st century,” says Edward Glaeser, a professor of economics at Harvard and author of Triumph of the City: How Our Greatest Invention Makes Us Smarter, Greener, Healthier, and Happier (Penguin, 2011). “We used to think that technology would continue to disperse us away from the city, but that hasn’t happened.”
In the new century, Florida and Glaeser began promoting the city’s beehive of creative activity and its economic disruption. Environmental researchers and earth scientists started to view urban areas as places where energy and other resources were used more efficiently. In the past decade, data experts, earth scientists, and physicists have become entranced with the urban specimen, treating cities as places that could be understood better via the quantification metrics of the hard sciences.
Geoffrey West, like Bettencourt a physicist at the Santa Fe Institute, searched with him and others for ways that cities could be measured across the globe with some consistency and predictability. West started by calling on biological tools he had used to determine efficiencies of scale in mammals, such as how larger ones used less energy per pound than smaller ones.
“When I first started, cities were a complete backwater scientifically,” West says. By using scaling techniques and huge sets of data, West’s group learned that each time a city doubled in population, its infrastructure needs grew by only 85 percent. Resource use, such as carbon footprints, and a variety of other measures (crime, income, rate of innovation) also increased at the same proportion as cities became larger. The findings were independent of a city’s culture or history.
Finally, the burgeoning science of cities had some hard numbers.
What it lacked then, and does still, West says, is a way for scientists to talk about those numbers, something that is typical of any interdisciplinary science endeavor. “I was a string-theory physicist who moved into biology. Communication was very difficult. It’s like my fellow researchers were speaking Albanian,” he says.
Even more troubling to West are the limitations that most interdisciplinary research centers place on experimentation. While applauding the wide-ranging work that MIT and others are doing in tandem with a center in Singapore, he says funders and politicians backing American centers are too focused on solving local problems. “Officeholders think in terms of two-year increments, not infinity,” he says.
Research centers like New York University’s CUSP began with principles that were “more holistic,” West says. “They reflected a desire to understand the bigger picture, but that’s been lost. If we want to develop an understanding of cities as a complex adaptive system, we need financial supporters who take the long view.”
Such thinking inspired Karen Seto and two co-authors to publish an urban-science manifesto of sorts in 2013. The article, in the journal Environment, called for a new, multifaceted science of cities that would study “the underlying urbanization processes at the center of global climate change and sustainability challenges.” Instead of focusing so intently on creating bike lanes in cities, or the effects of driverless cars on traffic, the authors argued, a new and well-supported science would help researchers understand how urbanization unfolds, “and how this process interacts with local and global environments.”
That search for a new method has raised hopes — and concerns. As big-data based solutions to crime, traffic, and other issues have been put forward, some researchers worry that they will result in more invasions of privacy and economic inequality. Richard Florida, in his recently released book The New Urban Crisis (Basic Books), ponders how cities can be improved without an unintended consequence that often comes with them these days: gentrification. Others, like West, say that an increase in surveillance in so-called smart cities could result in less freedom. “You worry about creating exclusive areas via surveillance cameras,” he says. “They can effectively make parts of cities gated.”
Some earth scientists who have studied cities say that researchers need to widen their lens. Instead of looking at cities purely as a collection of self-contained ecological entities, scientists should factor in all of the “inputs” that cities gobble up — coal from rural Wyoming, fracked oil from western North Dakota, steel from smoke-belching Chinese mills — and the pollution and warming that come from it. “If you look at cities purely from the biosphere level, they don’t necessarily have built-in economies of scale,” says John W. Day, a professor of oceanography and coastal sciences at Louisiana State University and co-author of America’s Most Sustainable Regions: Surviving the 21st Century’s Megatrends (Springer, 2016).
In the 1830s, London was the only city in the world with 1.5 million people. Now, Day notes, nearly 300 cities have at least that many. While that gives researchers ample subjects to study, as well as a reason to study them, there’s no reason to assume that cities will be the main human organizing factor in the future.
“The only reason we have big cities now is because we’ve had 150 years of industrial development based on cheap energy. Well, that’s ending,” Day says. “We’ll reach some kind of sustainable situation within the next couple of centuries, but it won’t be like anything we have right now.”
Urban researchers too often ignore the realities of resource depletion, says Day. Scientists generally fall into two camps, he says. On one side are the “constrainists,” mostly natural scientists who believe that evolution has been driven by a reaction to scarcity in the natural world. On the other are “cornucopians,” who believe that technology will rescue us from a world of exhausted and nonrenewable resources. Day says he witnessed the dichotomy firsthand at a London School of Economics and Political Science conference last year on the health of the planet. When a speaker asked for a show of hands of those who believe that natural laws place limits on future growth, all of the ecologists raised their hands. When the entire group was asked again if growth would continue with the aid of new methods, the economists raised their hands.
Urban science, Day says, is dominated by cornucopians. “The laws of thermodynamics are on the side of the others,” he grimly adds.
Even Geoffrey West concedes the point: “Cities are more sustainable than other arrangements — until they aren’t. They are more dynamic and creative than corporations, but in the end, we have to keep increasing the rate at which cities churn up these incredible disruptions and creations, so they come faster and faster. In the end, it’s not sustainable.”
Those who believe that their research will make for better and more sustainable urban lives say we can’t yet count out technology. More hustle and bustle in the city don’t necessarily mean more grime and smog, or cars and crime. For want of a crystal ball, researchers say, they need to keep working.
“It’s disingenuous to think that economic development means more emissions,” says Bettencourt. “If we can get large amounts of renewable energy, we can shift how a city operates in a way to make it more livable.”
Until the field has a better sense of what can be achieved, it needs to attack all kinds of urban problems, local and otherwise. “It may take 10 to 20 years for us to learn how to predict the daily pulse of a city, or how to plan one better,” adds Steven Koonin, of NYU. “We’re at the stage now where we’re kind of like where biology was early on. Sure, we need to understand how the human body generally works. But to do that, we need to look inside a real body or two. We need to do both.”
Tamás Budavári, the Johns Hopkins developer of the method to find newly vacant homes, explains the hometown-vs.-anytown problem briefly: “There are so many problems that you just have to pick one. Then you follow where the data takes you.”
Michael Anft, a writer in Baltimore, has long covered urban issues. Jennifer Ruark contributed reporting to this article.
