Triumph of the City: How Our Greatest Invention Makes Us Richer, Smarter, Greener, Healthier, and Happier

Glaeser, an urban economist at Harvard, argues that cities make people more productive, more innovative and more environmentally efficient, and that most urban policy works against the density that produces those effects. His central mechanism is proximity. Cities concentrate skilled people, which raises the rate of knowledge transfer between them, and Glaeser presents evidence that wages rise with city size beyond what individual characteristics explain, that the effect is largest for skilled workers, and that innovation and patenting concentrate in dense areas.

His environmental argument is that urban residents consume substantially less energy per person than suburban ones because of smaller dwellings, shared walls and shorter transport distances, and that restricting building in dense, temperate cities pushes development to places with higher emissions per household.

His policy positions follow. He attacks building restrictions and preservation rules as the principal cause of housing costs in successful cities, arguing that they transfer wealth to existing owners and exclude everyone else. He argues that declining cities should not be rebuilt through infrastructure spending, since the buildings outlast the economic reasons for the city, and that policy should help poor people rather than poor places. He is critical of Jane Jacobs on height restrictions specifically, arguing that her preference for low-rise districts conflicts with the density she otherwise advocated.

Critics argue that Glaeser underweights displacement and the effects of development on existing communities, and that the education and skill correlations he reports may reflect selection rather than agglomeration. The building restriction argument has become mainstream since publication.