Introduction : Our urban species
What do they make in Bangalore? : Ports of intellectual entry: Athens ; Baghdad's house of wisdom ; Learning in Nagasaki ; How Bangalore became a boom town ; Education and urban success ; The rise of Silicon Valley ; The cities of tomorrow
Why do cities decline? : How the rust belt rose ; Detroit before cars ; Henry Ford and industrial Detroit ; Why riot? ; Urban reinvention: New York since 1970 ; The righteous rage of Coleman Young ; The Curley effect ; The edifice complex ; Remaining in the rust belt ; Shrinking to greatness
What's good about slums? : Rio's favelas ; Moving on up ; Richard Wright's urban exodus ; Rise and fall of the American ghetto ; The inner city ; How policy magnifies poverty
How were the tenements tamed? : Plight of Kinshasa ; Healing sick cities ; Street cleaning and corruption ; More roads, less traffic? ; Making cities safer ; Health benefits
Is London a luxury resort? : Scale economies and the Globe Theatre ; The division of labor and lamb vindaloo ; Shoes and the city ; London as marriage market ; When are high wages bad?
What's so great about skyscrapers? : Inventing the skyscraper ; The soaring ambition of AE Lefcourt ; Regulating New York ; Fear of heights ; The perils of preservation ; Rethinking Paris ; Mismanagement in Mumbai ; Three simple rules
Why has sprawl spread? : Sprawl before cars ; William Levitt and mass-produced housing ; Rebuilding America around the car ; Welcome to The Woodlands ; Accounting for tastes: why a million people moved to Houston ; Why is housing so cheap in the sunbelt? ; What's wrong with sprawl?
Is there anything greener than blacktop? : The dream of garden living ; Dirty footprints: comparing carbon emissions ; The unintended consequences of environmentalism ; Two green visions: the prince and the mayor ; The biggest battle: greening India and China ; Seeking smarter environmentalism
How do cities succeed? : The imperial city: Tokyo ; The well-managed city: Singapore and Gaborone ; The smart city: Boston, Minneapolis, and Milan ; The consumer city: Vancouver ; The growing city: Chicago and Atlanta ; Too much of a good thing in Dubai
Flat world, tall city : Give cities a level playing field ; Urbanization through globalization ; Lend a hand to human capital ; Help poor people, not poor places ; The challenge of urban poverty ; The rise of the consumer city ; The curse of NIMBYism ; The bias toward sprawl ; Green cities ; Gifts of the city

America is an urban nation. More than two thirds of us live on the three percent of land that contains our cities. Yet cities get a bad rap: they're dirty, poor, unhealthy, crime ridden, expensive, environmentally unfriendly. Or are they?As Edward Glaeser proves in this myth-shattering book, cities are actually the healthiest, greenest, and richest (in cultural and economic terms) places to live. New Yorkers, for instance, live longer than other Americans; heart disease and cancer rates are lower in Gotham than in the nation as a whole. More than half of America's income is earned in twenty-two metropolitan areas. And city dwellers use, on average, 40 percent less energy than suburbanites. Glaeser travels through history and around the globe to reveal the hidden workings of cities and how they bring out the best in humankind. Even the worst cities-Kinshasa, Kolkata, Lagos-confer surprising benefits on the people who flock to them, including better health and more jobs than the rural areas that surround them. Glaeser visits Bangalore and Silicon Valley, whose strangely similar histories prove how essential education is to urban success and how new technology actually encourages people to gather together physically. He discovers why Detroit is dying while other old industrial cities-Chicago, Boston, New York-thrive. He investigates why a new house costs 350 percent more in Los Angeles than in Houston, even though building costs are only 25 percent higher in Los Angeles. He pinpoints the single factor that most influences urban growth-January temperatures-and explains how certain chilly cities manage to defy that link. He explains how West Coast environmentalists have harmed the environment, and how struggling cities from Youngstown to New Orleans can "shrink to greatness." And he exposes the dangerous anti-urban political bias that is harming both cities and the entire country. Using intrepid reportage, keen analysis, and eloquent argument, Glaeser makes an impassioned case for the city's import and splendor. He reminds us forcefully why we should nurture our cities or suffer consequences that will hurt us all, no matter where we live