Survival of the City. The Ideas of Edward Glaeser

The first pandemic recorded by historians dates back to 430 BC, when a quarter of the inhabitants of Athens disappeared and the city found itself defeated in the Peloponnesian War. The plague had arrived from the harbour, the entry point to the city and the link to the world. Justinian’s plague of the 6th century, the world’s first major pandemic, devastated the Byzantine empire, bypassing walls and barriers, and generated a new way of governing and managing urbanisation in Europe.

Edward Glaeser, an economist and urban development expert at Harvard University, starts from these historical considerations to tell how the city is by no means over after Covid-19. By juxtaposing the similarities, differences and historical causes that led cities to be inevitable protagonists of progress and the concomitant decline of civilisations, the book ‘Survival of the City: Mass Flourishing in an Age of Social Isolation’ shows us a new perspective on the urban future.

If every pandemic that humanity has experienced has in some way represented a watershed moment, today we look to a future in which the health response to emergencies will have to be global. And if in 19th century New York cholera prompted the government to invest in new infrastructure, making the city clean and liveable for the first time, today the global challenges accentuated by the pandemic require us to overcome social inequalities. Once again, the answer can only come from the city.