For much of the twentieth century, the prevailing wisdom held that the city was a problem to be solved — congested, polluted and inhuman in scale. The suburban dream, with its promise of space and quiet, was in many ways a repudiation of urban life itself. Yet as we survey the wreckage of that experiment — the traffic, the isolation, the sprawl that devours countryside without ever quite satisfying — a striking reversal is under way.
The city, far from being obsolete, is being reimagined as the most sustainable form of human settlement we possess. Density, once a byword for squalor, turns out to be an ecological virtue: people who live close together drive less, consume less energy and, counter-intuitively, often enjoy richer social lives than their isolated suburban counterparts. The very proximity that once bred disease now breeds efficiency.
None of this, however, should tempt us into a naïve urban triumphalism. A city that prices out all but the wealthy is not a solution but a gilded cage; densification without affordability merely relocates inequality rather than resolving it. Nor can the environmental case be won by architecture alone, so long as the political will to fund public transport and green space remains conspicuously absent.
The question, then, is not whether we should build denser cities, but for whom. If the coming decades belong to the city — and the evidence suggests they will — the real measure of our success will not be how tall we build, but how many we manage to bring along with us.