Books about urbanism in the age of climate change URBAN AFFAIRS

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Triumph of the City

How Our Greatest Invention Makes Us Richer, Smarter, Greener, Healthier, and Happier

By Edward Glaeser

(The Penguin Press; 338 pages; $29.95)

Urbanism in the Age of Climate Change

By Peter Calthorpe

(Island Press; 139 pages; $35)

As the past weeks of tumult in Cairo have shown, large cities are cauldrons of combustive potential - places where brash dreams confront rooted culture, and the problems and prospects of a nation are thrown into sharp relief.

Many people see only the problems, the "raw and incoherent ugliness" perceived by Henry Adams way back in 1880 in his novel "Democracy." But anyone who has watched new condo towers sprout in San Francisco knows that big cities are back in style - not just for self-styled hipsters, but among boosters who tout a return to compact communities as a remedy for the environmental ills of the 21st century.

That's the premise binding two new books that proclaim their allegiances in their titles: "Urbanism in the Age of Climate Change," by Peter Calthorpe and, more emphatically, Edward Glaeser's "Triumph of the City: How Our Greatest Invention Makes Us Richer, Smarter, Greener, Healthier, and Happier." Neither is likely to achieve the stature of a classic they each reference, Jane Jacobs' "The Death and Life of Great American Cities," but each succeeds at challenging our assumptions about the relation between individual cities and the larger world in which we live.

Glaeser's starting point is that physical proximity still matters, that innovation is sparked by like-minded people who meet and challenge each other. On top of this, he argues that proximity also pays off ecologically - buttressing the case, like the Harvard University economics professor that he is, with a procession of factoids such as how the average single-family detached home consumes 88 percent more electricity than an apartment in a five-unit dwelling.

If so far this sounds like a retread of David Owen's 2009 book "Green Metropolis," Glaeser goes further. He makes the case that when high-minded city-dwellers clamp down on building heights, or turn undeveloped land near cities into sacrosanct open space, they cause far worse problems than they solve.

The culprit he uses as an example is our very own Golden State: "While limits on California's growth may make that state seem greener, they're making the country as a whole browner and increasing carbon emissions worldwide. ... If they hadn't stopped building in coastal California, where incomes are high and the climate is sublime, then there wouldn't have been nearly as much demand for living in the less pleasant parts of the Sunbelt."

Nudges like this are glib fun, but they also signal a weakness in Glaeser's approach; too often, "Triumph of the City" isn't about cities. It's as if Glaeser has intellectual scores to settle, such as his digression to swipe at teacher unions that oppose tying salaries to test scores. When extolling his own platform, though, the just-the-facts economic skeptic is nowhere to be found. "We can build taller towers that give people plenty of space in the heart of downtown, but build them in a way that guarantees environmental sustainability and good sight lines and plenty of street life." Problem solved!

The claims are more modest and the case is more detailed in the book by Calthorpe, a Berkeley architect and urban planner best known as one of the founders of the Congress for the New Urbanism in 1992.

"Urbanism in the Age of Climate Change" strikes a chord found throughout Calthorpe's work: What he sees in standard post-World War II suburbia is a withered terrain where "people and activities are segregated by simplistic zoning, and human scale is sacrificed to a ubiquitous accommodation of the car."

Here, though, he buttresses his case with information gleaned from computer projections he generated for Vision California, a study funded last year by two nooks of state government. Calthorpe was hired to analyze various ways of housing the estimated 20 million people who will be added to the state's population by 2050. His verdict: pursue innovations in how energy is produced and consumed, but also build up rather than out.

One example: Simply doubling the average number of townhouses produced in the state and trimming the share of suburban tract houses from 40 to 30 percent, Calthorpe argues, would reduce the land needed for development statewide from 5,600 square miles to 1,850 square miles.

In today's acrimonious political culture, where scientists who warn of climate change are dismissed as dupes of Al Gore, these two books might find readers among only like-minded city lovers; neither is vibrant enough to intrigue the skeptic. Still, it's important to add them to the debate.

"Each age brings with it a new set of priorities to which the city responds by constantly modifying and adjusting its form and character," Calthorpe writes, and this is one facet of urbanism that isn't likely to change.