Livable Cities: Our Best Hope

Mark Alan Hughes’ Livable Cities, an Audible Original audiobook in The Great Courses series, argues for the necessity for cities in meeting the fundamental needs of individuals and of the human community. Following are the editors’ selected annotated highlights to give a sense of the delights of Mark Alan Hughes’s work, Hughes’s reflections on a Penn IUR-sponsored October event that brought together scholars from across the university to share their research as it relates to the themes in Hughes's book, and the names and affiliations of many participants in the October discussion.

Editors’ Selected Annotated Highlights

“Cities are created, sustained, and trusted because thus far in human history cities have proven themselves to provide our best conditions for reaching human potential as individuals and communities. …In the Middle Ages, the phrase ‘stadtluft macht frei’ (which means, ‘city air makes free’) conveyed the widely accepted principle that a serf who lived for a year and a day in a city was no longer bonded to his feudal master but instead was free to make a new life in the city.“ But as Mark Alan Hughes goes on to quote Emma Lazarus: “’Until we are all free, we are none of us free.’ …”

Going forward, Mark Alan Hughes argues in the audiobook: “the presence of livable cities will be the measure of our future survival of the cascading nexus of climate impacts, recurring pandemic, and precipitous inequality. Indeed, the process of livable cities will be the source of this survival: we have seen how knowledge, health, meaning, even nature itself are products of human culture manifest in livable cities. We need them to survive.“

Listen to the book here and watch a video of the discussion here.

Reflections on the Penn IUR Livable Cities Event

By Mark Alan Hughes

Of the many hats I’ve worn over the last forty years, it was under my columnist’s fedora at the Daily News that I learned to never bury the lede: eighteen eminent scholars representing six of Penn’s 12 Schools and many more disciplines and specializations gathered recently to discuss cities and whether they maximize human possibility. Each of the discussants at the October 27 event is an intellectual leader on one or more of the concepts I use to explore the necessity of cities—health, meaning, exchange, and so on—in Livable Cities, the audiobook book recently published by Audible.

The book originated with a call from an acquisitions editor from The Great Courses suggesting I write an Audible Original on "livable cities." Even after asking several of the people from Amazon (the owner of Audible.com) why they asked me to take on such a challenge, I still don't know the answer. But I treated the opportunity as something of a lark, a totally unexpected chance to write something for my parents and my children. So, I took full license to outline my best case for the necessity of cities. The Amazon/Audible editors had been expecting something more along the lines of "cities are full of problems and here are some ideas to make them more livable." But with Audible cranking out dozens of Originals each month, they allowed me to proceed unfettered on my very different tack: the basic claim is, "thus far in human history cities have proven themselves to provide our best conditions for reaching human potential as individuals and communities." To substantiate that claim, the nine chapters that follow argue, "people create cities to find refuge, facilitate exchange, and construct meaning. They sustain cities to establish freedom, acquire identity, and curate knowledge. And we trust cities to maintain health, promote nature, and ensure survival in the face of existential challenges like climate change."

When the pandemic struck I was struck by how durable my original outline was in the face of COVID-19's many challenges for the future of work, the rapid deployment of innovation, the mobilization of communities, and the ubiquitous cross-cutting demands of justice. My outline remained intact, and I simply emphasized contemporary examples from the summer of 2020, when I was writing and when Trump was still President.

It was Penn IUR’s idea to organize a discussion around the book. Being experienced with such events, the institute is familiar with the “melt” that often happens on the appointed day—and so they invited many people to speak. We were all surprised, and I myself quite intimidated, when 18 Penn faculty accepted the invitation. What transpired was an improvisational tapestry of discussion with unexpected insights and challenges. As the conversation went on and as these expert scholars were able to elevate the ideas beyond my use of them, some alchemy took place: each speaker brought their disciplinary perspective but also started to refer back to earlier speakers coming from completely different literatures and frameworks.

Discussants picked up on themes from the book and put them in context within their disciplinary perspectives. Jennifer Pinto-Martin, for example, made connections to research on children’s health, noting that a lack of livability—stress, disruption, insecurity—can have a long-term, intergenerational impact on health. David Barnes, also commenting on the health impacts of cities, put the discussion within a historical context by pointing out that, at different points in history, living in a city could confer an “urban penalty” and at others an “urban advantage” in terms of health and longevity.

Many discussants noted the importance of centering equity when envisioning livable cities. Mia Bay, warning that “racism tends to reinvent itself,” noted that individual successes have the potential to be pyrrhic: Montgomery, Alabama, the locus of successful 1950s bus boycotts, now has an anemic public transportation system. “What,” she asked, “is the relationship between livable and gentrified cities?” Michael Delli Carpini, too, commented on the constant subversion throughout US history of equity.

With this in mind, Simon Richter noted that progress toward livable cities is a process that we must shape intentionally and collaboratively. Francesca Ammon situated my remarks about the long-term survival of cities within the long history of speculating and advancing proposals future cities, noting that an important historical lesson is the need for broad and inclusive buy-in. Karen M'Closkey noted, in comparing current environmental challenges to the comparatively simple 19th-century problem of conservation, that “now we have a much more difficult task of unbuilding some areas and removing people,” something that she noted we do not have a good track record of doing.

Several speakers took Philadelphia as their jumping-off point, as I did in the audiobook. Karen Glanz noted the way her own experience of the impacts of COVID-19 in Philadelphia—from food delivery truck, to takeout, to the proliferation of “streeteries”—reflects the complexity of urban food systems, their ongoing evolution, and their multifaceted impacts on a place’s livability. Bethany Wiggin related her work with children in Philadelphia’s Grays Ferry in imagining the future of cities, poetically weaving this into an imaginary trip along the Schuylkill, the river that bisects the city and connects environmentally restored sites to brownfields and through to the many different neighborhoods that offer disparate experiences of the city.

Michael Weisberg emphasized the durability of ideas when embodied in a city, as William Penn’s ideas are embodied in Philadelphia. Gilles Duranton also spoke on the durability of urban places, noting the balancing act they must do: cities are constantly reinventing themselves and yet are, simultaneously, highly durable. What happens when they persist but no longer serve an economic function?

Genie Birch, meanwhile, emphasized cities’ adaptability: historically, people change cities. She championed the adaptations people in rapidly urbanizing places are promoting, acknowledging in particular the informal settlements of rapidly urbanizing places, and discussed the UN agreements that are nudging cities—and governments at all levels—to rise to the many contemporary challenges. Last week’s COP26 meeting in Glasgow is the most recent stage on which these debates are taking place.

I was especially energized by challenges from my colleagues, many of whom pushed me on the ideas I presented in the book. Akira Drake Rodriguez, noting that “livability” means different things to different people, asked: “How do we sustain livability and make it more accessible for everyone in the city? As the city becomes more affluent and less accessible for those who have been here for quite some time, what is the role of planners, policymakers, politicians, and elected officials to increase accessibility and make it more sustainable?” Picking up on Akira’s questions, Dominic Vitiello noted how relevant these questions are when considering how improvements to urban food systems have fueled gentrification.

Randy Mason, too, pushed me to interrogate the concept of “refuge” within cities as one with a a dark side—what he called a “double-edged sword” with one edge representing solace, comfort, livability, and the other representing exclusion of otherness and retraction from wildness. David Grazian, also reflecting on “refuge,” pointed out that we also need refuge within cities: affordable housing, public restrooms, parks, meeting places, and all the other urban infrastructures that shelter people from not just the elements but also from intangibles like isolation.

Erick Guerra pushed me to think hard about the drawbacks of the gig economy and to delve deeper into “the contemporary movement for the protection of labor.” Allison Lassiter pointed out that innovation is not something that only “happens in resourced places and is pushed on other cities around the globe, but that innovation can come, and does come, from everywhere.”

For those two hours, cities were the one constant among the 20 of us in the discussion and the 50 or so in the audience listening. Cities solidly organized the conversation, even as the scholarly lens changed every five minutes. Along the way, the case for the centrality of cities to the human experience grew far stronger than anything I had written. It’s unlikely any other conversational device could have prompted a stronger set of insightful responses among such a diverse and thoughtful group.

I am genuinely pleased that the biggest contribution of my book may be to have occasioned such an event. As I listened, trying not to feel too much like Tom Sawyer in the tree, I felt even more urgency about the necessity of cities to human well-being.

Place attachment is a fundamental basis for livable cities. It takes time to accumulate the durable memories and patterns and commitments that cities manifest as livability. Climate change is an existential threat to place attachment in hundreds of coastal and tropical cities around the world. It is an emergent risk for most cities everywhere. Losing all that these cities have been and are, all that they do and mean, will be an extinction of a particularly destructive kind for humanity.

But after the disruption and dislocation of climate change in coming decades and beyond, I’m confident that future generations will settle and start to build again the livable cities that bring out the best in us.

My thanks to the following Penn colleagues for a memorable conversation, in the order of their comments: Akira Drake Rodriguez, Michael Weisberg, Randy Mason, David Grazian, Gilles Duranton, Erick Guerra, Michael Delli Carpini, Mia Bay, Domenic Vitiello, Karen Glanz, Allison Lassiter, Bethany Wiggin, Jennifer Pinto-Martin, David Barnes, Karen M'Closkey, Simon Richter, Francesca Ammon, and Genie Birch.

Mark Alan Hughes is Faculty Director, Penn's Kleinman Center for Energy Policy; Professor of Practice, City and Regional Planning, Weitzman School of Design; and a Penn IUR Faculty Fellow.

Livable Cities Event Participants

Francesca Ammon, Associate Professor, City & Regional Planning and Historic Preservation, Weitzman School of Design, and Penn IUR Faculty Fellow

David Barnes, Associate Professor, History and Sociology of Science, School of Arts and Sciences, and Penn IUR Faculty Fellow

Mia Bay, Roy F. and Jeannette P. Nichols Chair in American History, School of Arts and Sciences

Eugenie Birch, Lawrence C. Nussdorf Professor of Urban Research and Education, City & Regional Planning, Weitzman School of Design, and Penn IUR Co-Director

Michael Delli Carpini, Oscar H. Gandy Professor of Communication & Democracy, Annenberg School for Communication; Professor, Political Science, School of Arts and Sciences; Faculty Director, SNF Paideia Program; and Penn IUR Faculty Fellow

Gilles Duranton, Dean's Chair in Real Estate Professor, The Wharton School, and Penn IUR Faculty Fellow

Karen Glanz, George A. Weiss University Professor; Professor, Perelman School of Medicine and the School of Nursing; Director, UPenn Prevention Research Center; and Penn IUR Faculty Fellow

David Grazian, Professor, Sociology and Communication; Faculty Director, Urban Studies Program, School of Arts and Sciences; and Penn IUR Faculty Fellow

Erick Guerra, Associate Professor and Associate Chair, City & Regional Planning; Director, Cm2 University Transportation Center, Weitzman School of Design; and Penn IUR Faculty Fellow

Mark Alan Hughes, Faculty Director, Penn's Kleinman Center for Energy Policy; Professor of Practice, City and Regional Planning, Weitzman School of Design; and Penn IUR Faculty Fellow

Allison Lassiter, Assistant Professor, City & Regional Planning, Weitzman School of Design, and Penn IUR Faculty Fellow

Randy Mason, Professor, Historic Preservation and City & Regional Planning; Faculty Director, Center for the Preservation of Civil Rights Sites, Weitzman School of Design; and Penn IUR Faculty Fellow

Karen M'Closkey, Associate Professor, Landscape Architecture, Weitzman School of Design

Jennifer Pinto-Martin, Viola MacInnes/Independence Professor of Nursing; Professor of Epidemiology, Perelman School of Medicine; Executive Director, Center for Public Health Initiatives; and Penn IUR Faculty Fellow

Simon Richter, Class of 1942 Endowed Term Professor of German; Department Chair, Germanic Languages and Literatures, School of Arts and Sciences; and Penn IUR Faculty Fellow

Akira Drake Rodriguez, Assistant Professor, City & Regional Planning, Weitzman School of Design, and Penn IUR Faculty Fellow

Domenic Vitiello, Associate Professor, City & Regional Planning, Weitzman School of Design, and Penn IUR Faculty Fellow

Michael Weisberg, Professor and Chair of Philosophy, School of Arts and Sciences; Senior Faculty Fellow and Director of Post Graduate Programs, Penn’s Perry World House

Bethany Wiggin, Associate Professor of German; Founding Director, Penn Program in Environmental Humanities, School of Arts and Sciences