Triumph of the City by Edward L Glaeser

A great book that really made me think about the relative physical and environmental costs of city and rural life, why cities came about across the globe, the rise of industry, and the social outcome that describes how a large population of people living close together can generate extreme productivity and new ideas.  It elegantly speaks about the human need as young adults to live in close proximity to each other, sparking exciting exchanges of ideas and invention but as they age and have families and children and then retire other needs come to the fore, good schooling, nice countryside and green spaces leading to suburbanisation.  Glaeser addresses the issues that both first and developing world cities face, slums, transportation, disease, water quality, congestion, green spaces, industry, work and housing costs.

Glaser's book is extremely informative on the taxation system of America which is very different from the British one.  Taxation on fuel which allows access to suburban areas is much higher and we have direct taxation via yearly statutory tax discs which pay for road upkeep, car users also have graduated insurance premiums which, along with congestion charging in some areas, do make road users think seriously about their usage.  I find the United States' low taxation on and high usage of such a finite resource as gasoline horrifying. Unlike America we don't have mortgage tax relief, but we do have a lot in common when it comes to suburbanising for a better quality of life. 

Here in Scotland suburban and urban are not so clear cut, apart from the central belt much of what Glaeser speaks about is slightly modified, the northern cities are smaller and surrounded by small towns which have good amenties and transport links as well as extreme rural areas where private vehicles are the only feasible method of transport.  However, we are similar in that even in these small towns transport links are still not good or cost effective enough to replace the affordability and convenience of having personal transport, especially over longer distances where rail travel is much more expensive than cars and buses are achingly slow.

There are a few problems with the text itself, with copy editing issues which were a bit annoying, and Glaeser does repeat himself at times, but generally I am grateful for a book which taught me so much.

The City & The City by China Mieville

Two cities,  Beszel, a decaying soviet style society and Ul Qoma, near Eastern in style.  The body of a murdered young girl found in the vandalised playground of a sink estate by Inspector Tyador Borlu of the Extreme Crime Squad [for some reason, annoyingly, Blogger doesn't seem to support accents, but there are acute accents over the first e in Mieville, the second in Beszel and the u in Borlu, which give an indication of the slavic slant of the language of the latter two].  But all is not as it seems, and Mieville's detective story is, Borlu says of his case on page 9, 'considerably more Byzantine than it had initially appeared'.  I won't give anything away, but the reference to Byzantium, also known as Istanbul and Constantinople over its history, as well as the meaning of 'byzantine' itself give clues to just how much of a ride Mieville takes you on.  Brilliantly conceived and written