Quotes from Joel Kotkin

What makes cities great, and what leads to their gradual demise? As this book will argue, three critical factors have determined the overall health of cities— the sacredness of place, the ability to provide security and project power, and last, the animating role of commerce.

But what looked like a more diverse and open media world, where anyone could be a reporter or reach an audience, is turning into one where a very few companies control the information pipelines.

Without the notion of sacred space, it is doubtful cities could ever have developed anywhere in the world.

The global securities industry, for example, once overwhelmingly concentrated in the financial districts of London and New York, has gradually shifted an ever larger share of their operations to their respective suburban rings, other smaller cities, and overseas. The headquarters might remain in a midtown high-rise, but more and more the jobs are located elsewhere.

I believe that people and places form each other . . . the touch of one returning the touch of the other. What we seek, I think, is tenderness in this encounter, but that goes both ways, too. I believe that places acquire their sacredness through this giving and taking. And with that ever-returning touch, we acquire something sacred from the place where we live. What we acquire, of course, is a home.120

The honor that knowledge will give us will be entirely ours, and it will not be taken from us by the thief 's skill . . . or by the passage of time."24 Nowhere

The great classical city almost everywhere was both suffused with religion and instructed by it. "Cities did not ask if the institutions which they adopted were useful," noted the classical historian Fustel de Coulanges. "These institutions were adopted because religion had wished it thus."54

It's ironic that while we enjoy easier access to information than ever before, we are falling behind in real knowledge. We are replacing books with blogs, and essays with tweets.

Today, elite cities often attract tourists, upper-class populations working in the highest end of business services, and those who can service their needs, as well as the nomadic young, many of whom later move on to other locales. This increasingly ephemeral city seems to place its highest values on such transient values as hipness, coolness, artfulness, and fashionability. These

Humankind's greatest creation has always been its cities. They represent the ultimate handiwork of our imagination as a species, testifying to our ability to reshape the natural environment in the most profound and lasting ways. Indeed, today our cities can be seen from outer space. Cities

As automobile registrations soared in the 1920s, suburbanization across the rest of the country also picked up speed, with suburbs growing at twice the rate of cities.

Perhaps the most telling criticism of suburban migration focused on an expanding racial divide between the heavily white suburbs and the increasingly black inner cities. Clearly, some new suburbanites, and the developers catering to them, shared a deep-seated racism: In 1970, nearly 95 percent of suburbanites were white.

Suburbia, triumphant in the world's leading economy, also swept successfully through virtually every part of the advanced industrial world. Compared with the option of living closely packed in apartment complexes, most human beings seemed to define their personal "better city" as a little more space and privacy, and perhaps even a spot of lawn.

The founder of the Persian Empire, Cyrus the Great, possessed a remarkably cosmopolitan vision. Rather than annihilate or enslave his opponents, Cyrus envisioned a multinational empire where foreign cultures were to be respected and preserved, albeit under Persian supervision. This

The process of ascent and decline of cities is both rooted in history and changed by it. Successful urban areas today must still resonate with the ancient fundamentals—places sacred, safe, and busy. This was true five thousand years ago, when cities represented a tiny portion of humanity, and in this century, the first in which the majority live in cities.

As late as 1850, the United States had only six "large" cities with a population of over one hundred thousand, constituting barely 5 percent of the population. This reality would change dramatically in the next fifty years. By 1900, there were thirty-eight such cities, and they now housed roughly one in every five Americans.23

Second, there is a working class who are becoming more like medieval serfs, with diminishing chances of owning significant assets or improving their lot except with government transfers.

In explaining his shift away from Maoist economics, Deng Xiao Ping, chairman of the Chinese Communist Party, described his market-oriented changes as "socialism with Chinese characteristics." Today, American businesses, as well as the media and academic establishments that serve them, increasingly embrace what can best be described as "Chinese capitalism with American characteristics.

Great structures or basic physical attributes—location along rivers, oceans, trade routes, attractive green space, or even freeway interchanges—can help start a great city, or aid in its growth, but cannot sustain its long-term success. In the end, a great city relies on those things that engender for its citizens a peculiar and strong attachment, sentiments that separate one specific place from others.52

Google at the end of 2013 had a market cap six times that of General Motors while having one-fifth as many American workers.