I'm certainly not alone among those who wonder about the future of cities. I spend quite a bit of time thinking, reading and writing about the subject, but the truth is I have no definitive answer. The only two observations I can offer with any degree of confidence are these: Cities are constantly evolving, and they possess surprising resilience.
As a way of pursuing those thoughts, allow me a truncated venture into urban time travel and the role of city centers in the history of urban life. Let’s start with some of the western cities of medieval times, nearly a millennium ago.
Walk into medieval London or Paris or any of the larger German cities, and you will notice something interesting right off the bat: The wealth and vitality are in the compact center, inside the walls built to provide protection from invaders. Clustered in the center are the communal trade guilds, the churches and the city hall, and tall wooden houses that surround the town square. “City air makes you free,” the old German proverb went, but it’s a restricted air, to say the least. It doesn’t include the people outside the walls, the peasants who supply the food and drink that the burghers on the inside depend on. Those outlying districts are backwaters, not suburbs. There’s no such thing as a suburb in medieval Europe, not in any modern sense. The center is a parasite, feeding on the periphery.
Next we’ll look at the industrial city of the 19th century. The center is still the locus of vibrant urban life, but it is a different center. The guildhalls and professional enclaves have largely yielded to a manufacturing economy, with factories lining the edges of downtown. The bankers who finance them cling to the central neighborhoods and live, in many cases, on the upper floors of their business houses. The workers who labor in this industrial world live just outside the center, most of them trapped in tenements close to factories and docks.
Downtown is a magnet for wealth, but unlike the medieval city center, it is also a place of industrial grime and noise that the pre-industrial city avoided. Moving outside the center is a worthy goal for those who can afford it, but not many can, and the transportation network that will one day make suburban life feasible mostly does not exist.
Let’s move on to a different version of the industrial city, the chaotic one of the early 20th century. New York is such a city, dependent to a great extent on the labor of immigrants from southern and eastern Europe. The affluent have begun to escape disorderly lower Manhattan by moving uptown; the immigrant enclaves downtown remain crowded with a vibrant but physically dangerous congestion, with some of the highest population densities ever recorded in the western world.
The narrow streets are thronged with commerce, a training ground for criminals but also home to bright and ambitious children who dream of something better. Subways have made the outer city boroughs relatively reachable for the upwardly mobile working class, and the headquarters of the city’s major corporations are increasingly divided between the canyons of Wall Street and newly built skyscrapers that line the avenues of Midtown.
It’s a somewhat shorter jump to the big American cities of mid-century, and Chicago is as good a case study as any. Downtown is still the fulcrum of city life, the center of commerce and government and shopping and movie palaces. But it has a down-at-the-heels quality to it; no building of consequence has been constructed downtown for the past 30 years. Working-class white neighborhoods remain largely intact, although their bungalow residents are terrified that the city’s Black population will continue moving west and break up their fragile communities. One promising sign is the growing recognition that the city’s Lake Michigan waterfront on the edge of downtown can be the engine of a city center revival; Chicago is ahead of most industrial cities in this recognition, but others are starting to appreciate it.
We move forward to the 1970s, and we see urban centers in more trouble than they have experienced in modern memory. Crime is up alarmingly, and the downtown streets are dangerous at night. White flight from the center seems to be getting worse every year, and the department stores are moving to the suburbs along with the middle class.
This forces many of the traditional smaller-scale neighborhood businesses to close, leaving others in perilous financial conditions. Interstate highways have invaded the center of most cities, breaking up venerable neighborhoods and making the idea of a walkable city dubious in much of urban America.
Twenty years later, however, many city centers are beginning a resurgence that few could have expected. Crime declined substantially in the mid- and late 1990s, and increasing numbers of younger people are reclaiming close-in neighborhoods that were decrepit a couple of decades before. Urban life has become attractive to many who grew up in the suburbs, felt marooned there, and are looking for something a little livelier. Chic restaurants have become a mainstay downtown attraction.
The center isn’t attracting massive population growth, but at least in the more affluent metro areas its numbers are holding steady and it is growing wealthier, making gentrification a term of opprobrium for some. Luxury housing is sprouting up near the center of many cities, suggesting a resurgence that seems likely to continue and expand.
Not all cities are experiencing this comeback, but most are and virtually all of them are looking for ways to participate in it.
Now let’s move ahead to the present, and to the urban centers we have bequeathed ourselves in the first quarter of the 21st century. Much of the enthusiasm of the 1990s and early 2000s has begun to dissipate. It’s certainly no secret that downtowns aren’t what they were two decades ago. Center-city retail is in what amounts to a depression, one that began a few years before COVID-19 with the rise of digital commerce.
The pandemic has made this situation far worse, as millions of commuters who used to work, shop and eat lunch downtown are finding ways to work at home. Many office buildings are empty or lightly occupied, prompting some critics to describe them as “business hotels,” used largely for meetings and occasional social gatherings in the middle of the week. Conversion of these buildings to residential use remains a promising option, but developers have been slow to adopt it, insisting that the architecture isn’t well suited to it. City centers need efficient and well-used transit to revive, but ridership is still down from pre-COVID-19 levels, and money for improvements is hard to come by.
Notwithstanding all that, quite a few downtowns have held their populations, attracting a subset of young people who want to live near the amenities that a city center can still provide, even if their work is done at home.
We don’t know what the downtown future holds, but a few guesses can be made safely: Suburbs will continue to sprout new developments built to look like walkable city centers, luring an under-40 cohort that seeks some semblance of an urban lifestyle. Downtowns will increasingly function as entertainment centers, crowded with restaurants and bars and pitching their attractions to singles and couples. City-center residential conversions will gather steam, as declining office building revenue makes them a more attractive alternative. Retail options for middle-class consumers perhaps will all but disappear, but luxury retail will survive, attracting a wealthy city population and appealing to tourists with money to spend.
There will be other developments that no one can dare to predict right now. But we know one thing for certain: City centers will continue to evolve, as they always have, seeking and finding new functions and new denizens. The one prediction we can discount is that they will lurch toward extinction. That has never happened. It never will.
