Cities and the way of water. By Matthew Yglesias

Cities and the way of water. By Matthew Yglesias

Read time: 11 minutes

Cities and the way of water

The long shadow of old rivers (and harbors and canals and lakes)

Water was, for much of human history, a formidable barrier to transportation, and the development of boats fundamentally altered humans’ relationship to geography. They’re an extremely old technology that predates cities, writing, or “civilization” — it was only relatively recently that we invented railroads that allowed people to travel faster on land than over water. And as much as trains and later automobiles have impacted human geography, the dead hand of the past continues to weigh heavily on our cities.

London, one of the world’s largest and most important cities, is where it is because the Roman Empire wanted a town/army camp near a good place to ford the River Thames. Rivers, in general, played a crucial role at a time when humans didn’t have easy access to huge oceangoing vessels. Paris, Rome, and Madrid are all built on the banks of rivers because rivers were the highways of their time. Eventually, deep water ports became very economically significant, but history matters a lot, too. Once a city exists with a lot of people in it and businesses that cater to them, other people go to that city to take advantage of the existing amenities or to earn a living selling things to the city’s population. The English built new cities like Liverpool to meet the demand for new ocean ports. But by that time, London was already well-established as the national capital and already sported not only the government of the country but also the Royal Exchange and associated financial services. London had theatre and other cultural amenities.

Samuel Johnson supposedly said, “when a man is tired of London, he is tired of life” in the late 18th century, expressing the extraordinary value of being in a place where lots of other people already are — there was (and is) a lot of stuff to do in London, and the rise of other English cities during the Industrial Revolution didn’t change that. Such was the strength of London’s agglomeration that while England’s secondary cities were hit hard by the de-industrialization process, London itself has been able to very successfully pivot to a new model. At this point, while the fact that it’s a good place to ford the Thames couldn’t be less relevant, it’s still central to the history of London — but the intersection of a waterway with a particular moment in history is a story that plays out differently in different places.

How the east coast rocks

In contrast to western European cities that generally reflect a Roman legacy, the east coast of the United States was settled during the Age of Sail, and its geography is largely based on the need to find good harbors for sailboats.

Philadelphia, New York, and Boston are all port cities. New York gained its decisive advantage over the other two thanks to the 1825 completion of the Erie Canal, which made New York not only an Atlantic port city but also connected it to the Great Lakes region. I always think the vibes are slightly off in Washington, D.C. because even though it’s sort of an east coast city, it’s not actually on the coast and doesn’t have the social, economic, or demographic history of a port city. But just up the road is Baltimore, which does have a harbor and many of the other characteristic elements of an east coast city like “white ethnic” enclaves.

D.C. has grown a lot in the 20 years I’ve lived here (~20% population growth in the city and ~25% in the metro area), but that itself reflects its status as in some ways more of a sunbelt city than a northeastern one. Back when I was new in town and it was smaller, I found D.C. frustratingly small — especially from the perspective of someone who grew up in New York. I used to muse about what it would be like if the nation’s capital had been placed in Baltimore, letting us combine some of Charm City’s legacy industrial and waterfront assets with D.C.’s contemporary vitality as the national capital. Today, the fact remains that these two cities are very close together, and one of my big pet ideas is to knit the combined metro areas more closely together.

These oceanic legacies matter in ways that are at times surprising.

New York book publishing got its start, for example, because the United States didn’t enforce foreign copyrights. A book would come off the presses in London, go by boat across the Atlantic, and come off the docks in New York where people would start printing copies — the city had the optimal location for the physical activity of obtaining, copying, manufacturing, and distributing books. The modern publishing industry is a follow-on legacy of the pirate book manufacturing industry. And because book publishing happened mostly in New York, it became the national hub for magazines and thus for high-end advertising and thus one pole (along with Los Angeles) for radio and television.

Today, you can buy all kinds of insurance products, but historically the insurance industry and other financial services were very closely linked to ocean-going voyages. These were big, risky, complicated undertakings, the viability of which required financial engineering. You may have heard talk of the “carried interest loophole” whereby hedge fund managers can characterize their fees as capital gains rather than labor income. That was originally about ships. A maritime voyage trading venture would accumulate a bunch of investors who would spread the risk of the trip but also share in the profits. Since the upside was somewhat uncertain, the investors wanted the captain to be not just a hired hand but someone with fully aligned incentives — a shareholder in the venture. The share belonging to him (and potentially other high-ranking officers) was the “carry interest” since they were the ones carrying the goods.

Old seaports became hubs of finance and insurance, and they often continue that legacy today.

The Midwestern giant

The first time I went to Chicago, I somewhat belligerently demanded that a couple of Chicago-based writers explain to me what the heck everyone was doing in this giant city.

New York is finance. D.C. is politics and government. LA is Hollywood. The Bay Area is tech. What’s up with Chicago? They didn’t engage much with my somewhat confused way of posing the question, but it sort of remains. The Midwest is (or was) America’s great manufacturing hub, and midwestern cities are normally agglomerative centers of one particular industry. That tended to cap them at middling size since most specific industries just don’t get that big. And while it’s useful for glass makers to agglomerate with other glass makers, it’s counterproductive to compete with existing factories for resources when you’re in a different industry. So the Midwest has lots of mid-sized cities, and then super-giant Chicago.

The reason, it turns out, is water. The Des Plaines River flows into the Mississippi River, which is both very large and connects to tons of other rivers. The Chicago River, meanwhile, flows into Lake Michigan, which connects to the other Great Lakes, the St. Lawrence River, the Erie Canal, etc. And these two rivers are very close to each other, making the Chicago Portage a crucial location.

In 1848, the Illinois & Michigan Canal replaced the portage and created a seamless water connection that dominated the North American continent.

With Chicago already established as the major mid-continental transportation hub, it was natural for railroad entrepreneurs to follow suit. All of that turned Chicago into a bit of an everything city. Stockyards, famously, were a big deal there, along with agricultural processing more generally, but Chicago also became a hub for commodity-related finance, and for the transshipment of all kinds of industrial goods. With that stuff in place, it just became a kind of regional hub for stuff. Every government agency with regional branch offices has one in Chicago, and much the same is true for business enterprises. Because so much regional transportation infrastructure was already built around Chicago, it became a huge airline hub. If you’re a foreign company looking for a North American headquarters, Chicago is a very convenient location — especially before air conditioning.

When cities were building urban rail, Chicago came up with the unusual idea of a tight city center loop, whose geometry as, you can see, is strongly suggested by the adjacent waterways.

This created an unusual railroad-era situation in which every Loop-adjacent location was about equally convenient but any non-Loop location was decidedly inferior. The result of that was arguably the single most job-dense downtown in the world.

The automobile led to urban sprawl basically everywhere, and Chicago’s hinterlands offer a very sprawl-friendly geography. But the logic of that hyper-dense job core meant that (at least until Covid and the remote work boom), Chicagoland always maintained a decent mass transit ridership despite a rather low average population density. A dense job core is logistically easy to serve with trains and leads to expensive parking. But what rivers giveth they can also taketh away, depending on history and happenstance.

The hidden river

Los Angeles has great weather, great food, and godawful transportation logistics.

When I was a kid, it was fashionable among urbanists to attribute that to a lack of investment in transportation infrastructure or some conspiracy theory about the dismantling of the streetcar system. More recently, LA has invested a ton of money in building out what’s now a pretty extensive metro system that nobody rides. Some of this is poor management and poor route planning. But some of it is that the logistical fundamentals of LA are legitimately very bad. We’re staying at a hotel downtown this week, and to go from there to the Santa Monica Pier, for example, is over an hour by metro. No transfers, though! The infrastructure exists; it’s just a very long trip because downtown Los Angeles is very far away from Santa Monica.

But therein lies the vexing nature of Greater Los Angeles. It’s pretty normal for cities to have a certain socioeconomic directionality. The north side of Chicago is the fancy direction; in D.C., it’s northwest. In LA, the fancy direction is west because that’s where the beach is, and people like the beach.

If you stare at the map and generally understand how cities work, the puzzling thing is why downtown is so far from the ocean. If it were closer, the downtown tourist attractions would be close to the beach-related tourist attractions. And the rich person neighborhoods near the ocean would be a more convenient commute to downtown. The answer is that the founders of the late-18th century El Pueblo de Nuestra Señora la Reina de los Ángeles weren’t thinking about the transportation logistics of a 21st-century metropolis. They needed access to fresh water in a place that doesn’t have a lot of fresh water, so they wanted to build their town near the LA River. This is famously not a very large river (watch “Chinatown” if you haven’t) and is not a super-noteworthy part of contemporary Los Angeles geography. But city stuff is sticky, and contemporary downtown Los Angeles is where the original town was built, which was near the river rather than the beach.

Over time, of course, rich people decided they wanted to live closer to the ocean or up in the hills. But rich people also like to engage in upscale consumption near their houses, so a lot of the stuff that in a “normal” city would be downtown or downtown-adjacent got parceled out across different westside neighborhoods. The unusually large gap between the upscale residential neighborhoods and DTLA also meant unusually inconvenient commutes for rich decision-makers, who then used their decision-making authority to spawn secondary office districts scattered all around the west side. In individual terms, that’s supposed to be convenience-enhancing. But collectively it amounts to a giant coordination failure, especially because downtown is, in fact, still there with its own cluster of offices and hotels and entertainment amenities.

There’s genuinely no good way to build transportation infrastructure for a city this large that has this geography, which would normally stop a city from becoming so large. But logistics aside, LA really is pretty amazing, so it grows anyway.

If you gave me a blank SimCity map of Greater Los Angeles to work with, I’d put the Central Business District roughly where Century City is, creating a compact unequivocal downtown containing the lion’s share of offices, cultural destinations, hotels, etc. And the goal of the transportation network would be to get people to it.

The grooves of time

This musing about hitting “delete” on Los Angeles and restructuring it in a different, more logical way is a habit that I’ve tried to train myself out of over the years.

But even though I’m a very sloppy person in terms of tidying my desk, my basic bias is to want ideas and concepts to be orderly and logical. It drives me crazy that D.C.’s street grid is so irregular even though it’s a planned city. And I used to be really entranced by ideas like “what if you pressed reset and redid the American constitution from scratch?” After all, it’s a deeply flawed system that was created a long time ago by men who were in some ways farsighted but who in other respects adhered to values we would find repugnant (slavery) and who badly misperceived the role of basic building blocks of representative democracy (political parties). Why shouldn’t we start over from scratch?

Well, we’re not going to. And by the same token, it seems absurd to have a metropolitan area of millions held hostage to the decisions of a few dozen early settlers dispatched from New Spain, but the fact is that’s the situation.

Radical changes do happen, of course, both to cities and to constitutional systems and to much else besides. But when they happen, they tend to take the form of tragedies, bloodshed, and disaster. It’s important to think about fundamental questions because if disaster strikes and you have to rebuild, it’s smart to build back better when you can. But in general, you want to avoid disaster. And certain structures can be remarkably resilient to the vicissitudes of time — a lot of history has happened between Londinium’s founding and today. We mostly, for better or worse, need to work with what history has bequeathed to us and try to make the best of things.

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