Attacks Threaten Future of Cities

The beginning of the U.S. bombing campaign in Afghanistan has renewed fears that terrorists may again strike at targets in America’s great cities. Such fears represent a continuing threat to cities’ long-term prospects because the growth of urban culture has historically depended on greater security. Indeed, the resurgence of urban growth in America during the 1990s owed much to falling crime rates. By undermining that sense of security, the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, and now the likelihood of new ones, could stall, perhaps even reverse, the growth of great cities.

Ever since the earliest periods of settlement, security has been a critical component of urban growth. The first great wall-less cities arose in Mesopotamia in the third millennium BC. The great cities of antiquity, Rome and Alexandria, flourished when they no longer needed walls to ensure security. When security crumbles, as it did in the European Dark Ages, cities shrink. Barbarian invasions, endless wars and political insecurity turned even great cities like Rome into mere shadows of their former selves. In large part, this explains why, for much of the Middle Ages, Europe’s cities, surrounded by brigands and torn by incessant internal conflict, remained relatively small compared with the urban concentrations of more secure regimes like Imperial China and the caliphates of the great Islamic civilization that arose after the 7th and 8th centuries.

Stability, rule of law, toleration and secure lines of communication--the very assets terrorists seek to destroy--helped create urban cultures of unprecedented magnificence and creativity. Baghdad and Cairo had as many as a half-million residents in 1300. With respect to the latter, it is noteworthy that modernity, cosmopolitanism and urbanism were not in conflict with Islam.

It was only after European, and later American, cities achieved a degree of order and worldliness that urban centers like London, Paris and, subsequently, New York enjoyed similar scale and grandeur. These cities’ infrastructure underpinnings--from trolley cars and water systems to subways, bridges, highways and, more recently, airports--all depended on a sense of security and the idea that long-term investments would not be destroyed by anarchic forces.

The link between security and urban growth is evident in more recent times as well. The decline of U.S. cities in the latter half of the 20th century can be traced in significant measure to rolling riots and high crime rates in the 1960s. Fear of crime pushed millions of middle-class residents and businesses out of the central core. Once ensconced in suburbia, many saw little reason to return to urban centers. This was especially true at the top of the economic food chain. In 1974, more than half of the nation’s high-tech and elite business-service employment was in core cities; by 1992, the figure had dropped to barely one-third.

The reduction in crime rates in the late 1990s, revitalized public spaces and a rising quality of life combined to partly reverse big-city contraction. Some key cities, especially New York, enjoyed a remarkable resurgence in population and economic activity because of the rise of the information economy. Similar phenomena, albeit on a less spectacular scale, occurred in cities as diverse as Chicago, Houston, Boston, Charlotte and Philadelphia.

The threat of terrorism in big cities jeopardizes this success. It’s not just that cities offer many high-profile targets. As significant, the added costs of beefed-up security for urban companies will make cities less competitive as the country moves into recession. Real estate firms outside New York City report an uptick in requests for information about office and residential properties. One Manhattan real estate analyst who had downplayed the effects of the Sept. 11 attacks on the city now worries about an “almost apocalyptic” reaction by New York-based companies. Some, he says, are contemplating five or seven-year leases outside the city.

The digital economy, furthermore, with its promise of easy communications across vast distances, could further stagnate cities. When air travel was disrupted and terrorism widely feared during the Gulf War, the Internet, teleconferencing and other new telecommunications technologies were in their infancy. Today, many companies can function “virtually” from multiple locations, and the threat of terrorism is certainly one incentive to expand that capacity.

As a result, telecommunications companies, badly battered in the high-tech stock-market crash, may have gained a new lease on life, says Richard P. Nespola, president of TMNG, Inc., an Internet and telecommunications consulting firm based in Kansas. Nespola believes that employees’ fear of flying and anxiety over working in high-profile buildings will force more and more companies to adopt a model of corporate dispersion. Still, Nespola believes there will always be people who will want to live and work in a city like New York.

This perhaps is the key to the next urban renaissance: building cities to lure that often talented, highly motivated minority that craves the edginess and personal contact that only great agglomerations can provide. Seen in this light, the rebuilding of lower Manhattan should be less about reconstructing the steel and glass behemoths lost in the terrorist attack than about finding ways to make it more people-friendly. Cities will thwart terrorists by becoming more decentralized and multipolar. The spirit of urbanity, so closely tied to that of civilization itself, will not be extinguished as long as people seek to live in special places, as they have for the better part of the last five millennia.