Globally Rational

A few days ago, I had the opportunity to fly over four major cities: Kuwait, London, Boston, and New York (in that order). Looking at them from the airplane window, I noticed that the layout of the different cities says a great deal about the many comparisons and contrasts that can be made:

-The outskirts of Kuwait City are, of course, mostly desert. Flying over the city, however, you can see the effects of the rapid development in the past decade. Nearly every building is new and all of the engineering is novel. The roads are wide and well-developed. There is a high level of development near the ocean and it slowly faded as I looked towards the desert. It is obvious that the development is quickly working its way west and north, as the plans for Madinat al-Hareer confirm. Kuwait is 300 years old, but it has recently become a cosmopolitan hotspot.

-London’s vicinity is astonishingly green. Everywhere I looked, there was a golf course or a park or a cricket ground or a rugby field or a strange patch of greenery whose purpose even Google Earth failed to identify. I assume that in London, these patches of greenery are no unusual sight… but to a person whose background is in Pakistan (where pointless greenery can never be maintained because of negligence) and the US (where pointless greenery can never be maintained because it is inefficient), it was refreshing. I was not surprised to find that London has one of the lowest population densities of all megapolises. I learned today that the reason for the greenery (and the fact that London, according to the last link, is still less sparsely populated than New York) is that the UK has a Green Belt policy. London has grown very fast in its more recent history, but the city planners have kept up to pace, unlike their counterparts in Boston. The houses are very well-organized and the roads are far more modern than I’d expect out of such an old city.

-Boston is the reason why my expectations were low for London. When I spent the summer of 2005 in Boston, my biggest complaint was that the city was still functioning around the urban planning (or lack thereof) that happened when the Puritans founded the city 400 years ago. The old roads had been paved (but not widened) and new, equally narrow roads had been added. Houses were spaced out well, but this drove up property values unnecessarily without allowing the sort of greenery that characterized London. From the plane, Boston looked like a town built in SimCity by somebody who isn’t particularly good at the game. The skyline is modern, but the rest of the city seems like it was just thrown together haphazardly when settlers built houses wherever they wanted. Soon, everything was a historical landmark and nothing could be destroyed (plus, it’s cheaper to improve things than to rebuild them).

-New York suprised me. JFK and LaGuardia International Airports, both of which I went to, are located on Long Island. I expected the area to be packed with apartment buildings with no room to walk. I assumed that the roads would be just like Boston’s, since New York is just as old and its growth as a city was much more rapid. What I found, however, was houses with front yards, a developed grid of roads, and lots of baseball fields. It turns out that New York City’s vicinity is even more sparsely populated than London’s. I guess the idea of sprawling streets and tall apartment buildings is overplayed by the media and reinforced whenever somebody visits downtown Manhattan. It’s hard to make any direct conclusions from this; it’s just a series of observations that I think are interesting. I will continue to write about various cities as I fly to different parts of the world in the future. If I haven’t flown in a while, I might even use Google Earth to cheat.

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