The City of the future – – lies in the past.

     To know what kind of city New York will be in the future, you have to look to the past. The future that I am referring to is a period of less than 50 years from now, although it’s not tomorrow, next year or even the next decade. In fact, over the next few years, I envision very little change, if any in New York City, with the exception of its economy.

      The New York City economy depends on the state of the national economy as well as the health of industries that are currently important to New York – - mainly financial services such as banking and Wall Street. This brings up the main point of my essay. New York City has long stopped being a manufacturing center and instead has migrated to more of a services sector. New York City used to be the capital of American manufacturing. It once had over one million manufacturing jobs as opposed to today which is less than 100,000. New York’s surviving factories face tough competition from foreign imports, and have to fight for real estate against condo developments and businesses ranging from art galleries to retail. Some examples of manufacturing still remaining include apparel and textiles, metal products, furniture and chemicals.

     As a result of the diminishing manufacturing industry, as well as many other reasons, the City’s architecture went from horizontal to vertical. Manufacturing requires a broad footprint, since it is difficult to manufacture products on different floors. By contrast, services can be performed in a vertical environment – - stacking one group of people on top of another. From an architectural standpoint, the only major similarity between service and manufacturing, until about a dozen years ago, was that both required people to congregate in a common work environment. However starting around the early ‘90s, technology took a major leap forward with the formation of the Internet along with the advent of the personal computer. This not only increased the productivity of service workers, it also laid the ground work for what I think will be a major change in the way New York and many other large cities will function. This is because service people no longer need an office environment to perform their tasks. Today’s technology allows people to interact with one another from remote locations – not only in print but visually (thru webcams) as well. This is known as telecommuting. Telecommuting increases the employability of parents with small children, the disabled and people living in remote areas. It reduces an individual’s carbon footprint through lack of daily commuting. It provides flexibility and increases productivity. It provides more quality family time and less stress. It eases traffic congestion which results in less air pollution and petroleum use. The initial costs of the infrastructure are outweighed by the benefit of happy, productive employees.

      With the manufacturing sector shrinking and the service sector expanding the logical outcome of this is the return of the cities of the past where people lived and worked in close proximity. The need for commuting will be sharply reduced, and along with it carbon emissions and the need for foreign oil. In short, technology will not only make workers’ lives easier it will contribute to cleaning our air and perhaps slowing the trend to global warming.

     In Europe, where many cities are hundreds of years old, this trend is readily apparent. You either live in the city or you live on the farm. There’s no such thing as suburbs, exurbs or megalopolises. People either walk to work, ride a bicycle or take a bus and in some cases they work out of their domiciles. This trend toward the past that I envision is a logical outgrowth of our changing emphasis on services rather than goods, along with advances in technology and increasing congestion in central cities. Indeed looking ahead far enough one could envision the New York City of today morphing into a number of smaller cities in the future as this trend takes hold.

     This breakup won’t happen right away. In the beginning, New York City will split into five cities – one for each borough. By our standards these cities will be considered small but by other folks living in other parts of the country, these cities will be considered large. In fact, they would still be too big for many people to walk or bike to work. A city as large as Brooklyn will still require either automobiles or subways to get around. But eventually these cities could be as small as Binghamton, Orangeburg or even Monticello just to name a few in New York State. If one looks far enough ahead one could envision many even smaller jurisdictions, which would have separate names but would allow for common usage of utilities and yet small enough that everything could be self contained.

     With smaller cities come many advantages such as a better quality of life, more green space, more character and atmosphere, less anonymity, a feeling of belonging, less crime, less poverty and less crowding. As the population is living longer, a smaller city is more desirable for retirement.

     Perhaps one could compare the idea of small cities to the polis dating back to the 5th century b.c.e. In H.D.F. Kitto’s article titled “The Polis”, the author defines the polis as a city/state or self governing community. It is a living community or extended family. The Greeks’ ideal city was 5000 people although some were as large as 20,000 people. The Greeks felt that everyone should know each other by sight. The author states that “the Greek prefers to live in a town or village to walk out to his work and to spend his rather ampler leisure talking in the town or village square”. The market became the center of communal life. Perhaps this ideal city is too small compared to the scale of New York City but we should not confuse size with significance.

     In conclusion, New York City appears to be at a crossroads. The most frequently noted view is that it will expand beyond its borders going as far as Boston to the north and Washington DC to the south, thereby becoming one megalopolis. But there is another possibility that few have paid attention to but which seems to make more sense from a technological as well as an ecological point of view. That is instead of getting bigger, New York and other big cities will break up into smaller jurisdictions to reflect the growing trend to working at home or close to home. Indeed, in spite of all of the efforts of the government to tackle such issues as global warming, energy independence and clean air, if I am right, the issues may soon be resolved by the people themselves.

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