Upward Bound: Vertical Density and the Future of Urban Living

A few words from the publisher, Cornelius Frestagon. Since the first revivals of the early modern city, business has pressed toward the critical nodes — the crossings where goods, people, and ideas change hands — and those nodes have grown relentlessly denser, everyone scrambling for the same few acres. You can measure the force yourself: spend a day downtown and note what it costs to park. Parking is not a public good, handed out freely; it is a private, allocated good, and it is priced like one. That price is the price of density — someone is willing to pay more than you are for a chunk of downtown real estate, and the parking bill is how you feel it. This issue explores those forces: how they arose, which is a continuing subject of urbanicity, and how they have shifted in just the past five or ten years. Downtown space that was once the most sought-after real estate in America is shedding its oldest tenant, the office. Employers who once paid to organize their workers in towers are satisfied now with an off-campus headquarters and two or three days a week of remote work — sometimes none at all. That change is itself a measure of technology. Consider what the machines have already taken out of the working week. To earn today's living a century ago took something closer to seventy hours, and the office-machine revolution had barely begun — nobody could have sweated that hard at a desk, because the desk could not yet repay the sweat. Email, search, and computing gave every worker a boost at the chair; the threads of that revolution reinforce one another in a feedback loop, and the gains compound. Part of the dividend we take as income. A growing part we take as leisure — vacation is compensation, and the ladder of service years (two weeks when you start, four or five when you have earned them) tells you exactly what we think leisure is worth. The likely result is a permanent reduction in the skyscraper space we need. Small cities may shed nearly all of it. A mid-sized city that once demanded four towers may consolidate into one, the surviving building filled by the tenants who truly want to be downtown. The great inventories — Chicago, New York, Miami — will sort themselves the same way, while the young cities of the tech belt, in Texas and Tennessee and increasingly Florida, attract the recently educated to wherever companies find lighter taxes, fewer suits, and a freer hand. The vertical city is not finished. But it is changing what it is for — and this issue climbs the tower to find out. — C. Frestagon Publisher & Editor-in-Chief

— Cornelius Frestagon, Publisher