Urban Resilience

Edward Glaeser

No 29261, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: Will COVID-19 end the urban renaissance that many cities have experienced since the 1980s? This essay selectively reviews the copious literature that now exists on the long-term impact of natural disasters. At this point, the long-run resilience of cities to many forms of physical destruction, including bombing, earthquakes and fires, has been well-documented. The destruction of human capital may leave a longer imprint, but cities have persisted through many plagues over the past millennia. By contrast, economic and political shocks, including deindustrialization or the loss of capital city status, can enormously harm an urban area. These facts suggest that the COVID-19 pandemic will only significantly alter urban fortunes, if it is accompanied by a major economic shift, such as widespread adoption of remote work, or political shifts that could lead businesses and the wealthy to leave urban areas. The combination of an increased ability to relocate with increased local redistribution or deterioration of local amenity levels or both could recreate some of the key attributes of the urban crisis of the 1970s.

JEL-codes: R11 R23 R28 R5 R53 R58 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021-09
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-geo, nep-isf, nep-lma and nep-ure
Note: EFG
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Published as Edward L Glaeser, 2022. "Urban resilience," Urban Studies, vol 59(1), pages 3-35.

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w29261.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nbr:nberwo:29261

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/w29261

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc National Bureau of Economic Research, 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138, U.S.A.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().