If you were asked to name a famous traffic engineer, in some pub quiz gone horribly wrong, chances are slight you could hazard a good guess. It is true that Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, president of Iran, was trained as a traffic engineer, but his notoriety does not derive from tinkering with the streetlights in Tehran. Bill Gates got his start developing software for a device to count car traffic, but he was a computer boffin more interested in the technology than the traffic. Your memory might flicker in recognition at the names of William Phelps Eno, the putative “father” of traffic control, or Henry Barnes, the onetime New York City traffic czar credited with inventing the “Barnes Dance,” wherein an entire intersection, for a moment, is given over to a four-way pedestrian crossing.

Traffic engineers are rather obscure characters, though their work influences our lives every day. A geographic survey of East Lansing, Michigan, for example, once found that more than 50 percent of the retail district was dedicated to “automobile space”—parking, roads, and the like. By and large, the design and management of this space is handed over to traffic engineers, and our behavior in it is heavily influenced by their decisions.

In the last few years, however, one traffic engineer did achieve a measure of global celebrity, known, if not exactly by name, then by his ideas. His name was Hans Monderman. The idea that made Monderman, who died of cancer in January at the age of 62, most famous is that traditional traffic safety infrastructure—warning signs, traffic lights, metal railings, curbs, painted lines, speed bumps, and so on—is not only often unnecessary, but can endanger those it is meant to protect.

As I drove with Monderman through the northern Dutch province of Friesland several years ago, he repeatedly pointed out offending traffic signs. “Do you really think that no one would perceive there is a bridge over there?” he might ask, about a sign warning that a bridge was ahead. “Why explain it?” He would follow with a characteristic maxim: “When you treat people like idiots, they’ll behave like idiots.” Eventually he drove me to Makkinga, a small village at whose entrance stood a single sign. It welcomed visitors, noted a 30 kilometer-per-hour speed limit, then added: “Free of Traffic Signs.” This was Monderman humor at its finest: a traffic sign announcing the absence of traffic signs.

Monderman wasn't an obvious candidate to become a traffic revolutionary. Born in the small Friesland village of Leeuwarden, son of a headmaster, he worked as a civil engineer, building roads, then as an accident investigator, examining how crashes happen. But he was an unusually fluid thinker. Over lunch during my visit, he excitedly told me that he had been reading about the theory that delta societies tend to foster innovation because of their necessary flexibility in dealing with potentially changing landscapes. He saw a parallel with the low-lying Netherlands. “I think the Dutch are selected for that quality—looking for changes—by the landscape.”

And Monderman certainly changed the landscape in the provincial city of Drachten, with the project that, in 2001, made his name. At the town center, in a crowded four-way intersection called the 

 Monderman removed not only the traffic lights but virtually every other traffic control. Instead of a space cluttered with poles, lights, “traffic islands,” and restrictive arrows, Monderman installed a radical kind of roundabout (a “squareabout,” in his words, because it really seemed more a town square than a traditional roundabout), marked only by a raised circle of grass in the middle, several fountains, and some very discreet indicators of the direction of traffic, which were required by law.

As I watched the intricate social ballet that occurred as cars and bikes slowed to enter the circle (pedestrians were meant to cross at crosswalks placed a bit before the intersection), Monderman performed a favorite trick. He walked, backward and with eyes closed, into the 

. The traffic made its way around him. No one honked, he wasn't struck. Instead of a binary, mechanistic process—stop, go—the movement of traffic and pedestrians in the circle felt human and organic.

A year after the change, the results of this “extreme makeover” were striking: Not only had congestion decreased in the intersection—buses spent less time waiting to get through, for example—but there were half as many accidents, even though total car traffic was up by a third. Students from a local engineering college who studied the intersection reported that both drivers and, unusually, cyclists were using signals—of the electronic or hand variety—more often. They also found, in surveys, that residents, despite the measurable increase in safety, perceived the place to be more dangerous. This was music to Monderman’s ears. If they had 

 felt less secure, he said, he “would have changed it immediately.”

Not surprisingly, these kinds of counterintuitive findings made news. But often, the reports reduced Monderman’s theories to a simple libertarian dislike for regulation of any kind. Granted, he did occasionally hum this tune. “When government takes over the responsibility from citizens, the citizens can’t develop their own values anymore,” he told me. “So when you want people to develop their own values in how to cope with social interactions between people, you have to give them freedom.” But his philosophy consisted of more than a simple dislike of constraints. He was questioning the entire way we think about traffic and its place in the landscape.

In several years of research for a book on traffic, I interviewed any number of engineers, but none, save Monderman, referred to Marcel Proust. In 

(1913–27), Proust famously waxes lyrical on the ways the automobile changed our conception of time and space. When a driver says it will take only 35 minutes to travel by car from Quetteholme to La Raspelière, the narrator is moved to reflect: “Distances are only the relation of space to time and vary with it. We express the difficulty that we have in getting to a place in a system of miles or kilometers which becomes false as soon as that difficulty decreases. 

, since a village which seemed to be in a different world from some other village becomes its neighbor in a landscape whose dimensions are altered.”

Proust, unlike critics such as John Ruskin (who argued that “all traveling becomes dull in exact proportion to its rapidity”), saw much to extol in this new mobility, as did his Belgian contemporary Maurice Maeterlinck. In his 1904 essay “In an Automobile,” Maeterlinck enthused that “in one day,” the car gave us “as many sights, as much landscape and sky, as would formerly have been granted to us in a whole lifetime.” The railway had already radically altered conceptions of time and space, as standardized time united villages in which previously, as Thomas Hardy described it, “one-handed clocks sufficiently subdivided the day.” But the car liberated us still further, from fixed destinations and schedules.

Monderman was interested in this notion that the car changed time and space. He commented on Proust’s observation that a visit to a relative that once took a few days could now be completed in one. Suddenly, more trips could be made, but each trip seemed shorter. “What happened to these people?” said Monderman. “They had gone to their uncle’s, spent three days. Suddenly they’re in a hurry. . . . It’s quite simple—they bought a car. The first thing put in a car is a clock, ticking away in an objective linear time. In the past time went different. They woke with the chickens, and went to bed when it became dark. You had your own time schedule depending on what the seasons told you. Suddenly we can measure the whole day around objective time.”

The implications are clear to any modern driver. Commute times are precisely that—times—with distance obliterated, as if we were driving across the face of a clock. Cities have essentially expanded in size to the extent that new transportation means have arisen to keep commuting 

 more or less stable. Pedestrians, on the other hand, who possess a more intimate knowledge of the geography they are traversing (and must provide the actual power to do so), tend to think in terms of distance. As a New Yorker, my first instinct is to think of some destination in terms of how many blocks away it is, not how long the walk is.

Progress in traffic is measured in time, and it is striking to hear Proustian phrases such as “lost time” appear in the engineering literature. At traffic lights, for example, “start-up lost time” is the time consumed as cars in a line successively begin to accelerate from a stop. The time that drivers toward the back lose as the queue begins to creep forward is the sum of everyone else’s lost time. Commuters, too, dread “losing time” in traffic.

Commute times are precisely that—times—with distance obliterated, as if we were driving across the face of a clock. Pedestrians, on the other hand, who possess a more intimate knowledge of the geography they are traversing (and must provide the actual power to do so), tend to think in terms of distance.

Time, of course, is highly subjective. Traffic experts have long known that people in traffic tend to feel they are making more progress at a slow, continuous clip than if, over the same distance, they wait at a long traffic light, then drive quickly to the next light. Traffic plays into what is known as “queue psychology”: We think waits are longer when we don’t know how long they will be, or when we are alone, for example. David Levinson, a researcher at the University of Minnesota, has found that drivers view waiting on the highway as less onerous than waiting for a “ramp meter” light to allow them to merge onto the highway.

Monderman believed that the best way to change the conception of time—and thereby to change people’s behavior—was to change the context. This simple insight was one of the foundations of his traffic revolution, which took root a decade before he remade Drachten. In the mid-1980s, Monderman, then a regional safety inspector for Friesland, was dispatched to the small village of Oudehaske to check the speed of car traffic through the town’s center (two children had been fatally struck). Previously, Monderman, like any good Dutch traffic engineer, would have deployed, if not an actual traffic light, the tools of what is known as “traffic calming”: speed bumps, warning signs, bollards, or any number of highly visible interventions.

But those solutions were falling out of favor with his superiors, because they were either ineffective or too expensive. At a loss, Monderman suggested to the villagers, who as it happens had hired a consultant to help improve the town’s aesthetics, that Oudehaske simply be made to seem more “villagelike.” The interventions were subtle. Signs were removed, curbs torn out, and the asphalt replaced with red paving brick, with two gray “gutters” on either side that were slightly curved but usable by cars. As Monderman noted, the road looked only five meters wide, “but had all the possibilities of six.”

The results were striking. Without bumps or flashing warning signs, drivers slowed, so much so that Monderman’s radar gun couldn't even register their speeds. Rather than clarity and segregation, he had created confusion and ambiguity. Unsure of what space belonged to them, drivers became more accommodating. Rather than give drivers a simple behavioral mandate—say, a speed limit sign or a speed bump—he had, through the new road design, subtly suggested the proper course of action. And he did something else. He used context to change behavior. He had made the main road look like a narrow lane in a village, not simply a traffic-way through some anonymous town.

What Proust, in his early modernist enthusiasm for the mobility afforded by the automobile, did not seem to foresee was that the ability to conquer distance would lead to the denigration of landscapes between the points of origin and destination, and that once the mass of society had acquired cars, those distances would feel more arduous to cross, thus increasing the pressure of time. As Wolfgang Sachs writes in 

 (1992), “The masters of space and time awaken to find themselves slaves of distance and haste.”

And so places such as Oudehaske begin to be read less as villages than as something to be blown through on the way to some great elsewhere. Traffic engineers, in Monderman’s view, helped to rewrite these places with their signs and other devices. “In the past in our villages,” Monderman said, “you could read the street in the village as a good book.” Signs advertising a school crossing were unnecessary, because the presence of a school and children was obvious. “When you removed all the things that made people know where they were, what they were a part of, and when you changed it into a uniform world,” he argued, “then you have to explain things.”

Traffic signs speak to our increased mobility, but also our loss of local knowledge. They are standardized fast food instead of local cuisine. For the past few decades, the geographer Denis Wood has intensively mapped his neighborhood, the Boylan Heights section of Raleigh, North Carolina, to show everything from the distribution of Halloween jack-o’-lanterns on people’s porches to the light cast by streetlights. He noticed that the streets with the most signage were those that carried the most people 

 the neighborhood. “The signs were, by and large, not for locals,” he said. Another map showed that the most emergency police calls came from those same streets, typically for crashes: The signs were not necessarily improving safety (though of course it could be argued that without signs there would have been even more accidents).

Traffic signs speak to our increased mobility, but also our loss of local knowledge. They are standardized fast food instead of local cuisine.

Monderman envisioned a dual universe. There was the “traffic world” of the highway, standardized, homogenous, made legible by simple instructions to be read at high speed. And there was the “social world,” where people lived and interacted using human signals, at human speeds. The reason he didn't want traffic infrastructure in the center of Drachten or any number of other places was simple: “I don’t want traffic behavior, I want social behavior.” The social world had its limits; at some intersections in Drachten, Monderman said, he “wouldn't trust this solution.” The removal of signs and other visual markings could only be done after careful study of conditions such as traffic volume, the geometry of the intersection, and the mix of cyclists and cars. It is precisely this delicate attention to context that Monderman felt many of his colleagues lacked in installing traffic controls in the first place: “I call them copy machines. They always do things by the book.”

Monderman’s work has inspired or been echoed by a growing number of projects that, in essence, try to replace the traffic world with the social world. His ideas, often under the guise of what is known as the “shared space” movement, have found their way in one form or another into a number of other towns across Europe, from Bohmte, Germany, where the town’s leaders (after visiting Drachten) decided to scrap the lights and signs at its center, an increasingly busy artery for through traffic, to the “gossip square” in the Swedish town of Norrköping, where cars, bicycles, and pedestrians cross streams of traffic in a central plaza largely devoid of markings.

Despite Monderman’s successes in places such as Makkinga and Drachten, skeptics have objected that while these arrangements are fine for small villages, they could never work in cities with heavy traffic. A project in London, undertaken a few years ago independently of Monderman, suggests otherwise. On Kensington High Street, a busy thoroughfare for pedestrians, bikes, and cars, local planners decided to spruce up the street and make it more attractive to shoppers by removing the metal railings that had been erected between the street and the sidewalk, as well as “street clutter,” everything from signs to hatched marks on the roadway. None of these measures complied with Department for Transport standards. And yet, since the makeover there have been 

 accidents than before. Though more pedestrians now cross outside crosswalks, car speeds (the fundamental cause of traffic danger) have been reduced, precisely because the area now feels like it must be navigated carefully.

While Monderman addressed conferences and municipal governments in the United States on several occasions during his lifetime, his ideas have not been adopted here in any meaningful way. One reason is that the United States has yet to fully embrace even traditional traffic calming methods. Collectively, Americans are still trying to wrap their heads around the fact that roundabouts are safer (and generally move traffic more efficiently) than conventional signalized intersections.

If Monderman’s ideas seem heretical to many in the United States, it’s worth considering exactly who created the American system in the first place, and why. In 

, a fascinating history published earlier this year, Peter D. Norton documents how the automobile industry, in concert with self-proclaimed traffic experts, helped shift the debate on urban traffic safety during the 1920s. As motorization levels soared, measures such as “speed governors” on engines, a once popular idea, fell out of favor, and the urban street was redefined from a place with various uses to a channel for moving the most vehicular traffic as quickly as possible.

And this is what we got: an entire infrastructure of inner-city expressways and elevated pedestrian crossings, whose ethos of separation was adopted under the banner of safety but was meant to move cars through cities faster (and even that strategy backfired, as the available space quickly filled with new drivers).The traffic infrastructure was intended to make cities safer for pedestrians by removing them from the street; but in any vital city this was, of course, never possible. The illusion of safety—roads built so that, as one engineer put it, “accidents will be impossible”—simply brought new dangers, and degraded the very qualities that made cities attractive: spontaneity, locality, interactions at human scales.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, given how long we have lived with this built ideology, Monderman’s ideas encounter two common criticisms. The first is that measures that appeal to the better angels of our nature could never work in a country such as the United States, where drivers seem stubbornly reluctant to “share the road” even with other cars, much less pedestrians and cyclists, and the threat of a lawsuit hovers over the smallest traffic intervention. It is true that if a local government is to remove the signs from a busy intersection, and orchestrate the smooth movement of bicycles and cars through it, strong social norms must be in place. But norms can be influenced by context. Picture, for example, the improvised grass parking lots at county fairs: no stop signs, no speed limits, no markings of any kind—maybe just some kids with flags telling you where to go. But people, by and large, drive and walk in a cautious manner. There is no great epidemic of traffic fatalities at county fairs.

The other objection Monderman’s ideas often meet is that people do act like idiots, and that, if anything, we need more separation, more safeguards, more rules. Standing with me near the roundabout in Drachten, Monderman noticed a driver speeding past. “There’s a little part of society who don’t accept rules, who don’t accept social structures,” he said. “It’s not up to a traffic engineer to change it.” A few weeks earlier, he said, a local 21-year-old who had just gotten his driver’s license had died in a crash. “He used drugs, alcohol. There’s not a street that can cope with that problem.”

Traffic signs, for Monderman, were an invitation to stop thinking, to stop acting on one’s own volition. In streets designed to safely handle the actions of the riskiest participants, everyone slips into riskier behavior. As he put it to me, “There are so many things that can be forbidden. The stranger thing is that we believe everything that isn't forbidden is allowed.”

Monderman loved cars. “I like to drive really fast on the Autobahn,” he admitted. But he did not love the accommodations that had been made to cars everywhere outside the Autobahn—the garish, oversized warning signs, the pens for pedestrians, the anonymous asphalt roads. For decades, traffic engineers have pursued, with the best of intentions, an impossible goal: the elimination of accidents. Monderman questioned how safe this kind of safety was. More fundamentally, he asked if mature automobile societies could, in essence, act like adults.

Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do (and What It Says About Us)

, published this summer by Knopf, from which portions of this essay are drawn. He lives in Brooklyn, New York. 

Peak_hour_traffic_in_melbourne.jpg

An unassuming Dutch traffic engineer showed that streets without signs can be safer than roads cluttered with arrows, painted lines, and lights. Are we ready to believe him?

The Traffic Guru

Several months ago, Steven Chu, currently the head of the U.S. Department of Energy, told 

, “Somehow we have to figure out how to boost the price of gasoline to the levels in Europe.” This was the voice of the rational scientist, correctly positing that higher gas prices will lead to less driving, and thus fewer tailpipe emissions. By the time of his confirmation hearing in January, he was forced to modulate his tune: “What the American family,” he said, using that great signifier of required political pandering, “does not want is to pay an increasing fraction of their budget, their precious dollars, for energy costs, both in transportation and keeping their homes warm and lit.” Politics, of course, is hardly as elegant as physics, but Chu articulated a sort of third way: ­efficiency.

“Efficiency” is a soothing, lovely word that means little on its own: efficient as compared to what? Take the American car (please). As veteran transportation and energy specialists Daniel Sperling and Deborah Gordon write in 

—­their authoritatively prescriptive challenge to the “transportation monoculture” that plagues the United States and Europe and looms in China and India—automakers have been making their cars more fuel efficient on the order of two percent annually. And yet the actual “corporate average fuel economy” of cars has made less commendable gains: “The bottom line is that although technologically the modern U.S. car is more efficient than ever before, gaining more work from a gallon of gasoline, those efficiency gains don’t show up as fuel economy gains.”

What happened? All the efficiency gains were consumed, by size and horsepower (not to mention increased driving). In 1976, the Honda Accord, which captured the wallets, if not the hearts, of Americans reeling in the wake of high fuel prices, weighed 2,000 pounds and got a reported 46 miles per gallon in highway driving. “Ten million Accords later, the car had ballooned,” write Sperling and Gordon. “The 2008 model is 78 percent heavier, equipped with an engine nearly four times as powerful and loaded with power options.” It also gets 17 miles per gallon less on the highway than its predecessor. This example is not atypical: “Today’s 

 car would have qualified as a performance car 25 years ago.” Neither increased weight nor greater horsepower provides any real societal good. Heavy vehicles are safer for their occupants (with certain exceptions, such as the SUV), but increase the risks to everyone driving a lighter vehicle. Increased speed increases crash risk and crash damage. What these traits appeal to is individual consumerist ­desire.

 may as well be the title of the book, for that is what U.S. con­sumers have been receiving from Detroit and federal policymakers over the last several decades. Rather than lock in and build upon the fuel efficiency gains made in the 1970s, automakers seized upon the emissions loophole for “light trucks” (a questionable label for vehicles that weigh several thousand pounds) and began building minivans, SUVs, and ­pickups—­vehicles that Japan and Europe initially (and for good reason) had little interest in producing. And thus these vehicles, which occupied, as the authors note, a marginal 15 percent share of the market in 1971, made up more than half of sales in 2004.

 can be read as a parable of Detroit: Walt Kowalski, the retired autoworker played by Clint Eastwood, is hostile to the changes occurring all around him, clinging to the past glory of his eponymous muscle car (and his pickup truck), yelling “get off my lawn” at interlopers. (As Sperling and Gordon note, Detroit still benefits from a 25 percent tax on imported pickup trucks.) Kowalski also embodies the typical Detroit customer these days: older, and living in a place where income and population are growing ­least.

While carving out a profitable, if precarious, niche in inefficient vehicles, American manufacturers were ceding ground in technological innovation to Japan. As the authors recount, in 2003 General Motors, “in the midst of its expansive hydrogen and fuel cell R&D program,” was granted fewer than 50 patents, while Honda secured more than 300. Meanwhile, GM head Robert Lutz was denouncing the science of global warming. The historian Lewis H. Siegelbaum, in 

 (2008), his study of the Soviet automobile, noted that Detroit—with its bloated bureaucracy, expensive “pretend to work” job-bank schemes for downsized workers, and debilitating health insurance costs—resembles nothing so much as the Soviet car industry before its collapse. And that was before Detroit manufacturers asked the U.S. government for billions in bailout money.

But the problems extend far beyond Detroit. U.S. car companies, amid recent difficulties, were chastised in some quarters for not building the fuel-efficient cars that people wanted. In fact, apart from loyal drivers of the EV-1 (the first mainstream production electric vehicle) and its ilk, consumers were voting with their dollars for larger, less fuel-efficient vehicles. And why shouldn’t they? Gas was cheap, the federal gas tax hadn’t been raised—not even to adjust for inflation—since 1993, and the government even gave tax credits for the purchase of “light trucks,” heavier vehicles once used for “work” but now becoming personal cars. Perversely, tax breaks on hybrid vehicles were curtailed as their sales increased.

For a variety of reasons, more emotional than ­practical—­some dim fantasy of a last unpaved frontier to be traversed, a misplaced feeling that being higher makes you safer (SUVs are prone to rollovers), or just a desire to dominate ­others—­U.S. consumers bought trucks and SUVs, as family farming and manufacturing shriveled. The authors cite “expanding baby boomer families” as one reason for these vehicles’ popularity, but U.S. household ­size—­in numbers, that is; people were getting heavier, and thus requiring more fuel to get around—­was actually shrinking as the number of large vehicles grew. Consumers had little incentive to drive efficient vehicles, and producers had little incentive to make them. The number and design of ­cup ­holders, the authors note, has been a more important consideration for vehicle buyers than fuel ­efficiency.

Things are changing, of course. For years, Washington actively blocked states’ efforts to improve efficiency and reduce emissions, but the political capital of the ­reform-­minded Obama administration and a vastly weakened Detroit may have finally ended this obstructionism. And even automakers are talking about establishing a kind of “floor” for gas prices. The reason is simple: The large investments they make in more energy-efficient vehicles, mostly in response to increases in the price of gas, seem to evaporate when the price declines. For example, Toyota recently canceled plans to complete a new factory in the United States to manufacture the hybrid Prius, whose sales plunged as gas dropped below $2 a gallon. Many propose higher gas and carbon taxes as a way to curb driving, encourage fuel efficiency, and keep fewer dollars from flowing to corrupt oil-producing regimes. These taxes might also go some small distance toward compensating for negative impacts of ­driving—­including road damage, air pollution, noise, conges­tion, and higher crash risk for other ­drivers—­for which motorists are currently given a free pass. But Sperling and Gordon caution against raising taxes as a ­silver-­bullet policy instrument. “Pro­ducers and consumers would barely respond to even a $50-­a-­ton [carbon] tax, well above what U.S. politicians have been considering,” they ­write.

One problem is consumers’ dependency on (some would say addiction to) gasoline, which means, as the authors note, that demand (at least in the short term) is extremely price inelastic. The price has to rise a ­lot—­the recent $4 per gallon level was a new psychic ­benchmark—­before consumption drops. (Gasoline is much more price inelastic than addictive substances such as cocaine and heroin, though most of us don’t need those to go to work in the morning.) A ­gas-­price floor is thus one of a basket of proposals laid out in the book, most of which center on two themes: innovation and ­incentives.

The urgency of these proposals hinges on a looming fact: Within the next 20 years, the planet is likely to host two billion cars. ­“One-­fourth of all the oil consumed by humans in our entire history will be consumed from 2000 to 2010,” the authors write. “And if the world continues on its current path, it will consume as much oil in the next several decades as it has throughout its entire history to date.” Much of that will be due, of course, to the demands of China, which has reportedly surpassed the United States as the leading emitter of greenhouse gases.

There is a certain irony in the authors’ suggestion that “to promote progress, it’s in the interest of the rest of the world to enthusiastically back China in its pursuit of a more benign transport-­energy path.” Shouldn’t that innovation and leadership be coming from the more advanced countries, which have been dealing with mass motorization for a century, not less than a decade? But whatever the roads not taken, the stakes are clear: By 2050, China may have as many as 600 million cars on the road. What will the price of fuel be in 2050? That’s really a moot question, for the reasons the world cannot afford another automobile century have little to do, in the ­long ­term, with fuel prices. As former Saudi oil minister Sheikh Zaki Yamani noted, “The Stone Age did not end for lack of stone, and the Oil Age will end long before the world runs out of oil.”

Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do (and What It Says About Us) (2008).

Two Billion Cars: Driving Toward Sustainability

 by Daniel Sperling and Deborah Gordon, Oxford University Press, 304 pp, 2010.

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Tom Vanderbilt on the future of the auto industry.

Oiling Our Progress

Joel Kotkin, along with his ­some-time ­nemesis Richard Florida, is perhaps the leading purveyor of a kind of ­psycho­economic demography, a predictive chronicler armed with Census tract data, Pew surveys, and some old-fashioned shoe-leather reporting, all recounted in an urgent, assuaging, insider-y ­tone—­a kind of Kiplinger Report for the national soul. I can imagine Kotkin and Florida randomly encountering each ­other—­in, say, the Admiral’s Club at DFW, as each is en route to his assignation with civic leaders eager to sup the sooth—­and engaging in a ­dueling-­PowerPoint exer­cise, with Florida touting his “creative class” metro­poles and their ­cappuccino-­fueled dyna­mism, and Kotkin his “ephem­eral cities”—places such as Port­land that are elaborate stage sets for hip urban play, ultimately overregulated and hostile to the wants of average Ameri­cans, who would find fuller expression of their economic (and reproductive) potential in a place such as Boise. Only one man would be left standing amid the acrid tang of overheated hard drives, but I’m not sure ­which.

In his latest oracular production, ­Kotkin—­whose other books include 

 (2005)—takes as his starting point a single, arresting statistic: “According to the most conservative estimates, the United States by 2050 will be home to at least 400 million people, roughly 100 million more than live here today.” This next 100 million will be a bit different from the last 100 million; for one, the “vast majority,” Kotkin notes, will be Asian or His­pan­ic. For another, many of them, he predicts, will reside not in the great ­mega­­regions, but in the “Heartland”—which seems here to be some­where around Nebraska—reversing a trend of disinvestment and depopulation. The country will become more suburban, more dispersed. The good news, Kotkin writes, is that “even with 100 million more people, the country will still be only ­one-­sixth as crowded as Germany.”

At its best, The Next 100 Million combines deftly energetic and sweeping analysis, spanning everything from the sociology of immigrant communities to labor economics, with healthy smatterings of revelatory facts (“between 1990 and 2005 immi­grants, mostly from the Chinese diaspora or from India, started one of every four U.S. ­venture-­backed public companies”). Kotkin is particularly good at countering casual assumptions with larger data patterns. For example, while the portrait of the dying Middle American town, struggling with fore­closure and meth addiction, has become familiar, Kotkin writes that “demographer Richard Rathge states that since the 1950s the overall population of the Great Plains has more than doubled.” And Kotkin’s interpretation of American exceptionalism offers a suasive rejoinder to the idea that it will be China, not the United States, that is dominant in ­2050.

But the book is not always so refreshingly elucidating. For one, it often seems to be revisiting material from The New Geography. (Fawning profile of lifestyle-center developer Rick Caruso? Check. Beguiling Japanese sociological phrase borrowed to describe U.S. trends? Check.) For another, Kotkin spends too much time rebutting old canards (e.g., the history of ­anti­suburban bias). His evidence often seems selectively ­framed—­while there is certainly something to be celebrated in the fact that “scores of . . . Heartland towns and cities, such as Sioux Falls, Des Moines, and Bismarck all grew well faster than the national average through 2008,” it would be nice to know if, say, that increase came off a bottom reached after decades of stagnation and decline. There are moments of repetition (an economist’s unremarkable observation that “suburbanites like the suburbs” appears twice), and on several occasions banal observations are tossed off as keening insights, such as this (footnoted!) kernel: “Today, in the age of computers and cell phones, children who leave home are no longer ‘gone.’ They send text messages, maintain blogs, and write ­e-­mails to keep parents informed of their activities.” Once upon a dark time, they also used landlines and sent ­s optimism about the American future can seem a tonic against unquestioning prophecies of American decline or Dobbsian nativist screeds, the book has an unremittingly Pollyannaish tone, like a ­gauzy-­hued sales document for a ­master-­planned community in one of the author’s beloved suburbs. Worried about the impact of all those new people settling into dispersed exurbs? No ­problem—­we’ll be living in “Greenurbia” (one of several lamentable portmanteaus). “Development is often castigated as poor for the environment, but research suggests that modest, ­low-­density development can use less energy than denser urban forms.” (He doesn't define modest, nor suggest, since he seems to be ­anti­-zoning, how such development would be regulated.) What about all those new people driving all those new miles? Here he cautions that “some aspects of suburban life,” such as long commutes, will “have to be changed,” not by government, but rather by market forces. To wonder about the carbon footprint of all those new people or to ponder having fewer children is presented as radical environmental­ism, a worldview nothing short of that depicted in Cormac McCarthy’s post-apocalyptic novel The Road (despite his proclaimed non­partisanship, Kotkin hews to a rigidly anti–Smart Growth position).

Far from being homogenous, Kotkin argues, suburbia will become the new melting pot, the direct portal of new immigration; suburbs, as he quotes one researcher, “can give rise to a much more integrated, rather than ‘balkan­ized,’ relationship among groups.” But there’s plenty of evidence to the contrary; for instance, a recent Pew Hispanic Center report noted that even as Hispanic school enrollment grew sharply in the past decade, segregation in many districts increased. And research at the State University of New York, Albany, has identified segregation ­patterns—­ethnic ­enclaves—­within suburbs. Sociologist Robert Putnam has put forward the unsettling proposition that “social capital” actually decreases with diversity; he notes, for example, that ­“inter­racial friendships (apart from that structural constraint on opportunities for contact) appear to be actually more common in less diverse settings.” People may like some of the trappings of ­diversity—­what I’ll call menu multiculturalism—but to suggest that suburbs will become polyglot meccas with no social discord seems overly optimistic. (Already there are myriad stories of increasing suburban crime.)

Similarly, Kotkin’s boosterism of ­post-­automotive cities is relentlessly breathless, and often meaningless. “Conceived as a bucolic collection of suburbs,” he writes of Los Angeles, “it has matured into a dense network of communities, organized more like the ­random-­access memory of a computer than the linear, hierarchical pattern that was common to cities for millennia.” Los Angeles is ­non-­hierarchical? Something to remember the next time you go shopping for real estate in Brentwood or Compton. In his zeal to defend suburbia from its elitist critics, Kotkin tends toward monochromatic depictions of “luxury cities” such as New York, which he calls a “demographic dead end,” a place filled with dour ­anti-­natalists harboring Scandin­avian tenden­cies. He sets up a false dichotomy between “cultural cachet” and “family friendliness.” In material terms, yes, cities are expensive—Kotkin warns that “an individual from Houston who earns $50,000 would have to make $115,769 in Manhattan and $81,965 in Queens to live at the same level of comfort.” True in terms of raw numbers, but one doesn't move to New York expecting Houston-sized real estate, just as one doesn't move to Houston expecting all that New York has to ­offer.

Kotkin takes a particular, and often justifiable, glee in recounting the various doom­saying (and largely unmet) prophecies of previous futurists, from Malthusian alarmists to premature ­peak-­oilers. But this also reminds us of the frailty of societal prognostication, not to mention the power of hindsight. It now seems easy to chart the reasons why Argen­tina, which once possessed one of the world’s most powerful economies, declined in the 20th century, but for a time, those 19th-century forecasts of a Pax Argentina looked pretty ­spot-­on. On Kotkin’s own Web site, we are told that The New Geography “focuses on the digital revolution’s surprising impact on cities: Their traditional role as the centers of creativity and the crossroads for trade and culture is becoming ever more essential in a globalized ­information-­age economy.” Now, less than a decade later, he’s telling us that the suburbs are where all the action will ­be.

"The Next Hundred Million: America in 2050" 

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What will America look like in the year 2050, by which time it is predicted that there will be an additional 100 million people within its borders?

Living on the Edge

Against a wall in R&C Apparel’s crowded factory, in an unremarkable building on 38th Street on the far western edge of New York City’s garment district, is a vast collection of sewing machines shelved with curatorial precision. The collection could be in a museum—many of the machines were built far back in the previous century, and are technically antiques.

For Ramdat Harihar, the factory’s Guyana-born owner, who began his career sweeping garment factory floors, the machines are not obsolete, but tools for innovation. With a little tinkering—and an arsenal of cannibalized parts—they can be used to create entirely novel stitching effects, which find their way into the work of leading American fashion designers such as Anna Sui and Zac Posen. Sometimes, innovation demands using machines for new purposes; in one instance, a microwave oven—and a dash of vinegar—helped create a new pleat for Donna Karan.

R&C Apparel is in one sense an archetypal, almost metaphorical, New York garment district business: Immigrant laborers work on outdated machines in an old building in a well-worn neighborhood, doing the sort of work one imagines was long ago outsourced to cheaper locations. Indeed, most of it has been. Even as New York City was gaining in stature as a fashion capital in the latter half of the 20th century, its share of U.S. garment production underwent a full-tilt inversion, from a commanding 90 percent to less than 10 percent.

The story of this shift still haunts the district. “You couldn't walk on the sidewalk,” says fabric wholesaler Bryan Kramer, recalling the jostling traffic of garment racks that once crowded the streets. Rodger Cohen, the second-generation owner of Regal Originals, keeps a tangible totem of the decline: a Pleaters, Stitchers, and Embroiderers Association wall calendar from the 1980s that lists some 400 members. “I’m the only unionized pleater left,” he says. Across the street from his office, someone has hung in another office window a sign that reads “Save the Garment Center.”

Beneath the well-chronicled narrative of garment industry decline, another set of truths: the garment industry is still New York City’s largest manufacturing sector by employment, and there are still compelling reasons why this industrial network continues to cluster in midtown Manhattan.

In the several months I spent researching the district as part of a team organized by the Design Trust for Public Space, I talked to everyone from designers to economists to one-man dress form manufacturing firms. (The team was convened in response to a proposal to alter the garment district’s zoning that would have effectively killed the district off; the proposal has since been tabled.) It was not hard to imagine myself as a kind of industrial Indiana Jones, mapping the murky contours of a business hardly known for its transparency, plying dark warehouses where hulking machines sat mothballed, being handed business cards advertising long-abandoned embroidery crafts such as bonnaz, meeting workers whose average age was just south of retirement. When I asked Cohen what the learning curve was for a man who was working on complex pleating patterns—intricately geometric, three-dimensional sculpture, really—he shot back, “There is no learning curve. The man spent his life doing it. There’s nobody left who does it.”

But beneath the well-chronicled narrative of garment industry decline—perhaps captured most eloquently in the elegiac homage to glove making in Philip Roth’s novel 

 (1997)—I began to see another set of truths: that the garment industry is still New York City’s largest manufacturing sector by employment; that the production, service, and supply businesses that remain play a vital, if underappreciated, role in the larger fashion industry of New York; and that even with the emergence of instant communications and far-flung supply chains—not to mention the pressures exerted by landlords looking to convert industrial space into more profitable offices—there are still compelling reasons why this industrial network continues to cluster in midtown Manhattan.

It has become fashionable, in part due to the tireless work of urban studies theorist Richard Florida, author of T

 (2008), to think of cities as big idea labs—creativity skunkworks—where, in science writer Matt Ridley’s infectious phrase, “ideas have sex.” Often, perhaps in reaction to decades of prophecies of urban decline, this theorizing takes on the zeal of a crusade. You’d be forgiven for thinking no idea has ever been hatched outside a metropolis. While not incorrect, this theory is incomplete. Yes, cities are filled with the modern-day equivalent of the 

(literally, people who “lived on air”), creatives who breathe WiFi. But in many sectors of the “creative industry,” there comes a point when something physical must be made, and when, because of financial or time constraints, it makes sense to have it produced locally. Where I live, in Brooklyn, the jewelry designer down the block may need something fabricated in metal—and 

—and so will visit a fabrication shop in the Navy Yard; the craft beer that a table of graphic designers is consuming was brewed down the street.

I don’t have in mind the Industrial City of old, with its huge buildings housing cardboard box factories, but rather, as the design critic Karrie Jacobs said in describing Brooklyn’s emerging manufacturing base, one that is “pre–industrial revolution in scale and postindustrial in strategy.” Having manufacturing close to the locus of creation isn't simply a matter of convenience; the process of production can inform and shape the creative process itself. So before another “industrial” loft is converted to a fantasia of Bosch appliances and Brazilian teak floors, before another productive building becomes a mid-range hotel for tourists, let us take a closer look.

To understand how the garment district hangs on, it is worth considering why New York first became the nation’s center of garment production—a mantle it claimed from the mid-19th century straight to the Nixon administration.

Blessed with deep ports, water (and later rail) connections to the rest of the United States, and easy access to oceans, New York City was a strategic nexus for the flow of goods, ideas, and people. As economist Edward Glaeser notes, in garment production, as with sugar refining—historically, the city’s second most prominent industry—it made sense to center production at the point of entry for raw materials: textiles from England, silk from the East. By 1860, more than 80 percent of textiles imported into the country came through New York. This concentration of industry, with its talent and techniques, also sparked innovation; 19th-century New York gave birth to everything from ready-to-wear clothing to the Singer sewing machine. Even as New York’s role as a port declined, apparel production remained strong (owing in part, Glaeser notes, to the city’s small footprint and the continuing surge of immigrant labor).

But advances in communications and transportation—the real cost to ship goods dropped by roughly 95 percent over the 20th century—diminished New York City’s inherent geographic advantage in manufacturing. This narrative is interwoven in the personal history of any longtime “garmento,” shorthand for anyone who works in the business. Stuart Edelman, who makes outerwear for the upscale bag manufacturer Tumi, can trace an arc from working in his father’s business in the coat factories on 12th Avenue, to moving to New Jersey in the 1960s, to setting up production runs in South Korea in the 1970s. “Imagine a world of no fax machines, no FedEx,” he says. “If we made a sketch and sent it over to South Korea, it would take three or four weeks for the package to get there.” Now, an e-mailed “tech pack”—industry jargon for the specifications to assemble a garment—travels close to the speed of light, and FedEx deliveries from China arrive in two days. “We actually get it the next day, because of the time difference,” Edelman notes.

And so the question is not so much why the garment industry has shrunk and moved elsewhere, but rather why there continues to be a garment district at all. In asking this, we might as well be asking why cities continue to exist. “If we postulate only the usual economic forces,” observed economist Robert Lucas, “cities should fly apart.” Why would young designers scrape by in New York when they could materially live better elsewhere? “People come to New York City because they want to be in fashion, and fashion came to New York because there were people who wanted to be in fashion,” says Simon Collins, dean of fashion at the internationally regarded Parsons The New School for Design.

When I asked Cohen what the learning curve was for a man who was working on complex pleating patterns — intricately geometric, three-dimensional sculpture, really — he shot back, “There is no learning curve. The man spent his life doing it. There’s nobody left who does it.”

People come to be near other people—to draw upon their expertise, to exchange ideas, to compete. The power of proximity has long been understood: the access to specialized knowledge and labor, the lower transaction costs, the “agglomeration effects” in which like breeds like. Large American clothing retailers such as Wal-Mart and Kohl’s may produce and sell globally, but they have design studios in New York City. Firms locate in the same place to gain a sense of what the competition is up to and to hire talent, to benefit from the spontaneous interchange that can happen in streets and elevators, while groupings of showrooms provide one-stop shopping for out-of-town buyers. “There is not a buyer who will go anywhere else,” says Danielle Shriber, owner and designer of the boutique fashion house Prairie New York. “People have trouble getting buyers to go downtown. I’m on 38th between Eighth and Ninth; most showrooms are on 39th between Seventh and Eighth. They see one block as a big hurdle.”

Even in an age of e-mail and overnight deliveries, fashion has particular reasons for desiring proximity. The industry requires a wide range of suppliers, specialized services, and skilled producers. Bringing a garment from sketch to rack requires the careful coordination of an entire just-in-time chain of production, involving any number of intermediate steps (that often involve working face to face), on a ruthlessly tight schedule. “It takes a lot of people to get something made,” says designer Shelley Steffee. “Even if it’s 12 garments. There are so many hands that touch that garment.”

“Hand” is one of the garment district’s enduring metaphors. It begins with the “hand of the designer,” of course—the sketch that animates the idea. But this design does not develop in a vacuum. “There’s a naiveté to believing that a designer can do it alone,” declares Nanette Lepore, designer of a brand that bears her name and has 11 boutique shops around the world. Clothes require skilled hands. Hands to trace the patterns, hands to cut the fabric, hands to do the draping, hands to sew, hands to embroider, hands to fashion the intricate geometry of pleat patterns, hands to do specialized work such as grading and marking, hands to carry all this back and forth. The work has an elegant tactility. In one shop, a worker puts polished stones on a fabric to smooth it out before cutting. In another, a worker uses sticks as weights as he rolls up a pleat pattern on a cardboard tube that will “bake” in a hulking steam oven. In still another, a seamstress deftly manipulates a complicated smocking machine, like a conductor working in colored thread rather than music.

The closer these hands are, the shorter the transit time, and the greater the control the designer can exercise over the final product. Fashion is an intensely iterative process in which time becomes an obstacle. “When you move into higher-end design, there is so much spontaneous creativity happening that you don’t want to wait a month to see your garments,” says Tina Schenk, owner of the pattern-making company Werkstett. “One design is based on another. You want to keep the process going, you want to continuously look at the things that you've been designing.” Andrew Rosen, a third-generation garmento who founded Theory, a fashion company that now grosses half a billion dollars a year, remarks, “Just from an efficiency point of view, I can make clothes faster here. Which is not to say we haven’t shortened the lead times in China—we have. But there’s a lot more logistics that need to happen from 12,000 miles away than from 12 blocks away.” As Edward Glaeser notes in his new book 

, one thing cities do well is eliminate the “curse of complex communication.”

And as any Project Runway viewer knows from those trips to Mood Designer Fabrics, the massive garment district emporium where the reality TV show’s contestants scout for chiffon and charmeuse, it’s important to have the raw materials of fashion within easy reach. Fabric needs to be touched. “It’s not a flat medium you’re working in,” says veteran designer Anna Sui. “When you gather a piece of fabric, sometimes because of the thickness of it or the loftiness or the bounceability of it, you never know how it’s going to react.”

Proximity comes at a price, of course, one that large-scale manufacturers—or the consumers who buy their products—typically do not seem willing to pay. But judging from what’s said by mid-range designers who work in the garment district, selling clothes not for several thousand dollars but several hundred, the assertion that it’s too expensive to make things in New York City isn't so iron clad. Prairie New York proprietor Shriber says that while quality is her main reason for working locally, overseas production prices aren't much cheaper. “By the time you pay your customs duties, air freight, you’re pretty much at the same dollar amount.” As evidenced by the recent trend toward “onshoring,” in which companies including Caterpillar and General Electric have said they will recall some of the manufacturing they have done in China to the United States,a whole host of issues—rising transportation and production costs, a weak dollar, quality control irregularities, intellectual property troubles—lay along the inexorable drift toward the low-wage periphery.

All of this is not to propose that New York City is poised to regain its stature as an apparel manufacturing giant, or even that it should. But as the critical mass of manufacturers, suppliers, artisans, and technicians that remains is increasingly threatened by redevelopment and rising rents, it seems evident that the potential impacts range beyond the loss of jobs or the loss of skills. What’s at stake is that layer of infrastructure, little seen but elemental, that has helped enable New York’s rise as a global fashion hub.

The reason a city like New York still thrives, even after losing most of its industrial base, argues Richard Florida, is that economic success “no longer revolves around simply making and moving things.” Instead, he writes, “it depends on generating and transporting ideas.” Just as neuroscientists speculate that higher intelligence correlates with the number of network connections between neurons in the brain and the speed with which they communicate, the cities that function best are those with the “highest velocity” of ideas, and the most efficient and robust links between people. In fashion, ideas not only need materials and manufacturing processes to take shape, but arise from the interplay of designers and manufacturers itself. The closer the connections, the faster and more productive that interplay is.

Of course, as Elizabeth Currid, an urban planning scholar at the University of Southern California, points out in 

(2007), these sorts of creative exchanges are not purely economic in nature. “Agglomeration may be even more important to maintaining the social mechanisms by which the cultural economy sustains itself,” she writes. The key to understanding urban economics in the future, some argue, is in so-called non-market interactions—for example, an essential ingredient of success in the fashion industry is being around other people in the fashion industry, both at work and at play. New York City has become what sociologist Saskia Sassen calls a “postindustrial production site.” It is a place built for the spread of ideas. What the successful 21st-century city now produces is innovation itself.

Few cultural enterprises are as driven by innovation as fashion. “The first thing a customer asks when they come into a store is, ‘What’s new?’” says Ron Frasch, president and chief merchandising officer of the upscale department store chain Saks. “They don’t want to know what was, they want to know what is.” As a cultural product, fashion has a perilously short shelf life. “We will sell 60 percent of what we’re going to sell in the first four weeks the goods are on the floor,” Frasch says. “That fact hasn't changed in my entire career.”

But what makes innovation happen, in terms of both inspiration and execution? Inspiration speaks to the intrinsic qualities of New York City: a willingness to accept new people and ideas, proximity to others drawn by these self-selecting qualities, and the fast transmission of ideas. The world’s great fashion capitals—Paris, Milan, London, now Shanghai—also happen to rank among the world’s leading financial capitals. Like fashion, finance is dependent upon the fast transmission of information. (Even as face-to-face trading has declined on Wall Street, firms are co-locating the data centers of their automated trading operations in New Jersey because even on the Internet physical proximity equals speed.) That those four cities also happen to be their countries’ media capitals illustrates people’s desire to be close to that information, to report and transmit it. And so the city itself, ever novel, ever regenerating, looms as an inspiration.

Which brings us back to Ramdat Harihar and his sewing machines. Some might regard him as a vestige of a marginal industry. But Harihar—and all of the other manufacturers, specialized tradespeople, suppliers, and other workers who constitute the district—can also be seen not simply as cogs in the production business, but as suppliers of a vital set of value-added services to a creative industry of immense importance to New York City. And while cheap transport and labor means manufacturing can be done anywhere, service sectors such as law and public relations—and, I would suggest, fashion—still tend to cluster, notes economist Jed Kolko, “because most services involve at least some face-to-face interaction.”

The service suppliers of the garment district act as an informal incubator. That word may conjure gleaming Silicon Valley office parks more than it does old buildings with dodgy elevators, but the end result is the same: Ideas and infrastructure get provided to start-ups. While the rise of New York City fashion is indelibly linked to names such as Ralph Lauren and Tommy Hilfiger, whose brands now do most of their manufacturing overseas, their businesses didn't begin abroad. Most young and emerging designers start their careers working out of apartments, using money borrowed from family and friends, working in quantities that are well below an order that any overseas factory would accept, and often under sharp time constraints.

The garment district firms do more than simply supply needed services; their role extends to everything from knowledge transfer to financing to simple moral support. Hence the value of specialized tradesmen such as Paul Cavazza, who runs Create-a-Marker, a grading and marking service. (In the garment trade, grading is the creation of patterns for each size of an item of clothing, while marking is the art and science of cutting patterns to minimize fabric wastage.) “I had a young designer walk in here last night,” Cavazza told me. “He’s just starting his line. He came in here at six. I was here with him until 8:30, walking him through grading and marking.”

The garment district doesn't merely provide a seedbed for the young designers who drive fashion; the iterative process conducted in proximity helps innovation itself happen. Quick turnarounds give designers test labs of a sort, with the final product often shaped by the manufacturers themselves. “When you’re working on a higher-end collection,” says designer Shelley Steffee, sewers and pattern makers “are almost like designers themselves.” They help solve design problems, figure out ways to reduce costs in ramping up to larger-scale production, and even introduce new techniques. Another designer, Yeohlee Teng, says, “You could have a design you want cut in a certain way, and your designer could turn around and tell you, ‘I can get better yardage if you turn this piece around.’” In her fall collection last year, Teng used a sort of double-pleated “checkerboard” technique in a dress. This pleat came from Regal Originals, Rodger Cohen’s shop, just down the block. As Cohen told me, one of his workers accidentally fed an already-pleated piece of fabric into a machine, creating a striking effect. This mistake, made on a cluttered, ancient factory floor, has been transformed into valuable inputs in the image economy of global fashion.

Mutation, error, serendipity: These are the ingredients that drive creativity, argues the popular-science writer Steven Johnson in 

 (2010)—and nowhere more so than in cities, where ideas, drawn from various subcultures crowded together, leak into a “liquid network” and “influence their neighbors in surprising ways.” Shana Tabor, a young designer who heads the Brooklyn-based In God We Trust accessories boutique, says, “I love days when I’m in the garment district, going up on an elevator to some place, and the door accidentally opens on a floor—and you’re like, ‘What are you guys doing in here?’” With each level come new possibilities.

The cluttered floor of Regal Originals, filled with machines whose own manufacturers have long gone out of business, is a kind of proof to the late urban critic Jane Jacobs’s famous dictum, “New ideas need old buildings.” It was the garment industry of New York City that provided Jacobs, in her classic text 

(1969), with a compelling story of how innovation—creative, technological, market—occurs. In the 1920s, a dressmaker named Ida Rosenthal began creating cupped undergarments as a service to help her clients achieve a better fit. The modern brassiere was born. Eventually, the bras became so popular that Rosenthal and her partners quit making dresses altogether. The service became a product, which became the lingerie company Maidenform. As Jacobs wrote, “New work arises upon existing work.” Yes, the company left New York, but what’s important is maintaining the conditions—such as the chains of contractors and producers—that help get such ideas off the ground.

This sort of innovation is often unpredictable, and not nestled within clearly delineated boundaries. “When new work is added to older work,” Jacobs wrote, “the addition often cuts ruthlessly across categories of work.” A little over a year ago, Stoll, a German manufacturer of knitting machines, opened a facility in a ground-floor storefront on West 39th Street. While its latest high-tech machines silently hum in the front window, the place does not exist to sell machines. Rather, it is part showroom, part boutique production facility, part technical institute. Faced with a constricting customer base for its machines, Stoll was looking for a way to build its brand and its sales. The company identified a market for providing what it terms “fast-track samples”—quick one-off prototypes—to the myriad designers in the garment district, offering a benefit in time and quality versus sending things abroad. There is no more common complaint among designers than sample quality. The decreased turnaround time makes new things possible.

Creativity in fashion, as in any art, can originate anywhere, or come from anything: a splash of color on a billboard, the movement of a symphony, sunlight dappling through trees, even a new stitch. It is not surprising that cities tend to be hubs of creativity—there are more things and people to be inspired by, more knowledge transfer, and, importantly, more ways to bring this creativity into actuality. The point, it seems, is less preserving this or another industry for its own sake, or even championing the idea that people are making things in cities, than enabling the seedbeds that help create and sustain the empire of images and aura that is New York City’s fashion industry. The loss of even a single fabric supplier, like a ripple in a pond, is felt everywhere. “It’s like a coral reef,” says designer Teng. “You don’t know how the reef will survive and what it will do if certain elements are removed.”

 (2008), and is a visiting scholar at New York's Rudin Center for Transportation and Policy Management.

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New York City's garment district illustrates that manufacturing can still be vital to the innovation that cities foster.

Long Live the Industrial City

IN 2009, THE UNITED STATES CROSSED A DIGITAL RUBICON

: For the first time, the amount of data sent with mobile devices exceeded the sum of transmitted voice data. The shift was heralded in tech circles with prophetic fury: 

“The phone call is dead,” pronounced a blogger at the Web site TechCrunch.

, journalist Clive Thompson observed, “This generation doesn’t make phone calls, because everyone is in constant, lightweight contact in so many other ways: texting, chatting, and social network messaging.”

 declared a paradox: “We’re well on our way to becoming an incredibly disconnected connected society.”

Where the world’s wires once hummed with the electrical impulses of people talking, that conversation, in the digital age, has been subsumed by all the other information we are exchanging. “At this point, voice isn’t even a rounding error in network operators’ calculations,” Stephan Beckert, an analyst with TeleGeography, a telecom research company, recently told me. To underscore the point, he sent me a chart showing “switched voice” as a thin wedge, gradually squeezed to a nearly invisible nothing by the oceanic thrust of “Internet” (and a smaller stratolayer of “private networks”). It looks as if the world has gone quiet.

There is one significant caveat here: Placing a voice call, compared to streaming 

 on Netflix or uploading a video clip of your friend’s latest freestyle BMX trick to YouTube, consumes virtually no bandwidth.

And so the phone call is hardly dead. While it is true that land lines are in sharp decline in every advanced industrial country—the most recent and, presumably, final time land lines saw an increase in use was, ironically, during the adoption of dial-up Internet in the 1990s—in many of those countries the decline has been more than offset by an increase in minute-per-month levels on mobile phones. Even on Skype, the explosively expanding Internet phone and video chat service, some 85 percent of calls still go to the “PSTN” (the public switched telephone network, composed of the infrastructure for land lines and cell phones).

Still, there are signs of an ongoing cultural shift. Even as the number of wireless connections increased from 286 million in 2009 to 303 million in 2010, voice usage on those phones decreased. And our calls are getting shorter. While in 2003 the average local mobile phone call lasted a leisurely three minutes, by 2010 it had been trimmed to a terse one minute and 47 seconds.

What’s going on? Disentangling our communication preferences and habits can be hard, bound tightly as they are, like fiber-optic cable, with myriad strands. Simple economics may be one significant factor; in many European countries, texting is cheaper than making a call. Personal inclination, rooted in psychology, may be another; researcher Ruth Rettie, of Kingston University, in London, has found that British mobile phone users often fall into “talker” and “texter” camps, the latter (the “phone averse”) leaving, rather uneconomically, huge numbers of unused voice minutes on their phone plans each month. (Their average mobile call is under 30 seconds.)

Or it may be merely a matter of logistics and convenience. In an increasingly data-rich, time-starved environment, the phone call can seem less a welcome invitation to connect than a disruptive, troublingly analog experience. 

As Judith Martin, who doles out etiquette advice as “Miss Manners,” told 

 last year in an article on the disappearing telephone call

, “I’ve been hammering away at this for decades. The telephone has a very rude propensity to interrupt people.”

Before probing into the future of voice telephony, and the idea that we find it ever easier to do without it, we need to ask a simpler question, one that turns out to be curiously relevant to current discussions of the impact and role of a communication technology such as the Internet in our lives: What 

Before probing into the future, we need to ask a simpler question: What was the telephone call?

, a new technology typically sets in motion a now familiar script. At first, the technology is deemed to have little import or to fulfill only very specific, limited uses. Consider, for example, 

 “The problem with television is that people must sit and keep their eyes glued on a screen; the average American family hasn’t time for it.”

Next, as the technology’s true uses come into view, but before it is widely adopted, come the grandiose pronouncements, both pro and con, on how it will reshape society. 

 that television inventor Philo T. Farnsworth thought television would engender world peace: “If we were able to see people in other countries and learn about our differences, why would there be any misunderstandings? War would be a thing of the past.”

And then, as prices come down and the technology continues to improve, people simply buy the thing (which, it turns out, has fulfilled neither the utopian nor apocalyptic scenarios ascribed to it), and like a persistent rainfall refilling a dry desert lakebed, over time it so thoroughly permeates everyday life that we no longer pause to think about its presence, or indeed what might have once lain beneath the shimmering surface.

The telephone fits comfortably into this schema. It arrived on the historical stage in 1876 without invitation or clear mass desire. Yet there it was, a device harboring a radical change: For the first time, people could converse in real time at a distance. But what to do with it? As sociologist Claude Fischer observed in 

 (1992), businessmen, who relied on letters and the telegraph to transmit important and often complex information, were initially skeptical of the telephone. “For them,” Fischer wrote, “voice transmission, scratchy and often indistinct, could be an adjunct at best.” (Inventor Elisha Gray gave up pursuing the telephone, which he called the “talking telegraph,” to focus on improving telegraphy.) Economics also played a role. William Preece, chief engineer of the British postal service, said America — not Britain — had use for the telephone. “Here we have a superabundance of messengers, errand boys, and things of that kind.”

Then, as Fischer described, the uses took hold, cycling through new audiences and wider purposes, thanks in large part to a vigorous marketing push by the Bell System. (The company boasted in a 1909 ad that it had “from the start 

created the need of the telephone and then supplied it

.”) First the phone was used for commercial business, then for household business, then, gradually, for social purposes: visiting with relatives, “fond intimate talks,” getting “in touch.” “Friendship’s path,” a 1937 AT&T ad declared, “often follows the trail of the telephone wire.”

While this progression seems obvious in retrospect, the brief period when the function of the phone was in play should not be overlooked. There was, for example, the “Telephone Herald” (which was launched in Budapest but eventually came to the United States in various forms), described in a 1903 article in 

 as a “telephone-receiver” installed in the home that would alert the subscriber to the “sending of news” by an alarm (“a sort of trumpet”). An editor would read bulletins to the service’s subscribers. “The apparatus is so arranged,” explained the 

, “that the subscriber can lie down or follow some other occupation while he hears the news. Should the information not prove delectable to the auditor, he simply places the trumpet upon the hooks fitted to the receiver.”

In a 1909 ad, Bell boasted that it had “created the need of the telephone and then supplied it.”

The telephone as a broadcast medium, a kind of protoradio, is a historical curiosity, but the article included one other observation that still resonates. While the larger press may have seen in the Telephone Herald a threat to printed newspapers, 

 “People cannot afford to spend the whole of the day with their ear at a telephone-receiver or perusing a newspaper from morning till night. What is the result? The telephone delivers in a terse, incisive manner any special item of news; and, if the subscriber’s curiosity be aroused therein, he promptly seeks the next day’s newspapers for a full report.” Today, we sift through any number of information streams—flagging that tweet so we can later read the full article it links to on the Instapaper app installed on our iPad—and debate questions such as whether the Internet will kill television.

As the phone began to find users and uses, on came the claims for what it was doing to American society. For some, telephones were an “antidote to provincialism,” while others argued that the devices augured the “destruction of community because they encourage far-flung operations and far-flung relationships.” The phone tore down the walls of privacy even as it helped create a “general withdrawal into self-pursuit and privatism.” It brought people together in cities as it scattered them in far suburbs. (The idea that the phone allows us to live at great distance from one another persists today, even though, as MIT architect and engineer Carlo Ratti and a team of other researchers have found, the more people telecommunicate, the more they collocate.)

The sociologist Sidney Aronson, noting in the early 1970s the phone’s capacity to improve the coordination of business activities, observed that the “years from 1875 to 1914, during which telephone use spread rapidly, witnessed the growth of giant corporations and the formation of trusts, despite the passage of the Sherman Anti-Trust Act in 1890.” In the early 1900s, an AT&T engineer argued that without the telephone, the skyscraper would have been impossible: “Suppose there was no telephone and every message had to be carried by a personal messenger. How much room do you think the necessary elevators would leave for offices?”

In fact, the skyscraper owes its existence not to Alexander Graham Bell but to Elisha Otis, inventor of the safety elevator. That the claim on behalf of the telephone “has been repeated for over 80 years without serious examination,” Fischer argued, hints at how little we know about this instrument’s actual effects. As telephones became ubiquitous in America — their number grew from 1.3 million in 1900 to 43 million at the end of the 1950s — they nearly disappeared from the realm of scholarly inquiry. Perhaps, as political scientist Ithiel de Sola Pool noted in the introduction to a 1977 book, The Social Impact of the Telephone, “the telephone’s inherently dual effects are one reason for the paucity of literature on its social impact. Its impacts are puzzling, evasive, and hard to pin down.”

But so too are the impacts of, say, the computer. Witness the intense debate occasioned by the publication a couple of years ago of 

, in which technology journalist Nicholas Carr examined whether the Internet was changing the way we think. Yet while there are entire academic journals (e.g., C

) that parse the social impact of computers, not a single scholarly publication is devoted to the telephone. Even the mobile phone, arguably, is more scrutinized for its computer-like texting functions than its influence on our vocal communication.

As telephones became ubiquitous in America — their number grew from 1.3 million in 1900 to 43 million at the end of the 1950s — they nearly disappeared from the realm of scholarly inquiry.

Indeed, it is striking how many phenomena attributed to the Internet age have their historical echo in the telephone. Identity theft and Internet predators? The early years of the telephone brought concerns over the unwanted entry—via telephone line—of unsavory characters into the home, and some people called for laws to regulate criminal use of the phone. Or consider the contemporary argument that automated high-frequency Internet trading increases the volatility of financial markets. As Aronson noted, “The widespread use of the telephone probably added to the short-run instability of such markets.” Before unwanted spam e-mails there were unwanted sales calls. The phrase “information superhighway” was preceded by a century in an AT&T ad announcing “a highway of communication.” Computer hacking grew out of the culture of “phone phreaks”—those early-1970s technological obsessives (Steve Jobs among them) who figured out how to manipulate the phone system to place free phone calls.The list of parallels goes on.

Perhaps the telephone, despite its seemingly transformative nature—the annihilation of time and space—didn’t change us much after all. Fischer, in 

, refuting the technological determinists who see the telephone altering the way we think and behave, quoted historian George Daniels: “Habits seem to grow out of other habits far more directly than they do out of gadgets.” Social historian Daniel Boorstin similarly observed that “the telephone was only a convenience, permitting Americans to do more casually and with less effort what they had already been doing before.” A good place to examine how much the telephone changed society is the phone call itself.

“THIS IS GOING TO MAKE YOU SELF-CONSCIOUS,”

 Emanuel Schegloff tells me from the other end of the line in California, “but there will be a point in this conversation when one of us will say ‘so’ — or something like that — which will be a signal that I want to close this off. But you don’t have to play along. Maybe you’ll say, ‘There’s something else I want to ask you.’ You have to work up to goodbye.”

There is something deeply metaphysical about conducting a telephone conversation with a linguist who has studied, perhaps more than anyone, how we talk on the telephone. Yet even Schegloff, an emeritus professor at UCLA, is hesitant to assert that there are any vast differences between how we talk on the phone and how we talk face to face. “It is an adaptation to the absence of visual access to one another, but it’s pretty much the same sorts of action in the same sorts of order.”

What made telephone conversation so interesting to one of the main progenitors of “conversational analysis” — a discipline that looks for the deep structures in our everyday talk — was not that it represented some bold break from traditional human communication, but that it is, in essence, pure talk, not contaminated by the suggestive glance, the gesture of a hand, a person’s body torque. Sifting through hundreds of hours of actual recorded calls from an array of sources, Schegloff rigorously dissected the dynamics in play when two people who cannot see each other talk: the turn taking, the “forced position repair” (that moment in a conversation when one realizes there has been a misunderstanding — “I thought you meant …” —  and the participants must go backward in time to “fix” the conversational thread).

Consider, for example, the “conversational beginning.” A “multiplicity of jobs” are done in those first moments, Schegloff says. There’s simple identification — though not often so simple. The answerer speaks first. “Hello?” “It’s me,” says the other. And there it is: The presumption of intimacy, the expectation (or desire) that one will be recognized. Haven’t we all, when playfully (or aggressively) opening a call with the words “It’s me,” felt the sting of being asked, “Who’s ‘me’?” That’s hardly the end of the work. There’s the “reconstitution of the relationship” (“It’s been ages since we talked”), as well as the articulation of the specific reason for the call, which Schegloff says often will be preceded by an utterance such as “um” once the initial pleasantries have been dispensed with. The caller, he says, often will try to ease into this purpose without drawing undue attention to it.

While there are certainly differences between phone conversations and face-to-face communication — on the phone, silences tend to be shorter, and “overlaps” can be more frequent because we can’t see that the other person is preparing to speak—what is most striking is how much of the spirit and function of social interaction survives on the phone, even stripped of humans’ powerful nonverbal cues.

“If I suddenly decide I want to dial you up, I have no way of knowing whether you’re busy, and you have no idea why I’m calling. We have to open Schrödinger’s box every time, having a conversation to figure out whether it’s OK to have a conversation.”

In an early teleconferencing exercise in 1963 — set up with the idea of providing a video hot line between the White House and the Kremlin — the Institute for Defense Analyses found that individuals preferred talking on the phone to video interaction. Further studies revealed little difference between the telephone and face-to-face contact in accomplishing a variety of tasks, ranging from comprehension to problem solving. Linguist John Baugh and other researchers have shown that subjects on a phone call generally can determine the other speaker’s race. In short, while we might regard the phone as an impoverished form of communication, it more or less gets the job done.

But the call itself has not been immune to the evolution of technology. The introduction of caller ID dispensed with the recognition problem (though I am still sometimes startled to hear the phone answered with “Hey, Tom”), while mobile phones introduced an entirely new function for openings: establishing location (hence the grating procession of “We just landed” or “I’m in line at the bank”). The advent of e-mail and text messages — one-way, contained, their purpose generally spelled out in advance, presumably less intrusive (save for the ping of the BlackBerry) — made the phone call seem more formal, with yet another function thrown into the opening. As Clive Thompson noted in his 

 article: “If I suddenly decide I want to dial you up, I have no way of knowing whether you’re busy, and you have no idea why I’m calling. We have to open Schrödinger’s box every time, having a conversation to figure out whether it’s OK to have a conversation.”

Indeed, there is a sense that young people today, with so many other ways to stay in touch, find the very structure of the phone call oppressive. “You’ve got to get the whole chit-chat in there,” one texter told Ruth Rettie in the course of her research on mobile phone users. Noting texters’ disaffection with calls, Rettie wrote, “There was a need for small talk, silences were unacceptable, and finishing a call could be difficult. … Silences and hesitations are interpreted as meaningful, so that there is little time for the interactants to deliberate.” The structure of the call loomed so large that while there is “no technical reason why phone calls could not be used for minimal messages such as ‘goodnight,’” this was deemed roundly unacceptable. It’s as if texters were dodging the telephonic version of what television comedian and writer Larry David calls “the stop and chat,” that encounter on the street where you’d prefer to just say “hello” and keep walking.

Now that telephones are virtually everywhere, observed The New York Times, “telephone manners are, quite naturally, becoming equally complicated.” The year was 1986 (when a few people had car phones but the mobile phone was not yet widely distributed). Strikingly, it could have been last week — or it could have been around 1900, when, the German critic and philosopher Walter Benjamin noted, the phone arrived in his Berlin household, with an “alarm signal that menaced not only my parents’ midday nap but the historical era that underwrote and enveloped this siesta.”

In 1986, the latest shift was “call waiting,” which Judith Martin compared to “standing at a cocktail party and not paying attention to the person you’re with, waiting for a more important person.” Now, of course, as we stand at that same cocktail party, fidgeting with our smartphones — which, despite rarely looking like something designed for speaking into, we not only talk on, but to (summoning the iPhone’s electronic concierge, Siri, for directions or the weather) — the interruptions that once occurred on the telephone line now occur in real time and space.

We have been fretting about the phone for years, even as it has moved closer and closer to us — once relegated to the back hallway, “between the dirty linen hamper and the gasometer,” as in Benjamin’s day, now in our back pocket. But it is difficult to say, as it seems to be morphing once more as a cultural form, whether the telephone has profoundly changed us in any way.

, a book about the mysteries of human preferences.

Photo courtesy of Flickr/Delwin Steven Campbell

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Today, we worry about the social effects of the Internet. A century ago, it was the telephone that threatened to reinvent society.

The Call of the Future

In the days before the Internet, eating at an unknown restaurant meant relying on a clutch of quick and dirty heuristics. The presence of many truck drivers or cops at a lonely diner supposedly vouchsafed its quality (though it may simply have been the only option around). For “ethnic” food, there was the classic benchmark: “We were the only non-[insert ethnicity] people in there.” Or you could spend anxious minutes on the sidewalk, under the watchful gaze of the host, reading curling, yellowed reviews, wondering if what held in 1987 was still true today. In an information-poor environment, you sometimes simply went with your gut (and left clutching it).

, or any Web site teeming with “user-generated content”), you are often troubled by the reverse problem: too much information. As I navigate a Yelp entry to simply determine whether a place is worth my money, I find myself battered between polar extremes of experience: One meal was “to die for,” another “pretty lame.” Drifting into narrow currents of individual proclivity (writing about a curry joint where I had recently lunched, one reviewer noted that “the place had really good energy, very Spiritual [sic], which is very important to me”), I eventually capsize in a sea of confusion. I either quit the place altogether or, by the time I arrive, am weighed down by a certain exhaustion of expectation, as if I had already consumed the experience and was now simply going through the motions.

What I find most striking is that, having begun the process of looking for reviews of the restaurant, I find myself reviewing the reviewers. The use of the word “awesome” — a term whose original connotation is so denuded that I suspect it will ultimately come to exclusively signify its ironic, air-quote-marked opposite — is a red flag. So are the words “anniversary” or “honeymoon,” often written by people with inflated expectations for their special night; their complaint with any perceived failure on the part of the restaurant or hotel to rise to this momentous occasion is not necessarily mine. I reflexively downgrade reviewers writing in the sort of syrupy dross picked up from hotel brochures (“it was a vision of perfection”).

In one respect, there is nothing new in reviewing the reviewer; our choices in pre-Internet days were informed either by friends we trusted or critics whose voices seemed to carry authority. But suddenly, the door has been opened to a multitude of voices, each bearing no preexisting authority or social trust. It is no longer merely enough to read that someone thought the vegetarian food was bad (you need to know if she is a vegetarian), or the hotel in Iowa City was the best they have ever seen (just how many hotels have they seen?), or a foreign film was terrible (wait, they admit they don’t like subtitles?). Critics have always had to be interrogated this way (what dendritic history of logrolling lay behind the rave about that book?), but with the Web, a thousand critics have bloomed. The messy, complicated, often hidden dynamics of taste and preference, and the battles over it, are suddenly laid out right in front of us.

, Karl Marx famously ruminated on the predicted collapse of the division of labor in a communist society, where he would be free to “do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticize after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, shepherd, or critic.” It may not be communism, but the Internet has enabled the fruition of at least one of these activities: criticizing after dinner — particularly if the object of criticism is dinner itself.

The rise of this crowd-sourced aggregate of amateur reviewers, a reserve army of critical labor, is generally seen as an egalitarian blossoming, freeing consumers from the tyranny of individual mandarins, each harboring his or her own agendas and tastes. “The excising of the expert reviewer is happening right across the board,” 

. “Who needs expertise when every Tom, Dick, and Harriet reviews everything for free anyway. Isn’t this truly democratic? The nature of criticism is changing, so this hierarchy of expertise is crumbling.”

One can almost hear the anticipatory echoes of something like Yelp in the context of José Ortega y Gasset’s 

(1930). The multitude, he wrote, once “scattered about the world in small groups,” now appears “as an agglomeration.” It has “suddenly become visible, installing itself in the preferential positions in society. Before, if it existed, it passed unnoticed, occupying the background of the social stage; now it has advanced to the footlights and is the principal character.” The disgruntled diner, now able to make or break a restaurant through sheer collective will. Against this leveling of critical power, the old guard fulminates. Ruth Reichl, the former editor of 

, recently harrumphed that “anybody who believes Yelp is an idiot. Most people on Yelp have no idea what they’re talking about.”

If the God Criticism — in the sense of experts telling the anxious middle what to read, what to see, and how to be — now lays on its side, an Enver Hoxha statue in a Tirana back alley, what’s left? A new utopia of fisherman-critics who are free to make up their own minds and influence others? A glorious world of transparency and objectivity? A radical rewriting of the canon?

Perhaps. But there are complications with this idea that the Internet has obviated the need for experts and for critical authority. One question is what is happening to criticism itself when the evaluative architecture on a site such as Amazon is the same for leaf blowers as it is literature, when everything seems to be quantifying one’s hedonic response to a consumption activity; when we are forced into a ruthless dyad of thumbing up or thumbing down, or channeled into expressing a simple “liking” for something when the actual response may be more complex.