Triumph of the City: How Our Greatest Invention Makes Us Richer, Smarter, Greener, Healthier, and Happier (Penguin Press, 352 pages, $29.95) is provocative enough as a compendium of gee-whiz studies on development, housing and demography; we learn, for example, that it takes $100,000 in tax breaks to create one job in Detroit, where the average house is valued at $82,000. But Mr. Glaeser also pitches Triumph as a definitive apology for the urban writ large. He meanders through Shogunate Edo (Tokyo), Abbasid Baghdad and Athens in the fifth century B.C., places where the hard numbers of his stock and trade are hardly available. These detours are meant to undermine what Mr. Glaeser considers a deep-seated animus toward cities, afflicting even such progressive icons as Rousseau, Thoreau and Gandhi.

This purported anti-urban bias is, befitting its pastoral interests, rather full of straw. Who would deny that "cities, the dense agglomerations that dot the globe, have been engines of innovation since Plato and Socrates bickered in an Athenian marketplace"? Who could possibly believe that the solution to third-world poverty lies in "plac[ing] our belief in rural life"? How could anyone falsify-or confirm-the claim that when human beings de-urbanize (as after the fall of Rome), "knowledge itself move[s] backwards"? 

But look past the rhetorical flourishes, and you see an ambivalent verdict on post-1960s urban policy: It is often the actors most philosophically "urbanist" in intent that are the most deleteriously anti-city in effect. Mr. Glaeser brings us, in striking detail, a gated subdivision in the Houston outskirts called "The Woodlands." The city dweller's inborn cultural revulsion to the place is the stuff of any number of Sundance dramas: the sterility of the McMansions, the moral vacuity of the micropolitics, the ecological nihilism of the SUVs. But the appeal of such prefab townlets—one million people have moved to the Houston area since 2000—has little to do with culture; the Sun Belt beckons because urban California and the Northeast have radically distorted the market for any city's most crucial commodity: property.

The old canard that New York real estate is expensive because Manhattan is an island is, well, a canard: "It doesn't take more land to add an extra story to a high-rise, so the lack of land can't explain why Manhattan prices are so much higher than the costs of adding an extra story. ... In America's expensive coastal regions, housing supply is restricted not by lack of land but because public policies make it hard to build."

Once the untamed capital of architectural phallicism, New York now has the nation's most absurdly specific zoning laws, with piranha community boards to match. Houston has none at all. You cannot believe that vertical New York is a superior model of urban development to Houstonian sprawl and remain supportive or neutral about codes that, in the long- and medium-term, effectively limit traditional city centers to the very rich and very poor. "Affordable housing" is a numbers game of growing demand and artificially constricted supply: Adding a hundred penthouses might impede a neighborhood's "character" (an upper-middle-class problem if there ever was one), but it'd make housing cheaper overall.

Numbers are hard, cold things. Still, humanists do their cause a grave disservice by yielding the ground of analytical rigor to the developers. To prod his caste's squishy left-liberalism of feelings over systems, Mr. Glaeser is a self-conscious extremist about the failures of American zoning and historical preservation. But, of course, Mr. Glaeser likes old American cities, and ancient European ones, too.

His laissez-faire prescriptions for development-roughly, architecture freed from the dictates of social engineering-thus have higher purchase for the global boomtowns that will decide our fate as a species. Salvation, if it comes, will be a skyscraper. Having emerged in the 19th century, the majestic avenues and uniform, filigreed facades of central Paris might justify that city's long-standing aversion to height-since 1974, restricted to 83 feet. But why do restrictions in Mumbai, "one of the most densely populated places on earth," limit buildings to "an average height of only one-and-a-third stories?" Certainly not for architectural splendor. The squat skylines of Mumbai represent a dangerous disjuncture between today's frenetically entrepreneurial India and the pastoralist leanings of a newly independent India influenced, ironically, by then "fashionable ideas of English urban planning." In short, "Limiting heights didn't stop growth; it just ensured that migrants had to squeeze into less space."

If Mumbai threatens to become a Houston with dysentery, other remnants of the British Empire offer a more salutary model. By building vertically and "taxing" the use of public goods with such measures as downtown congestion charges, Singapore and Hong Kong were able to burst from third to first world while remaining walkable and, more or less, affordable. That these 20th-century success stories were city-states-where the national was coterminous with the urban-leads to one of Mr. Glaeser's more supple insights: In any country with multiple, nested layers of sovereignty, NIMBY-ism becomes more than the ad hoc grievances of individual citizens but rather a structural constraint on political possibility.

The challenge of this generalized, institutional NIMBY-ism grows in step with the realization that the planet is both promiscuously interconnected and finite. For all its representative appeal, American federalism may simply be unequipped for our moment. When local governments shave 10 stories off a Manhattan condo or mandate a 2-acre minimum lot size for some Westchester hamlet, they reduce the infrastructural and ecological burden on their jurisdictions. But if the endgame of such restrictions is to encourage the marginal resident to leave the Northeast Megalopolis or Silicon Valley to new construction in Houston or Phoenix with many times the carbon footprint, the net effect on their constituents, as citizens of the planet, is sure to be negative.

He may not be the lone voice defending cities he imagines himself to be, but Mr. Glaeser is a defender uniquely unsentimental. The city is a means to an end, and when one outlives its purpose, our interventions should work on behalf of its people, not its material and affective memory. Triumph expels countless statistics, but the most shocking is also the most familiar: After Katrina, urbanists proposed spending $200 billion to rebuild a New Orleans in decline long before the storm. This amounts to $200,000 for every household in the metropolitan area-a figure that might rebuild lives elsewhere in the country and world if not spent on rehabilitating a conglomeration that "lost its economic rationale long ago."

Triumph of the City is, oddly enough, anything but triumphalist. The city is a delicate, miraculous process, it argues, and sustaining it is an act of measured, even counterintuitive reserve. I'm not sure if this satisfies. Mr. Glaeser's most strident passages involve the environmental parsimony of urban living-again, a fact not nearly as unappreciated as he suggests. (Anyone who's waited for a late-night G train knows that his lifestyle taxes our geological and moral resources less than most any other American's.) In a marvelous riff, Mr. Glaeser compares the environmentalism of former London mayor Ken Livingstone—who successfully imported Singapore's congestion charges—with that of his country's most profound dolt: Prince Charles, whose love of nature runs toward fox-hunting, boutique organic farming and faux-medieval villages.

And yet Charles-poor, imbecilic Charles-has, in pet-project Poundbury, a positive, and normative, vision of human habitation: a village people drive to with inexplicably winding pedestrian roads and chain stores housed in camp re-creations of Tudor barns. This is, of course, the crux of New Urbanism—an overwrought facade of city living self-importantly implanted into the endless sprawl. Mr. Glaeser is a scion of the old urbanism, the natural evolution of cities as opposed to the self-reference of cityness. But this means embracing Platonic Athens, and Haussmann's Paris, and speculative New York, and authoritarian-gonzo Dubai as refractions of the same urban impulse. Unlike suburbia or the New Urbania, the real city doesn't have an obvious physical or social end point, and it is both the laudable honesty and fatal difficulty of Triumph of the City that it doesn't try to give it one—to give us the formula of a perfected urbanism.

The city, alas, is what we make of it, and what it makes of us.

 editorial@observer.com