Centers of Progress, Pt. 39: Houston (Spaceflight)
Introducing the city at the heart of the American space program.
Chelsea Follett —
Today marks the 39th installment in a series of articles by HumanProgress.org called Centers of Progress. Where does progress happen? The story of civilization is in many ways the story of the city. It is the city that has helped to create and define the modern world. This biweekly column will give a short overview of urban centers that were the sites of pivotal advances in culture, economics, politics, technology, etc.
Our 39th Center of Progress is Houston during the 20th century Space Race, the famous period of rivalry between the United States and the Soviet Union over which nation could achieve more in the realm of space exploration. Nicknamed “Space City” because it houses NASA’s famed Mission Control Center, Houston has done more to advance space exploration than any other city.
Today, as the fourth most populous city in the United States (beaten only by our previous Centers of ProgressNew York, Los Angeles and Chicago), Houston is a sprawling, busy port city. As the largest city in Texas and in the country’s South, Houston is also a thriving center of regional cultural traditions and boasts the world’s largest livestock exhibition and rodeo. The Houston Rodeo draws millions of visitors annually and has attracted famous musical performers over the years ranging from Elvis Presley to Beyoncé Knowles. But the city is also increasingly multicultural. More than 20 percent of today’s Houstonians were born abroad, with particularly large populations hailing from India, Vietnam, China (the city has its own flourishing Chinatown), Africa, and Latin America.
Houston also has the distinction of being the largest city in the country without zoning regulations, which its voters have repeatedly rejected, giving the city a reputation for laissez-faire land management. Houston’s lack of zoning has led to many businesses and houses coexisting as neighbors, creating unusual juxtapositions—and relatively affordable home prices, even as the city’s population has nearly doubled since 1970, swelling to 2.3 million. As the writer Nolan Gray has noted, unzoned Houston is “able to grow, adapt, and evolve like no other city” with an “ongoing supernova of construction.” Perhaps America’s most affordable metropolis, Houston is a car-centric city stretched over a vast flat landscape. Houston is also a major cultural and culinary destination known for its numerous museums and restaurants, as well as its large zoo and, of course, the Space Center—the area’s top attraction for international tourists.
Reports from European explorers suggest that native tribes such as the Akokisa people once lived in what is now the Houston area. The site was sparsely inhabited in 1826, when the settler John Richardson Harris (1790–1829) founded a town within the bounds of what is now Houston and named it Harrisburg after himself. A decade later, Harrisburg was destroyed during the Texas Revolution by Mexican troops pursuing the Texas army. A week later, the Battle of San Jacinto (1836) took place about 20 miles east of present-day Houston, ending the war, and Texas gained its independence from Mexico.
The people of the newly independent Republic of Texas (1836–1846) built a town with access to the Galveston Bay navigation system to serve as a transportation hub and temporary capital. Two enterprising brothers from New York state, the investor John Kirby Allen (1810–1838) and mathematics professor-turned-businessman Augustus Chapman Allen (1806–1864), who together had worked to keep supply channels operating during the war, bought land on the banks of Buffalo Bayou for the new town. The brothers thus became the founding fathers of Houston.
The site took its name from the Virginia-born military leader, statesman, and Cherokee citizen (by induction, not birth) Sam Houston (1793–1863), who led the Texas army to victory against Mexico and was heralded as a war hero. His accomplishments over the course of his life included serving as president of the Republic of Texas, representing Texas in the U.S. Senate, becoming governor of Tennessee (although he resigned early to live among the Cherokee), and governor of Texas. He remains the only individual to ever serve as the governor of two different states.
The city of Houston served as the congressional meeting place for the Republic of Texas (1836–1846) from 1837 to 1839, when the capital moved to Austin. In 1846, Texas was formally admitted as a state within the United States, and by 1850, the first census year after Texas joined the United States, there were 2,396 Houstonians. Two decades later, that figure had grown to 9,332, and the U.S. Congress designated Houston as an official ship port. Improvements to the ship channels helped Houston thrive as a trade hub.
In 1900, disaster struck the nearby town of Galveston. A Category 4 hurricane killed between 8,000 and 12,000 Galvestonians, making it the deadliest hurricane in U.S. history to this day. Many fled inland from the ruins of the devastated Galveston, moving to Houston. The following year, oil was discovered at Spindletop, some 80 miles east of Houston. More oil was discovered in Humble, about 20 miles northeast of Houston, in 1905 and in Goose Creek, about 25 miles east of Houston, in 1906. Houston’s location made it a natural choice to develop oilfield equipment.
Between the influx of new residents after the hurricane and the city’s proximity to several oil site discoveries, Houston’s economy grew rapidly. In 1912, Rice University was founded. In 1925, the 25-foot-deep Houston Ship Channel was completed, and Houston’s port welcomed its first deep-water vessel, making the city a gateway of global trade. Houston became Texas’s most populous city by the 1930 Census, with 292,352 residents. The city’s efficient maritime shipping made Houston rich as the Texas oil industry grew in the 1920s and 1930s, with more and more oil refineries popping up along the Houston Ship Channel. By the late 1940s, Houston’s port was the second busiest in the country, ranked by tonnage of goods transported, and by the mid-1950s Houston’s population had swelled to a million residents.
But the 1960s are when Houston’s greatest contributions to humanity began, as the city became the site where flight controllers on Earth would direct astronauts to the final frontier. After American engineer Robert Goddard (1882–1945) invented high-flying liquid-fueled rockets and American physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer (1904–1967) oversaw the first atomic bomb detonation in 1945, competition in the arena of rocketry between the Soviet Union and United States soon extended into spaceflight. The Soviet launch of the first satellite, Sputnik 1, in 1957 prompted the United States to create the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). In 1961, the Soviet lead in the Space Race grew more pronounced when the USSR launched the first man into space, Yuri Gagarin (1934–1968) in a spacecraft called Vostok 1.
That year, after a lengthy search, NASA selected Houston as the location for a new manned spaceflight laboratory because of the city’s mild climate, land availability, water supply, easy access to a major port, well-established industrial production capacity, and the presence of a large research university (Rice University), among other factors. The fact that the vice president at the time, Lyndon B. Johnson (1908–1973), was a Texan, may have also helped. Construction broke ground in 1962. In an address that year at Rice University, President John F. Kennedy stated:
We meet at a college noted for knowledge, in a city noted for progress, in a State noted for strength, and we stand in need of all three. . . . This city of Houston, this State of Texas, this country of the United States was not built by those who waited and rested and wished to look behind them. This country was conquered by those who moved forward—and so will space. . . . What was once the furthest outpost on the old frontier of the West will be the furthest outpost on the new frontier of science and space. Houston, your City of Houston, with its Manned Spacecraft Center, will become the heart of a large scientific and engineering community.
The Manned Spacecraft Center facility formally opened in 1963 and was renamed the Lyndon B. Johnson Space Center in 1973 after Johnson’s death. The center’s famed Mission Control Center has guided every American human space mission since Gemini IV in 1965 and manages the U.S. portions of the International Space Station today. When speaking remotely with the “CAPCOM” (the member of the operations team on the ground in charge of communications) in the Mission Control Center, astronauts refer to it by its radio call signs “Mission Control” or, simply, “Houston.”
While Gemini IV launched from Florida like most NASA missions, Houston assumed flight control the moment the spacecraft left the launch tower and entered the sky. The flight controllers in Houston monitored every aspect of the mission, including the spacecraft’s trajectory and fuel and oxygen levels as well as the crew’s heart and breathing rates. Leading them all was the flight director—the “orchestra leader,” as one retired flight controller put it. NASA refers to Houston as the “nerve center for American human spaceflight.” Gemini IV was NASA’s second manned Gemini spaceflight mission; it sent astronauts to orbit the Earth at a high altitude. It involved the first “spacewalk” (astronaut activity outside a spacecraft) by an American—less than a year after the Soviets achieved the first spacewalk—and conducted many science experiments.
In 1967, Houston officially adopted the “Space City” moniker. Flight controllers in Houston guided groundbreaking missions, including Gemini VIII in 1966, which saw the first successful spacecraft docking, and Apollo 8 in 1968, the first crewed mission to reach the moon and orbit it before returning to Earth. The latter’s astronauts became the first people to view the entirety of the Earth from afar, a sight captured in the remarkable “Earthrise” photograph. The crew also issued a captivating Christmas Eve broadcast, reading from the Book of Genesis. More people tuned in to listen to the astronauts’ voices than had ever simultaneously heard any voice in history. But Houston’s crowning achievement during the Space Age was undoubtedly the Apollo 11 mission in 1969, when human feet first stepped on the moon.
Astronaut Neil Armstrong’s (1930–2012) words upon touching down on the lunar surface are now famous: “That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.” But they were directly followed by a line directed at Houston’s eponymous Mission Control, “Houston, Tranquility Base here. The Eagle has landed.” Around 600 million people, a fifth of the global population at the time, watched the landing live, including north of 85 percent of U.S. households. People alive at the time often vividly recall where they were during that “giant leap for mankind.”
The eyes of the world were on the astronauts planting an American flag on the moon. But in a windowless room, stationed in rows behind console screens relaying critical data, mostly wearing white-collared shirts with skinny ties and pocket-protectors, the flight controllers in Houston were the quiet heroes of the Space Age. Their pale gray IBM consoles provided some 1,500 items of ever-changing information for analysis. Because the presence of flight controllers was required around the clock during multiday missions, each role was fulfilled in four overlapping eight-hour shifts by multiple people. At the time of the first moon landing, the average age of the flight controllers in Houston was only 32, with most having studied engineering, mathematics, or physics. The main flight director was Cliff Charlesworth (1931–1991), who held a bachelor’s degree in physics and was in his late 30s.
NASA’s Houston facility houses more than just Mission Control; it also once contained the Lunar Receiving Laboratory, where the first men to walk on the moon spent time quarantining upon their return to Earth, and most lunar rock samples are stored in Houston to this day. Houston also serves as a base for astronaut training.
While crew safety always took precedence over mission success, space exploration and astronaut training are dangerous endeavors, and astronaut deaths occurred, such as that of Theodore Freeman (1930–1964), who died during astronaut training in Houston due to a bird strike. Houston takes part in NASA’s annual commemoration of fallen astronauts. In a contrast of values, the Soviet government infamously concealed many space program deaths for decades, such as that of Mitrofan Nedelin (1902–1960), who perished in a covered-up launchpad explosion along with over 100 other people, and the Ukrainian pilot Valentin Bondarenko (1937–1961), who died during cosmonaut training at age 24.
In 1970, Houston’s management skills were put to the test like never before when Apollo 13, the third attempted moon landing mission, suffered an oxygen tank explosion. Soon after, astronaut Jim Lovell (b. 1928) spoke the now-famous line, “Houston, we’ve had a problem here” (better-known in the shortened form, “Houston, we have a problem” from the 1995 film Apollo 13 that dramatized the incident).
The explosion damaged the spacecraft and made a moon landing impossible. Houston’s attention turned to getting the astronauts back to Earth alive. With the command module’s life support system failing, the crew moved to the lunar module. That module was only intended to support two men for two days, but thanks to innovative thinking from the team in Houston, new procedures allowed the lunar module to support three men over the course of four days. The flight director, Gene Kranz (b. 1933), chose a return route to Earth that involved looping around the moon, and Houston’s Manned Spaceflight Center director Robert Gilruth (1913–2000) made decisions regarding the last part of the return journey that resulted in the safe landing of the astronauts in the Pacific. The actions of both the astronauts and the ground crew in Houston were essential to averting loss of life.
All in all, NASA completed six successful missions landing humans on the moon, with the last being Apollo 17 in 1972. Twelve humans have walked on the moon, and all have been American astronauts whose missions were guided by Houston. The last words spoken on the moon came from astronaut Gene Cernan (1934–2017) and were, “We leave as we came and, God willing, as we shall return, with peace, and hope for all mankind.”
Despite that rhetoric emphasizing unity, international rivalry was a major factor motivating space exploration. After the Cold War’s end, the space industry was no longer subject to the intense competition that drove progress during the Space Race, and crewed space exploration stagnated. As of this writing, only four moonwalkers remain alive, ranging in age from 86 to 92. But a new era of private space endeavors, led by companies such as SpaceX, Blue Origin, and Virgin Galactic, may once again allow humanity to reach for the stars as profits drive a new space race. Nearly 400 miles southwest of Houston, near the southernmost tip of Texas, SpaceX has constructed its own spaceport, Starbase. Today, Houston also houses an urban commercial spaceport that is expanding as Space City seeks to position itself as a hub not just for NASA activity but for private spaceflight.
Houston grew from a war-ravaged, struggling trading post into a global oil shipping nexus and then the capital of the Space Age. From liftoff onward, the American astronauts who shattered records and tested the limits of the possible relied on Houston to ensure mission success and bring them safely home. Many people still consider the moon landing to be among the greatest achievements of humanity. It was certainly the greatest feat of exploration in history. For guiding mankind to the final frontier, Houston has landed as our 39th Center of Progress.
Examining the places where major advances happened is one way to learn about the conditions that foster societal flourishing, human achievement, and prosperity.
Chelsea Follett —
Summary: Amidst the turmoil of modern times, evidence reveals significant progress across various metrics, from rising life expectancy to declining global poverty. Cities have emerged as epicenters of innovation and progress throughout history, fostering collaboration, competition, and freedom of thought. By exploring the unique environments of cities like Edinburgh and Paris, where intellectual liberty thrived, Chelsea Follett uncovers the vital role of peace, freedom, and population density in driving human achievement and societal advancement.
Has humanity made progress? With so many serious problems, it is easy to get the impression that our species is hopeless. Many people view history as one long tale of decay and degeneration since some lost, idealized golden age.
But there has been much remarkable, measurable improvement—from rising life expectancy and literacy rates to declining global poverty. (Explore the evidence for yourself). Today, material abundance is more widespread than our ancestors could have dreamed. And there has been moral progress too. Slavery and torture, once widely accepted, are today almost universally reviled.
Where did all this progress come from? Certain places, at certain times in history, have contributed disproportionately to progress and innovation. Change is a constant, but progress is not. Studying the past may hold the secret to fostering innovation in the present. To that end, I wrote a book titled Centers of Progress: 40 Cities that Changed the World, exploring the places that shaped modern life.
The origin points of the ideas, discoveries, and inventions that built the modern world were far from evenly or randomly dispersed throughout the globe. Instead, they tended to emerge from cities, even in time periods when most of the human population lived in rural areas. In fact, even before anything that could be called a city by modern standards existed, progress originated from the closest equivalents that did exist at the time. Why is that?
“Cities, the dense agglomerations that dot the globe, have been engines of innovation since Plato and Socrates bickered in an Athenian marketplace,” urban economist Edward Glaeser opined in his book The Triumph of the City. Of course, he was hardly the first to observe that positive change often emanates from cities. As Adam Smith noted in 1776, “the commerce and manufactures of cities, instead of being the effect, have been the cause and occasion of the improvement and cultivation of the country.”
One of the reasons that progress tends to emerge from cities is, simply, people. Wherever more people gather together to “truck, barter, and exchange,” in Smith’s words, that increases their potential to engage in productive exchange, discussion, debate, collaboration, and competition with each other. Cities’ higher populations allow for a finer division of labor, more specialization, and greater efficiencies in production. Not to mention, more minds working together to solve problems. As the writer Matt Ridley notes in the foreword he kindly wrote for Centers of Progress, “Progress is a team sport, not an individual pursuit. It is a collaborative, collective thing, done between brains more than inside them.”
A higher population is sufficient to explain why progress often emerges from cities, but, of course, not all cities become major innovation centers. Progress may be a team sport, but why do certain cities seem to provide ideal playing conditions, and not others?
That brings us to the next thing that most centers of progress share, besides being relatively populous: peace. That makes sense, because if a place is plagued by violence and discord then it is hard for the people there to focus on anything other than survival, and there is little incentive to be productive since any wealth is likely to be looted or destroyed. Smith recognized this truth, and noted that cities, historically, sometimes offered more security from violence than the countryside:
Order and good government, and along with them the liberty and security of individuals, were in this manner established in cities, at a time when the occupiers of land in the country, were exposed to every sort of violence. But men in this defenceless state naturally content themselves with their necessary subsistence; because, to acquire more, might only tempt the injustice of their oppressors. On the contrary, when they are secure of enjoying the fruits of their industry, they naturally exert it to better their condition, and to acquire not only the necessaries, but the conveniencies and elegancies of life. That industry, therefore, which aims at something more than necessary subsistence, was established in cities long before it was commonly practised by the occupiers of land in the country. […] Whatever stock, therefore, accumulated in the hands of the industrious part of the inhabitants of the country, naturally took refuge in cities, as the only sanctuaries in which it could be secure to the person that acquired it.
Of course, not all cities were or are peaceful. Consider Smith’s own city: Edinburgh. At times, the city was far from stable. But the relatively unkempt and inhospitable locale emerged from a century of instability to take the world by storm. Scotland in the 18th century had just undergone decades of political and economic turmoil. Disruption was caused by the House of Orange’s ousting of the House of Stuart, the Jacobite Rebellions, the failed and costly colonial Darien Scheme, famine, and the 1707 Union of Scotland and England. It was only after things settled down and the city came to enjoy a period of relative peace and stability that Edinburgh rose to reach its potential. Edinburgh was an improbable center of progress. But Edinburgh proves what people can accomplish, given the right conditions.
During the Scottish Enlightenment centered in Edinburgh, Adam Smith was far from the only innovative thinker in the city. Edinburgh’s ability to cultivate innovators in every arena of human achievement, from the arts to the sciences, seemed almost magical.
Edinburgh gave the world so many groundbreaking artists that the French writer Voltaire opined in 1762 that “today it is from Scotland that we get rules of taste in all the arts, from epic poetry to gardening.” Edinburgh gave humanity artistic pioneers from the novelist Sir Walter Scott, often called the father of the historical novel, to the architect Robert Adam who, together with his brother James, developed the “Adam style,” which evolved into the so‐called “Federal style” in the United States after Independence.
And then there were the scientists. Thomas Jefferson, in 1789, wrote, “So far as science is concerned, no place in the world can pretend to competition with Edinburgh.” The Edinburger geologist James Hutton developed many of the fundamental principles of his discipline. The chemist and physicist Joseph Black, who studied at the University of Edinburgh, discovered carbon dioxide, magnesium, and the important thermodynamic concepts of latent heat and specific heat. The anatomist Alexander Monro Secondus became the first person to detail the human lymphatic system. Sir James Young Simpson, admitted to the University of Edinburgh at the young age of fourteen, went on to develop chloroform anesthesia.
Two of the greatest gifts that Edinburgh gave humanity were empiricism and economics. The influential philosopher David Hume was among the early advocates of empiricism and is sometimes called the father of philosophical skepticism. And by creating the field of economics, Smith helped humanity to think about policies that enhance prosperity. Those policies, including free trade and economic freedom that Smith advocated, have since helped to raise living standards to heights that would be unimaginable to Smith and his contemporaries.
That brings us to the last but by no means least secret ingredient of progress. Freedom. Centers of progress during their creative peak tend to be relatively free and open for their era. That makes sense because simply having a large population is not going to lead to progress if that population lacks the freedom to experiment, to debate new propositions, and to work together for their mutual benefit. Perhaps the biggest reason why cities produce so much progress is that city dwellers have often enjoyed more freedom than their rural counterparts. Medieval serfs fleeing feudal lands to gain freedom in cities inspired the German saying “stadtluft macht frei” (city air makes you free).
That adage referred to laws granting serfs liberty after a year and a day of urban residency. But the phrase arguably has a wider application. Cities have often served as havens of freedom for innovators and anyone stifled by the stricter norms and more limited choices common in smaller communities. Edinburgh was notable for its atmosphere of intellectual freedom, allowing thinkers to debate a wide diversity of controversial ideas in its many reading societies and pubs.
Of course, cities are not always free. Authoritarian states sometimes see laxer enforcement of their draconian laws in remote areas, and Smith himself viewed rural life as in some ways less encumbered by constraining rules and regulations than city life. But as philosophy professor Kyle Swan previously noted for Adam Smith Works:
Without denying the charms and attractions Smith highlights in country living, let’s not forget what’s on offer in our cities: a significantly broader range of choices! Diverse restaurants and untold many other services and recreations, groups of people who like the same peculiar things that you like, and those with similar backgrounds and interests and activities to pursue with them — cities are (positive) freedom enhancing.
The same secret ingredients of progress—people, peace, and freedom—that helped Edinburgh to flourish during Smith’s day can be observed again and again throughout history in the places that became key centers of innovation. Consider Paris.
As the capital of France, Paris attracted a large population and became an important economic and cultural hub. But it was an unusual spirit of freedom that allowed the city to make its greatest contributions to human progress. Much like the reading societies and pubs of Smith’s Edinburgh, the salons and coffeehouses of 18th‐century Paris provided a place for intellectual discourse where the philosophes birthed the so‐called Age of Enlightenment.
The Enlightenment was a movement that promoted the values of reason, evidence‐based knowledge, free inquiry, individual liberty, humanism, limited government, and the separation of church and state. In Parisian salons, nobles and other wealthy financiers intermingled with artists, writers, and philosophers seeking financial patronage and opportunities to discuss and disseminate their work. The gatherings gave controversial philosophers, who would have been denied the intellectual freedom to explore their ideas elsewhere, the liberty to develop their thoughts.
Influential Parisian and Paris‐ based thinkers of the period included the Baron de Montesquieu, who advocated the then‐groundbreaking idea of the separation of government powers and the writer Denis Diderot, the creator of the first general‐purpose encyclopedia, as well the Genevan expat Jean‐Jacques Rousseau. While sometimes considered a counter‐Enlightenment figure because of his skepticism of modern commercial society and romanticized view of primitive existence, Rousseau also helped to spread skepticism toward monarchy and the idea that kings had a “divine right” to rule over others.
The salons were famous for sophisticated conversations and intense debates; however, it was letter‐writing that gave the philosophes’ ideas a wide reach. A community of intellectuals that spanned much of the Western world—known as the Republic of Letters—increasingly engaged in the exchanges of ideas that began in Parisian salons. Thus, the Enlightenment movement based in Paris helped spur similar radical experiments in thought elsewhere, including the Scottish Enlightenment in Edinburgh. Smith’s many exchanges of ideas with the people of Paris, including during his 1766 visit to the city when he dined with Diderot and other luminaries, proved pivotal to his own intellectual development.
And then there was Voltaire, sometimes called the single most influential figure of the Enlightenment. Although Parisian by birth, Voltaire spent relatively little time in Paris because of frequent exiles occasioned by the ire of French authorities. Voltaire’s time hiding out in London, for example, enabled him to translate the works of the political philosopher and “father of liberalism” John Locke, as well as the English mathematician and physicist Isaac Newton. While Voltaire’s critiques of existing institutions and norms pushed the boundaries of acceptable discourse beyond even what would be tolerated in Paris, his Parisian upbringing and education likely helped to cultivate the devotion to freethinking that would come to define his life.
By allowing for an unusual degree of intellectual liberty and providing a home base for the Enlightenment and the far‐ranging Republic of Letters, Paris helped spread new ideas that would ultimately give rise to new forms of government—including modern liberal democracy.
Surveying the cities, such as Edinburgh and Paris, that built the modern world reveals that when people live in peace and freedom, their potential to bring about positive change increases. Examining the places where major advances happened is one way to learn about the conditions that foster societal flourishing, human achievement, and prosperity. I hope that you will consider joining me on a journey through the book’s pages to some of history’s greatest centers of progress, and that doing so sparks many intelligent discussions, debates, and inquiries in the Smithian tradition about the causes of progress and wealth.
1,000 Bits of Good News You May Have Missed in 2023
A necessary balance to the torrent of negativity.
Malcolm Cochran —
Reading the news can leave you depressed and misinformed. It’s partisan, shallow, and, above all, hopelessly negative. As Steven Pinker from Harvard University quipped, “The news is a nonrandom sample of the worst events happening on the planet on a given day.”
So, why does Human Progress feature so many news items? And why did I compile them in this giant list? Here are a few reasons:
Statistics are vital to a proper understanding of the world, but many find anecdotes more compelling.
Many people acknowledge humanity’s progress compared to the past but remain unreasonably pessimistic about the present—not to mention the future. Positive news can help improve their state of mind.
We have agency to make the world better. It is appropriate to recognize and be grateful for those who do.
Below is a nonrandom sample (n = ~1000) of positive news we collected this year, separated by topic area. Please scroll, skim, and click. Or—to be even more enlightened—read this blog post and then look through our collection of long-term trends and datasets.
A Reduction in the Proportion of Africans Living in Shanty Towns
“According to the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), a shanty town is a disadvantaged part of a city characterised by very unhealthy housing built by the inhabitants from salvaged materials, extreme poverty and no rights or security of tenure. According to the World Bank, over 60% of Africa’s urban population now lives in shanty towns. These almost 285 million urban dwellers represent 60% of Africa’s urban population. In 2003, Africans living in shanty towns made up 71.9% of the urban population.”
Introducing Centers of Progress: 40 Cities That Changed the World
Chelsea Follett —
“Cities, the dense agglomerations that dot the globe, have been engines of innovation since Plato and Socrates bickered in an Athenian marketplace,” as urban economist Edward Glaeser explains in his book The Triumph of the City.
Athens’s storied breakthroughs in philosophy are but one example of how cities have often been the sites of pivotal advances throughout history. Kyoto gave us the novel. Bologna gave us the university. Florence gave us the Renaissance. Paris gave us the Enlightenment. Manchester gave us the Industrial Revolution. Los Angeles gave us cinema. Postwar New York gave us modern finance . . . the list goes on. As Glaeser also notes, “Wandering these cities—whether down cobblestone sidewalks or grid-cutting cross streets, around roundabouts or under freeways—is to study nothing less than human progress.”
If you’re not able to travel to each of these extraordinary cities, perhaps the next best thing is to embark on a virtual tour from the comfort of your home. To that end, I wrote a book surveying 40 of history’s greatest urban centers, showcasing each city at a moment in time when it notably contributed to progress.
Centers of Progress: 40 Cities That Changed the World offers a fact-filled yet accessible crash course in global urban history, spanning from the agricultural revolution to the digital revolution. This book affirms the importance of cities to the story of human progress and innovation by shining a spotlight on some of the places that have helped create the modern world.
The book’s chapters can guide you through the Library of Alexandria, the stock exchange of Dutch Golden Age-era Amsterdam, and the pubs of Edinburgh during the Scottish Enlightenment, all in an afternoon.
Centers of Progress “takes the reader on a time-travel cruise through the great flash points of human activity to catch innovations that have transformed human lives” at their moment of invention, according to writer Matt Ridley in the insightful foreword that he kindly provided. Come explore Agra as the Taj Mahal was erected and Cambridge as Isaac Newton penned the Principia. Meet engineers in Ancient Rome, Silk Road merchants in Tang Dynasty Chang’an, music composers in 19th-century Vienna, and Space Age flight controllers in Houston.
Learning about past achievements may even hold the secret to fostering innovation in the present.
As I note in the book, “Although there are some exceptions, most cities reach their creative peak during periods of peace. Most centers of progress also thrive during times of relative social, intellectual, and economic freedom, as well as openness to intercultural exchange and trade. And centers of progress tend to be highly populated. . . . Identifying those common denominators among the places that have produced history’s greatest achievements is one way to learn what causes progress in the first place. After all, change is a constant, but progress is not.”
From the fall of the Berlin Wall to Hong Kong’s transformation from a war-ravaged “barren island” into a prosperous metropolis, many of the stories featured in Centers of Progress hold valuable lessons about the importance of ideas, people, and freedom. I hope that you will consider joining me on a journey through the book’s pages to some of history’s greatest centers of progress.
