In Metropolitan New York, there are more cases of the coronavirus and more deaths from COVID-19

than anyplace else in the country. That's hardly surprising in the nation's largest city. After all,

the history of cities is a history of overcoming disease among dense populations.

But can New York and other cities as well survive this latest pandemic?

Now, there's a book written a few years ago called The Triumph of the City,

how our greatest invention makes us richer, smarter, greener, healthier, and happier.

The author is Harvard Professor Ed Glazer, a scholar of urban affairs, and he joins us now.

Welcome aboard.

It's great to be here.

Thank you so much for having me on.

In the subtitle of your book, you call Cities Our Greatest Invention.

But can they survive this latest plague called the novel

coronavirus? After all, that's because it's so mysterious, it's spread so fast, often by

people who don't even have any symptoms. So the amazing thing is that over the past 40 years,

despite innovations in communications and other forms of technology, cities have come

roaring back, far from the death of distance spelling the end of the demand for proximity.

We've seen a renaissance in urban America and great cities throughout the world, from

Paris to Singapore.

In some sense, the cause of this is that what globalization and new technologies have done

is that they have increased the returns to innovation. They've increased the returns to being

smart. And we are a social species that become smart by being around other smart people.

That's what happens in San Francisco and Silicon Valley. That's what happens in London.

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