April 18: A New Equation in the Middle East

A glossary of Zionist crimes; Treasury enacts fake Iran sanctions; Google fires activists

Apr 18, 2024

The Big Story

Why has Israel not responded yet to Iran launching the largest aerial attack in Middle Eastern history on Israeli territory this Saturday? No points for guessing if you’ve been reading The Scroll, but now the answer is in print.

According to various Israeli media reports from the past 24 hours, prior to Saturday, the Israeli war cabinet had approved a slate of potential retaliatory actions depending on the size of the Iranian attack, to be carried out immediately. Those were shelved on Saturday night following Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s phone call with Joe Biden, according to a report by Israel’s Kan news. Ynet, meanwhile, reported that “most” of the Israeli political and military leadership supported a retaliatory strike on Iran. Separately, Axios reported Wednesday that the Israeli war cabinet had considered ordering a strike on Monday, but called it off for “operational reasons,” according to Israeli sources. Israel has promised to respond to the attack eventually, but a U.S. official told ABC News on Wednesday that it is not likely to do so before the end of Passover, on April 30.

Perhaps Israel is getting something in return for restraint? Ynet reported early Thursday, citing reports in Arab media sourced to Egyptian officials, that the United States had offered to approve a Rafah operation if Israel agreed not to strike Iran. Not so, according to the latest dispatch from Barak Ravid. Ravid wrote Thursday, ahead of a “high-level virtual meeting” between U.S. and Israeli officials, that U.S. officials “flatly denied” these reports. Indeed, Ravid confirmed that U.S. officials are still concerned that “an Israeli operation in Rafah would lead to massive civilian casualties,” despite the Israelis having downgraded their proposals to a “gradual, slow operation in specific neighborhoods of Rafah that will be evacuated in advance—rather than an all-out invasion of the entire city.”

Frankly, though, the elimination of the remaining Hamas battalions in Rafah pales in comparison to Israel’s need to deter Iran from future strikes on Israeli territory. As Amos Harel noted in his latest Haaretz column:

The seriousness of the Iranian attack cannot be taken lightly. Iran aimed at least 350 different projectiles at Israel. They were meant to reach their targets quickly and cause a great deal of damage, even taking into account that the brunt of the attack was focused on Israeli Air Force bases in the Negev that are fairly distant from population centers. The extent of the ordnance fired at them was huge. If the attack had succeeded, it would have done a great deal of damage to Israel's fleet of F-35s, to sensitive operational sites and to the IAF’s capabilities.

And as both “anonymous U.S. officials” and basic strategic logic will tell you, there is no guarantee that Israel’s vaunted missile defense system will work as well in the future, especially if Hezbollah gets involved, which is why Israel must inflict pain on Iran directly. Indeed, Iran almost certainly decided to strike in an attempt to establish a new status quo in the region, premised on its assumption that Washington will deter Israel from forcing Iran to suffer direct consequences for its aggression. Eyal Pinko, a researcher at Bar-Ilan University and a veteran of Israeli intelligence, told Jewish News Syndicate on Thursday:

Iranian generals have been killed before. It doesn’t explain the change in doctrine. Iran perceived Israel as weak on several fronts, foremost among which is that it saw a significant decline in U.S. support.

The same article quoted Sharona Zablodovsky of the Forum Dvorah, who agreed that “Iran was counting on [American intervention].”

In our Monday edition, we quoted the head of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), Hassan Salami, who announced on Sunday that the attacks had created a “new equation”: that if “the Zionist regime anywhere attacks our interests, assets, figures, and citizens, we will reciprocally attack it from the origin of Iran.” Those “interests, assets, figures, and citizens,” of course, surround Israel on three sides and were instrumental in planning the Oct. 7 attacks, meaning that Israel’s ability to act against them is an existential necessity. And on Thursday, IRGC officials openly threatened to develop nuclear weapons if Israel decided to strike back. Here was the head of the IRGC’s nuclear security program, Ahmad Haghtalab, quoted in The Times of Israel:

The threats of the Zionist regime against Iran’s nuclear facilities make it possible to review our nuclear doctrine and deviate from our previous considerations [Ed. note: Iran has long officially claimed that it has a religious objection to developing nuclear weapons].

In what may be bluster or an indication that the Saturday barrage was a successful probing attack, Haghtalab also claimed that the IRGC had “identified” Israeli nuclear facilities and will target them with “advanced weaponry” if Israel strikes Iranian nuclear facilities. Iran’s nuclear breakout time, for what it is worth, is currently estimated at zero, meaning that it could produce nuclear weapons within a matter of days—if it hasn’t already.

The brazenness of Saturday’s attack and the subsequent messaging from Tehran suggests that the Islamic Republic understands that Israel’s traditional deterrence equation, which is premised on Israel’s ability to operate inside Iran under the protective umbrella of the United States, has collapsed utterly due to the pro-Iran posture of the Biden administration. Israel would do well to inform Tehran that it cannot accept this new status quo, before the Islamic Republic gets its hands on nukes and it truly is too late.

IN THE BACK PAGES: Walter Russell Mead on the rise of the Cyber City

The Rest

→Shortly before The Scroll closed on Thursday, and just before the UN Security Council was set to vote on a resolution to grant full member status to the Palestinian Authority, The Wall Street Journal reported on a “new” deal proposed by the Biden administration: that Israel accept Palestinian statehood in exchange for diplomatic recognition by Saudi Arabia, tied to a more formal U.S.-Saudi defense agreement. While the White House is spinning this push as emerging from the successful Israeli-Arab cooperation to defend against Saturday’s Iranian assault, in reality, the Biden administration has long sought to thwart Saudi-Israeli normalization—which would create a powerful anti-Tehran entente within the U.S. alliance system—by tying it to Palestinian statehood. As Tony Badran and Michael Doran wrote in Tablet in 2021, of the effects of Trump’s anti-Iran policy on Saudi-Israeli relations:

“Maximum pressure” was a form of collective security. It encouraged closer cooperation between American allies, and therefore played a major role in the Abraham Accords, the peace agreements leading to expanded cultural, economic, and military ties between Israel and Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates, Morocco, and Sudan—all of which are close to Saudi Arabia. None would have normalized relations with Israel if Riyadh had opposed the move. The next logical step in the process, and the strategic prize of the effort, was for the next U.S. president to advance the Israeli-Saudi rapprochement.

Instead, Biden promised on the campaign trail in 2020 to make Saudi Arabia into a global “pariah,” and, within months of coming into office, froze arms sales to the kingdom, ended U.S. support for Saudi “offensive” operations in Yemen, removed the Houthis from the State Department terrorism list, pressed Riyadh to come to terms with Tehran, and declassified a U.S. intelligence assessment on the 2018 killing of Jamal Khashoggi for no other purpose than to embarrass the Saudis—and to warn them against getting too friendly with Israel. For the White House to now claim that the Israelis must accept a Palestinian state because that’s what the Saudis want takes a remarkable degree of…what’s the word? Chutzpah.

→A note on terminology:

In our Tuesday Big Story, we briefly mentioned The Intercept’s recent “report” on a leaked internal memo at The New York Times, which warned reporters and editors against using highly charged language when writing about the Gaza war (Scahill’s tweet goes on to note that the memo also recommends against refugee camp.) We’re returning to it now because we’re seeing more posts like Jeet’s alleging that the memo “proves” the existence of some Zionist conspiracy at the Times. So let’s take the contested terms one by one:

Genocide: Defined in law as a range of actions, including killing, taken with the “specific intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group.” The case for genocidal Israeli intent is ludicrous and rests on quotes from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Yoav Gallant referring to Hamas, not Palestinians generally, as “monsters” and “animals.” And while we don’t have reliable casualty statistics for civilians in Gaza, most non-Hamas estimates agree that the combatant-civilian death ratio is comparable to, if not better than, the only recent campaign pitting a Western military against a terrorist group embedded within an urban civilian population: the U.S.-backed siege of Mosul, Iraq, in which between 9,000 and 11,000 civilians were killed in a battle against 3,000 to 5,000 Islamic State militants.
Ethnic cleansing: This has no formal definition in international law, but it was described by the U.N. Commission of Experts as “rendering an area ethnically homogeneous by using force or intimidation to remove persons of given groups from the area.” Applied to Gaza, the charge is simply incoherent—the closest thing to “ethnic cleansing” there would have been Israel’s forcible evacuation of Jewish settlers from Gaza in 2005. Perversely, the fear of “ethnic cleansing” has led the United States and international organizations to oppose the evacuation of Gazan civilians outside of Gaza’s borders, condemning them to remain in a war zone.
Occupied territory: This one is, in a sense, technically accurate, in that the United Nations regards Gaza and the West Bank as “occupied” by Israel since 1967, since they have not been turned over to another state. But it is misleading: Gaza, prior to the current war, had no Israeli military or civilian presence whatsoever and was ruled as a de facto statelet by Hamas, while the vast majority of the West Bank is administered by the Palestinian Authority.
Palestine: A vague term. The “state of Palestine” is what the PA calls itself, but the PA also claims Gaza, which it does not actually rule, and this state is not recognized as a state by the United States or any country in Western Europe. More generally, Palestine often appears as a polemical term designating all of the land claimed by Palestinian rejectionists (i.e., all of modern-day Israel), or as a vague historical geographic designation referring to British Mandatory Palestine or to the southern portion of Ottoman Syria, covering modern-day Israel, Jordan, and the Palestinian territories.
Refugee camp: As we explained back in the fall, when Israel was operating in the Jabaliya “refugee camp,” this is another phrase that is technically accurate but misleading in reality. The term refugee camp conjures images of displaced persons living in tents, but “refugee camps” in Gaza refer simply to neighborhoods established after 1948 by Arab refugees. Gazan “refugee camps” are more than 70 years old and feature permanent concrete buildings, high-rise apartment blocks, permanent infrastructure, etc. In other words, they are normal neighborhoods.

What Scahill and Heer are doing is a common tactic among progressives seeking to extract more favorable media coverage for one of their pet causes. They convince themselves that the ideological shibboleths of their tribe are in fact neutral and objective descriptors of reality (and that those who disagree are bigots, racists, propagandists, etc.), and proceed from there by working themselves into a frenzy about how the Times (or whoever) is “mainstreaming right-wing talking points” by making their journalists at least pretend to give the other side a fair shake. It works, to a degree, because many people in the Times agree with Scahill and Heer. They experience their bosses’ attempts to enforce professional standards as a bewildering sop to “genocide denial” (or whatever), which can only be explained by “Zionist special interests” influencing the newsroom. Which is why they keep leaking these things to The Intercept.

→Post of the Day:

Indeed, we’d go a step further than Noah. Given the well-known link between smoking and lung cancer, the provision of cigarettes shows genocidal intent and may itself be a form of genocide.

→Daily Fake Iran News Update:

The Treasury Department on Thursday officially announced new sanctions on Iran in retaliation for its attack against Israel, as the Biden administration seeks an economic rather than military response to Tehran.
Treasury Secretary Janet L. Yellen said the administration’s actions would “degrade and disrupt” the Iranian drone program that targeted civilian populations in Israel. The sanctions also target Iranian steel production, a measure not taken by U.S. authorities since 2021. The United States has imposed sanctions on more than 600 Iranian-related entities over the last three years, according to the Treasury Department.

That’s from The Washington Post, which goes on to note that the sanctions target “16 people and 2 companies that enable Iran’s drone production.” The steel sanctions are a minor piece of good news, but as we wrote yesterday, the United States has the ability to go after Iranian oil revenues by enforcing secondary sanctions against China and, in coordination with Europe, to trigger snapback sanctions on Iran’s drone and ballistic missile programs under U.N. Security Council Resolution 2231, which the Biden administration allowed to expire in October. By failing to do either, Washington is signaling to Tehran that even direct aggression against Israel will only earn it a slap on the wrist.

→That last item leads us to our Chart of the Day, posted on X by Bloomberg Intelligence Analyst Rob Barnett:

The chart shows Iran’s total crude oil exports from 2019 to the present, measured in thousands of barrels.

→The United States appears to be struggling to get its ships to the eastern Mediterranean for Biden’s Gaza humanitarian pier project. On Wednesday, Military.com reported that one of the ships deployed to Gaza, the USNS 2nd Lt. John P. Bobo, was forced to return to port in Jacksonville, Florida, after suffering a “fire in the engine room.” Another ship deployed to Gaza, the USAV Wilson Wharf, is stuck in Tenerife, Spain, with what appear to be mechanical failures, and a third, the USAV Gen. Frank S. Besson, was delayed for eight days in the Azores, although it has since continued its journey. A retired Army chief warrant officer told Military.com, “If these boats don’t have multiple major mechanical failures—I mean ‘dead in the water’ mechanical failures—I will be shocked. They’re horrendously maintained. I’ve got videos of these things falling apart.”

→Google has fired 28 employees affiliated with the “No Tech for Genocide” activist group for participating in a protest demanding that the company cancel its cloud computing contract with the Israeli Ministry of Defense, The Wall Street Journal reports. On Tuesday, employees at Google’s New York City and Sunnyvale, California, offices staged protests, pledging not to leave until they were arrested or Google canceled the contract; nine were ultimately arrested. In a company-wide email announcing the firings, Google Vice President for Global Security Chris Rackow wrote that the protests were “unacceptable, extremely disruptive and made co-workers feel threatened” and promised that the company will not “overlook conduct that violates our policies.” In the process, he offered a valuable lesson for those of us observing similar disruptive protests in cities and universities—namely, that they are relatively easy to handle, as long as there is the political will to do so.

TODAY IN TABLET:

This Isn’t Working, by Duncan Moench

Alex Garland’s ‘Civil War’ is a good movie with very stupid politics

SCROLL TIP LINE: Have a lead on a story or something going on in your workplace, school, congregation, or social scene that you want to tell us about? Send your tips, comments, questions, and suggestions to scroll@tabletmag.com.

The Rise of the Cyber City

The technological decoupling of geography from economic opportunity could make Gen Z filthy rich

By Walter Russell Mead

Nature documentaries follow the annual Great Migration of roughly 2 million wildebeests from the Serengeti to the Masai Mara and back every year, and it is not hard to find footage of grimly determined wildebeests braving the waiting crocodiles who assemble in the Mara River for their regular feast. Likewise, every year the grizzly bears of Alaska wade into the rivers to feast on the returning salmon, as millions of fans watch the show on live cameras and vote in the “Fat Bear” contest for the most successful predator.

But the greatest migration on planet Earth is not in the wilderness. It is in and around the human cities of our world. Morning and evening, five to six days a week, hundreds of millions of commuters have long swarmed into and out of the world’s central business districts. The human commuters may not face crocodiles and grizzly bears on their treks, but they nevertheless provide vital nourishment for the denizens of the concrete jungles at the end of the commute. Building and maintaining the office towers in the dense urban cores toward which the swarms of migrants converge, feeding the hordes on their lunch breaks, building and operating the mass transit and road networks that ferry them to and from their homes, storing millions of cars in parking garages and lots throughout the city center and surrounding train and subway stops far out into the suburban ring: These activities employ tens of millions of people around the world and consume a significant portion of the world’s daily energy and financial expense.

In America, the Great Migration is both the creator and the defining institution of the “car city,” the dominant form of urban life. The car city, with its mix of suburban and exurban sprawl and legacy central cities, shapes patterns of wealth accumulation, income distribution, and political division across the country. Mass commuting by car across a widely dispersed urban area made America’s post-World War II middle-class society possible. But the rise of the car city was a mixed blessing. The environmental, social, and financial costs of the daily commute are responsible for many of the most acute problems our society confronts.

It isn’t just urban geography and political economy that the Great Migration has transformed. The Migration shapes the social lives of the commuters and their families so profoundly that we often aren’t aware of just how massive the consequences are. Before the Industrial Revolution, for example, most families spent the majority of their waking hours working together on tasks that were necessary to keep the family housed, clothed, and fed. Usually, the nuclear family was a small and not always very distinct element in a large pool of relatives with many generations with aunts, uncles, and cousins all part of the mix. The modern family, an isolated nuclear unit in which parents might work in very different jobs in very different parts of an urban megaplex, surrounded all day by people who their spouses rarely meet, and both the education and care of the children largely delegated to teachers and out of the home day care workers, is radically different from anything previous generations knew. It is almost certainly a factor in the weakening of institutions like marriage, the general loosening of family ties, and the rise of isolation and alienation endemic to modern life.

After 100 years in which the rise of the car city and the gradual decline of the rail cities of the 19th and early 20th centuries shaped American culture and politics, we are seeing the beginning of a radically different form of urban life. Think of it as the cyber city. The rise of the cyber city is going to be at least as disruptive as the move from rail to car cities, and many of our social and political institutions may not survive the shift. Nevertheless, for social, economic, and environmental reasons it is something to welcome. Among other things, it promises to renew the economic machinery that made post-World War II America a paradise for the middle class and to provide Gen Z and its successors the kind of opportunity their predecessors enjoyed.

Until very recently, most people thought that the car city was the highest form of urban living and that the Great Migration would dominate our lives forever. Since the pandemic, doubts have been spreading. Work from home (WFH) opens the door to a new kind of urban living, and the shift from the car city to the cyber city looks like an upgrade. Cyber cities won’t be utopian paradises and they will have their slums and their dark alleys, but they offer more opportunity to more people at less social and environmental cost than car cities ever could.

The rewards of that upgrade are potentially so great that accelerating and facilitating the transition from the car city to the cyber city should ground the domestic policy program of any movement aiming to lead the United States in the next generation. Getting the transition right and making it quickly is not just the key to American prosperity and renewal at home. It is critical to maintaining America’s place in the world. The greater economic productivity, social cohesion, resilience, and environmental sustainability of the coming cyber city will enable a new era of American economic growth and help foster a sense of national unity and pride. Those forces in turn can underwrite a new era of American power globally, helping to maintain the peace in a rapidly developing and volatile world.

Although I think ultimately both parties will get with the program, Republicans are probably better placed to lead the transition than Democrats. This fact could, if Republicans play their cards well, make them the dominant political force for decades to come.

Especially in times like ours when rapidly cascading social and economic changes driven up the slope of the Adams curve by accelerating technological progress threaten to overwhelm us, it’s important to ground ourselves in past developments that can make the present more understandable. History matters most when the present is chaotic, and even a casual glance at the history of cities will clarify both the opportunities and the frustrations that we feel today.

***

Cities matter, never more than today when, unlike in past ages, a large and growing majority of people in the United States and around the world live in them. Cities, suburbs, and exurbs are where most of us grow up, build our social networks, find our spouses, educate our children, work, and accumulate our wealth. A change in the form of urban life will affect our lives in all these realms and will influence everything in politics from the distribution of votes in Congress and the Electoral College to the nature of political parties and the content of political debate.

Cities are where history is made. The word “civilization” comes to us from the Latin word for city. The Greek word for city, polis, gives us our word for politics. Since the dawn of civilization, cities have been the center of culture and politics. In Western culture, the three very different cities of Jerusalem, Athens, and Rome produced what remain today the intellectual, political, spiritual, and aesthetic traditions shaping our common life. The Renaissance is unimaginable without the vibrant Italian city-states out of which it came. In modern history, great cities like Paris, London, Vienna, and Berlin left their stamp on European history and culture during the Old World’s golden age.

Cities emerge from the interplay of geography and technology. Urban living brings people together, allowing for the specialization of labor and fostering the development of new products and new skills. But bringing people into close physical contact creates a set of problems, and the shape and size of cities is determined by how these are addressed.

Almost all the great cities of antiquity, and many down to contemporary times, sprang up based on their access to waterborne transport—still today the system by which most of the world’s long-distance trade is carried out. People in cities eat more food and their industry consumes more raw materials than can be produced in their immediate neighborhood. Iron for the blacksmiths, brick and marble for the builders, yarn for the spinners, and a thousand other goods must be brought to and then exported from the city.

Food is the worst of it. Even small cities require, literally, tons of food. Until the Industrial Revolution, agricultural goods could either travel by ship or barge, or be hauled in animal-drawn carts. But animals also need to eat, and oxen cannot bring food from long distances without consuming most or all the food in their wagon. Wind- and water-driven transport was more economical. Cities without good access to rivers or ports could only draw on food grown within a small radius; that limit capped their growth and handicapped their trade. Sanitation was also a problem; before modern techniques of sewage treatment cities needed rivers or the ocean to carry their detritus away.

The interplay of geography and technology doesn’t just dictate where cities can exist. It shaped the development of cities, the nature of the states based in them, and the international political sphere in which they interacted. Greece, where mountains divide much of the country into small, sea-facing valleys with rocky and thin topsoil, developed a host of relatively small, independent-minded city-states. The richer soil and less forbidding geography in Italy created a harshly competitive political arena. The fertile land supported a large population, and the absence of the kinds of natural barriers to land warfare created by Greek geography led to a strenuous competition among cities, out of which Rome, after centuries of testing struggle, emerged as a highly organized society designed for conquest and empire.

With the invention of railroads, the economics and geography of cities radically changed, and cities with millions of inhabitants became common. Throughout the Atlantic world, those rail cities, with a dominant and dense urban commercial and industrial core surrounded by suburbs on radiating lines of commuter rail, helped define the 19th-century politics and culture that we think of today as “modernity.”

In American history, the rise of the great railroad cities was politically challenging and culturally disruptive. Small trading cities like Boston, Philadelphia, and New York played vital roles in colonial times down through the early republic, but as these cities grew into huge urban centers, and as dozens of new metropolises sprang up almost overnight, American life was turned upside down. Even the more commercially minded Founders like Alexander Hamilton believed that great cities were inimical to republican government. One reason they believed that the United States could flourish under the Constitution was the absence of great cities like Paris, London, or ancient Rome with their extremes of wealth and poverty, their overweening aristocrats, and their seething mobs.

By the late 19th century, the United States was home to greater cities than anything Rome ever knew. These smoky, smelly cities teemed with immigrants whose religion, language, culture, and politics had little in common with prevalent American social and political norms and ideals. The horrified descendants of the Founders could not decide what was worse: the spread of Roman Catholicism, the great and vulgar fortunes made by the rising industrial tycoons, or the deeply corrupt political machines that established themselves in major cities and extended their tentacles into state and national government. Many prophesied the collapse of the republic under the weight of these shocking developments.

Populist politicians appealing to the rural vote decried the alien culture, the pollution, and the concentration of wealth that characterized city life. As the barnstorming, Bible-thumping populist orator William Jennings Bryan put it in his famous 1896 “Cross of Gold” speech, “Burn down your cities and leave our farms, and your cities will spring up again as if by magic; but destroy our farms, and the grass will grow in the streets of every city in the country.”

Yet these cities, and the wealth they created, provided the basis for America’s rise to world power in the 20th century. They stimulated the development of new building techniques, new approaches to public health, and saw the rise of great museums, concert halls, and opera houses that exposed Americans to the cultural accomplishments of the European golden age then at its height. The American popular culture that would repeatedly sweep the world from the age of ragtime to the triumph of rap and hip-hop would never have developed without the mass audiences of the new cities. The mastery of logistics and production that would make America an irresistible force in the two world wars was born in the struggle to supply these cities with the food, energy, and materials needed to sustain the activities of these ever-growing industrial centers. The canyons of Wall Street and the commodity markets of Chicago were where Americans learned the financial mastery that enabled them to supplant Britain as the world’s banker and trader.

Squalid and filthy in the beginning, under their cloaks of coal smoke many of the rail cities moved toward a new kind of beauty. The leafy suburbs of the Philadelphia Main Line, the magnificent public buildings, glorious railroad stations like Grand Central and the much-lamented Penn Station, and the clean lines of the skyscrapers testified to a new aesthetic for urban living that fit the needs and exploited the technology of the industrial age. The combination of density, wealth, and cultural ferment produced by different cultures and peoples living and working cheek by jowl made rail cities like Vienna, Paris, and New York centers of glittering artistic accomplishment. Nineteenth-century intellectuals decried the rise of the smoky, soul-sucking monstrosities of the rail cities; 20th-century intellectuals would lament their decline.

Railroads allowed cities to reach an unprecedented degree of concentration, bringing many millions of people drawn from the hinterlands into urban life throughout the Atlantic world. These cities became hubs of wealth creation and cultural innovation, but they were also citadels of class privilege and wealth stratification. Though these cities covered a large area by historical standards, exploding past their medieval walls and converting large tracts of nearby farms into factories, commercial districts, and residential developments, they were geographically compact compared to what would come later. Railways channeled development into city centers and along the train tracks leading in and out of the city. Factories needed immediate access to rail to send and receive bulk shipments. Retail outlets also needed to be as close as possible to railroad stops, so that both goods and customers could easily reach the store.

As late as 1920, the rail cities seemed to be the highest stage of urbanization, but new technologies were already preparing their supersession by a new type of city built around the automobile. Advances in power generation and transmission meant that factories could operate at a greater distance from the old urban cores. Cars and trucks freed both commuters and shippers from the tyranny of railroad tracks and rigid schedules.

The car was a game-changing technology that rewrote the rules of urban living. Rail centralizes; cars disperse. Geographically, cities sprawled far into the countryside. London feasted on Surrey; New York swallowed nearly half of Long Island, spread across northern New Jersey, and climbed up the Hudson to Yonkers and beyond. The American Sunbelt, where rail cities had never really flourished, exploded into extensive car cities from Los Angeles past Phoenix and Dallas to Tampa, Orlando, and Miami.

Lenin said that Bolshevism plus electricity would lead to the establishment of a true communist society in the Soviet Union. In America, electricity plus the automobile led to the emergence of a new type of city. Since World War II, America’s rail cities have been fighting a rear-guard action against a less centralized form of urban living in which suburbs and exurbs compete with city centers.

The rise of car cities in America defined the 20th century. Suburban living and single-family home ownership was once an elite preserve for people who could afford the relatively high costs of commuting by rail. The car, and the network of highways that quickly appeared to service the new drivers, opened both suburban living and home ownership to the masses.

The reasons lie in the interplay of geography and technology that have driven the process of city formation and growth for thousands of years. If people must work in a group of factories and stores in a central district and must walk to work, they must live within roughly 2 miles of their workplace. That is, they must live within an area whose size is defined by the old geometrical formula: the area of a circle equals π (Pi) times the radius squared. When the radius of your circle is 2 miles, everyone trying to reach a given set of factories must live within an area of about 12.6 square miles. Driven by this logic, the rail cities of the industrial era saw unprecedented levels of population density. In 1890, New York’s Lower East Side had a population density of about 250,000 per square mile.

The Great Migration changes this. If the workers could commute as much as 25 miles, that same population could be dispersed across almost 1,960 square miles, reducing population density by a factor of nearly 160. Double that distance to a 50-mile commute, and the circle of habitable land goes up almost fourfold to about 7,854 square miles. Scatter the residents of 1890s Lower East Side across that space, and the population density per square mile shrinks to about 30.

Longer commuting distances helped make the American middle class. Thanks to the cars and the freeways that made the Great Migration possible, more and more working people were liberated from the crowding and the cost of tenement living.

The arrival of the car didn’t just change commuting distances. It changed the way that economic development works. In the railroad age, developers and politicians understood that the major economic impact of building commuter rail lines was to increase the value of the real estate that lay near the new transportation axis. A potato field became much more valuable when the construction of a rail station made it a desirable building site.

But there was a catch. A railway sharply increases the value of land near a station or siding, but the effect drops off dramatically as the distance from the station to a given property increases. One must live very close to a train station to have a manageable commute, and the pattern of development looks something like ink spots of development surrounded by much larger areas of much less valuable land.

Roads change this. Once roads and cars enter the picture, anybody with a driveway can access the transport network. The ink blots of rail development yield to the vast expanses of suburbs and shopping malls that characterize the car city. This is what enabled ordinary families to buy homes within commuting distance of their jobs as the car cities expanded.

Read the rest here: https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/rise-cyber-city-work-home-walter-russell-mead