Glaeser: Unleash the 'Free Genius of Urban Creativity'

Edward Glaeser writes a polemic inside a paean on the liberties and potential of urban living, starting with a quote offromGermanic law: "city air makes you free." The original phrase applied to a serf living in the city, but Glaeser finds evidence of the phrase's meaning today as well:

The migrant who comes from rural India to Bangalore enters a world in which the strictures of rural life, such as the caste system, essentially vanish. In many poorer countries, rural life still binds with traditional rules enforced by elders who wield the threat of social ostracism. In a city, such threats become toothless because no elder can effectively banish those who misbehave.

Glaeser applies the trope of urban liberty to the subject of Boston, which, he writes, "was born with repression deep in its D.N.A." Thus the article identifies laws and regulations that still enforce the religious rules of early Massachusetts Puritans, and argues for an expansion of the freedoms that could empower a larger cross section of the city's residents.