There is an evocative episode in Wayne Johnson’s Colony of Unrequited Dreams, in which a young Joey Smallwood (the novel’s real-life protagonist who would go on to be the first premier of Newfoundland) sets out to organize railroad sectionmen in the colony’s rugged interior.  The problem, both physical and organizational, is that the sectionmen live in shacks at one mile intervals along the 700 miles of main and branch lines between St. John on the Atlantic coast and Port aux Basque at the island’s southwestern tip.   It is a daunting challenge for Smallwood, who sets a goal of 20 miles and 20 signatures a day: “I fancied I was walking the lone street in a company town called Sectionville.” And it is a hard life for the sectionmen and their families, who rely on the railroad (their employer) as their only source of contact with the wider world and on each other for very little.  Each shack at each milepost, in Johnson’s account, is occupied by families “driven to eccentricity by isolation.”  

The material, social, and democratic poverty of Sectionville underscores the importance of cities and labor unions— to each other, and to the goal of shared prosperity.  Cities offer the natural solidarities of work and neighborhood that make sustained organizing possible.  Union density (built on residential density) discourages competition on wages and encourages competition on efficiency and quality: it blocks the low road and paves the high road. This benefits workers and their employers, for whom the benefits of the high road settings (a well-trained workforce, easy access to suppliers and consumers, decent public goods) far outweigh the costs.  Cities drive the economy (our top 100 metros, on a merely 12 percent our land area, account for least three-quarters of GDP).  They are home to the best jobs and opportunities.  They claim virtually all of population growth.  They house our best schools and our leading cultural institutions.  And cities are, by any measure, green and cleaner then sparser forms of economic or residential development. 

In turn, cities—by virtue of their density and diversity—sustain progressive politics.  Perhaps the starkest determinant of the Presidential vote in 2012 was population density: across red and blue states, 98 percent of the most densely-populated counties went to Obama, and 98 percent of the least densely-populated counties went to Romney. The takeaway would seem to be this: People who live close to one and other are more tolerant and empathetic; they are more likely to know someone of a different color, a different income group, or a different sexual orientation.  They rely upon and appreciate the provision of public goods and public services (transit, parks,garbage collection)—even as they consume fewer public dollars than their red start counterparts.  And they have a deeper appreciation of the regulatory standards (guns, labor conditions, food, public health) that promise us a modicum of safety and security.

In an urban (and still urbanizing) nation, all of this would seem to be good news.  So why, when it comes to the hard work of building a just and sustainable future, does it feel that we still live in Sectionville?

Next: Losing Density