Economy
America's First Urbanist
George Tucker was a 19th century public intellectual who appreciated cities as engines of progress and offered some of the clearest early statements on their behalf. His ideas today still sound impressively modern.
Nearly two centuries before Edward Glaeser or Richard Florida, there was George Tucker.
In 1822 his essay, “On Density of Population,” he argued that the concentrated energy of cities is necessary for economic growth and progress in science and the arts. Two decades later he expanded his analysis in Progress of the United States in Population and Wealth for Fifty Years, as Exhibited by the Decennial Census (1843), where he celebrated urban potential. When he wrote that “the growth of cities commonly marks the progress of intelligence and the arts,” he foreshadowed Florida’s ideas about the creative class and Glaeser’s “gifts of the city.”