I always admire Jed Kolko’s papers, so it was nice to see brilliant friend, Mike Smart, sharing Kolko’s essay in Citylab today.

Again with my normal, Kingsley Davis S-Curve caveats about different percentages in growth numbers can mask what are big absolute changes in urban population growth, Kolko’s analysis shows that dense urban areas are growing fast, as are suburbs, but the in-between places are not growing as fast. But still growing. With urbanization it’s possible for all parts of the city to be growing. The fact that cities are growing again is a HUGE victory for them–a lot of the loudest mouths in this discussion don’t remember just how bad off cities were in the 1970s, so the fact that they are growing at all shows that planning efforts might actually be paying off, if what you want are vibrant places across metro areas–but not if the goal was to punish suburbs for not being cities.