In an essay quite appropriate for Independence Day, Harvard economics professor Edward Glaeser in today’s Globe traces the urban-centric history of the various revolutions that led to the one that created our country.  He writes

The organized uprisings, like the American Revolution, that toppled tyrants were often urban affairs that started with surreptitious meetings in crowded pubs and guildhalls.  They were led by creatures of the city: merchants, lawyers, weavers, butchers, and brewers.  As we celebrate our freedom at spacious suburban barbecues, we should remember that the road to freedom started on far more crowded city streets.

With an analysis that could just as easily be describing local political tyrannies as historic monarchical ones, Glaeser observes that dictatorships have several advantages over democracies.  In a dictatorship, you have “a small number of insiders who have strong incentives to fight for their regime,” while the benefits of true representative government are so widely shared that “no one has particularly strong incentives to fight to preserve [them].”  Another problem that plagues democracies is what Glaeser calls “the free-rider problem” which is the natural tendency that all of us have to let someone else step up and take action, a condition that might explain our dismally low levels of voter turnout in elections.  Glaeser says that solving this free-rider problem requires the type of coordination that is able to occur when people live and work in close proximity to one and other.  “Urban density connects citizens and enables them to meet and plan and talk.” 

Let’s see . . . connecting citizens . . . enabling them to meet and plan and talk . . . where could that be happening today?