American Democracy and the Pursuit of Equality

Merlin Chowkwanyun, Randa Serhan

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317261445
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

This collection assembles some of the country s foremost social scientists in one volume. It contains diverse investigations of metropolitan transformation, recent education policy, the (in)justice of disaster relief, the politics of aesthetics and design, immigration, the mass media, social movements, and the practice of social science itself, among others. Whatever their subjects, the writers investigate the promise and constraints of democratic practice in a time of disturbing growth in inequality and political disempowerment. Although they at times differ from one another, more often, they challenge popular received wisdom on a number of these topics. Cumulatively, the volume amounts to a critical sociological excavation of the United States from its leading social critics that will prove useful to specialists and general readers alike."

3

WHAT IS AN AMERICAN CITY?

Michael B. Katz

For many years I have argued that in the decades after World War II, economic, demographic, and spatial transformations in the United States resulted in an urban form unlike any other in history. Recently, I have realized that in one important way this formulation of recent urban history misleads. For it reports the outcome of history as singular when it should be plural. “Form,” that is, should be “forms”—an unprecedented configuration of urban places that calls into question the definition of city itself.

The April 25, 2006 death of Jane Jacobs was one of the events that prompted me to rethink the assumptions underlying my narrative of recent urban history. If any one person can be anointed patron saint of Urban Studies, Jane Jacobs deserves the crown. Her 1961 Death and Life of Great American Cities certainly must be the most widely read and influential book ever written about American cities.¹ After more than forty years, it retains its powerful impact. I have assigned it often to students who invariably find it moving and convincing. Death and Life resonates with their ideal of urbanism and gives them a set of criteria for identifying a good city. With the book as a yardstick, they find that today’s cities come up short. Although the book has the same effect on me—new delights emerge every time I reread it—recently, I have begun to wonder if it does as much to inhibit as to advance our grasp of American cities today. Its identification of mixed-use, short blocks, multi-age dwellings, and density as the crucial ensemble of features that define a healthy neighborhood finds its model in old cities like Philadelphia, New York, Boston, or in many of the cities of Europe. At least implicitly, this makes the goal of urban reform recapturing the past. Yet, the growing, dynamic, vibrant components of urban America are more like Phoenix and Los Angeles than the old East coast cities. With Jacobs’s criteria, they never can qualify as good cities; mutant forms of urbanism, they repel rather than attract anyone who loves cities. But is this a useful assessment? Is the fault with these cities or with the criteria? Did Jacobs bequeath us a core set of ideas that define urbanism, or do we need a different set of markers to characterize what makes a city—and a good city—in early twenty-first-century America? Certainly, the former—the belief in a core set of ideas defining healthy urbanism—underlies one of the most influential urban design movements of today: New Urbanism. New Urbanism does not take Jacobs’s criteria literally, although her spirit clearly marches through its emphasis on density, mixed residential and commercial use, pedestrian-friendly streets, and vibrant public spaces. Its charter defines a set of core principles it considers adaptable to a wide array of places from suburbs to shopping malls.² The other view, which finds the New Urbanism an exercise in nostalgia out of touch with the forces driving urban change, is represented by Robert Bruegmann in his 2005 Sprawl: A Compact History. He cites approvingly the views of a writer who “persuasively argues that the New Urbanism is only the latest version of a long-standing desire by cultural elites to manage middle-class urban life.”³

Even more than Jacobs’s death, what forced me to confront the protean quality of today’s urbanism and the inadequacy of singular definitions grew out of researching and writing a book on the twentieth century, One Nation Divisible: What America Was and What It Is Becoming, co-authored with Mark J. Stern.⁴ Stern and I set out to examine how the year 2000 U.S. Census reflected social and economic trends during the century. We concluded that America is living through a transformation as profound as the industrial revolution—one that reshapes everything, from family to class, from race and gender to cities. Events on the ground—the trends we identified and discussed—have undermined the concepts with which we interpret public life: work, city, race, family, nationality. All of them have lost their moorings in the way life is actually lived today. Their conventional meanings lie smashed, badly in need of redefinition.

The same situation occurred during the transition from the nineteenth to the twentieth century when an emergent industrial civilization, based on a global economy, shattered existing ideas, producing, among other changes, a new urban form: the industrial city. “‘Modern industry,’ is almost equivalent to ‘city life,’” observed University of Chicago sociologist Charles Henderson in 1909, “because the great industry, the factory system, builds cities around the chimneys of steam engines and electric plants.”⁵ The emergence of this new urban form—the industrial city—energized late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century social science and reform. With their focus on applied research, social scientists in both Europe and the United States tried to figure out how to respond to the problems of housing, poverty, public health, employment, and governance posed by this new entity, which they understood only imperfectly. Others, like Max Weber and Georg Simmel, searched for its essence as they advanced new theories of the city. In the United States, the attempt to define the industrial city culminated in the work of the Chicago School, which based its model on the interaction of industrial change, immigration, and social geography.⁶ The geographer Peirce Lewis calls this urban form, described “in any sixth-grade geography book written before the [Second World] war” as the “nucleated city”:

The railroad station was the gateway to the city, and the land with the highest value clustered nearby—occupied, quite naturally, by high-bidding commercial establishments. There the biggest cities built skyscrapers, visible monuments to the high value of center-city land. Industries located near the railroad track because it was the most economical place to receive raw materials and ship out finished products. Poor people lived in disagreeable areas near the edge of the commercial district, or, more commonly, close to their place of industrial employment, often under squalid circumstances in the shadow of belching chimneys. With the help of trolley cars, affluent people moved to the outer edges of the city, or, if they could afford it, to a nearby suburb. But even suburbanites had to live near railroad stations, and even the most affluent suburbs were necessarily fairly compact.⁷

This nucleated city and its compact suburbs no longer exist. What has taken their place?

My point that we need new answers to the question, “What is an American city?”, is hardly original. Poke around just a little in current writing about cities, and it pops up, either explicitly or by implication. A keen observer, in fact, could find the dissolution of conventional urban form described much earlier than the closing decades of the twentieth century. In his monumental 1961 jeremiad, The City in History, Lewis Mumford asked, “What is the shape of the city and how does it define itself? The original container has completely disappeared: the sharp division between city and country no longer exists.”⁸ In the same year (also, recall, remarkably the same year as Jacobs’s Death and Life), geographer Jean Gottman used the term Megalopolis, the title of his massive book, to describe the “almost continuous stretch of urban and suburban areas from southern New Hampshire to northern Virginia and from the Atlantic shore to the Appalachian foothills.” Within this territory, the “old distinctions between rural and urban” did not apply any longer. As a result, within Megalopolis, “we must abandon the idea of the city as a tightly settled and organized unit in which people, activities, and riches are crowded into a very small area clearly separated from its nonurban surroundings.” Although Megalopolis was most developed in the Northeastern United States, it represented the future of the world.⁹ More recently, in his iconoclastic history of sprawl, urbanist Robert Bruegmann observes:

In the affluent industrialized world since the economic upturn of the 1970s a great many cities have been turned inside out in certain respects as the traditional commercial and industrial functions of the central city have been decanted to the edges while the central city and close-in neighborhoods have come to be home to an increasingly affluent residential population and a high-end service economy. With the penetration of urban functions into the country side, the old distinctions between urban, suburban, and rural have collapsed.¹⁰

Pronouncements by authorities are one way to illustrate the need to redefine what “city” means in the early twenty-first century. Another emerges clearly from contrasting actual cities. Philadelphia and Los Angeles provide especially apt comparisons because they embody the old and the new urban America.

A TALE OF TWO CITIES

In 1900, Philadelphia typified urban America.¹¹ The ecology of America’s third largest city was a classic example of the urban ecology codified by the Chicago School of sociologists—concentric zones based on class and economic function, dotted by pockets of ethnic and racial concentration, radiating out from a central city—or of Lewis’s “nucleated city.” With its diversified manufacturing base, Philadelphia was an industrial powerhouse. By 2000, Philadelphia had slipped from second to fifth largest American city while Los Angeles had skyrocketed from thirty-sixth to second. At the start of the twenty-first century, Los Angeles defined American urbanization. In The Next Los Angeles, Robert Gottlieb and his colleagues observe, “To understand the future of America, one needs to understand Los Angeles. Nearly every trend that is currently transforming the United States… has appeared in some form in Los Angeles.”¹² This new Megalopolis was shaped by the automobile rather than the railroad, which, along with the streetcar, had done so much to define America’s industrial cities in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Los Angeles’s heterogeneous population—far more diverse than Philadelphia’s ever was—had arrived from around the globe as well as from all over America. Los Angeles’s sprawling multi-centered, multi-ethnic regional development stood in dramatic contrast to the old single, dense core surrounded by residential zones and a suburban periphery, exemplified by the Philadelphia region. Even though service industries dominated its economy to an unprecedented degree, Los Angeles probably was America’s most important twentieth–century industrial city. At mid-century, its aerospace industry replaced Pennsylvania’s shipbuilders as the heart of the military-industrial complex while factory jobs migrated from the Northeast and Midwest to the South, West, and overseas. Los Angeles emerged as a major center in the Pacific basin and an important player in the global economy. Philadelphia, on the other hand, could not surmount its place as a second-order city on the international stage.

The contrast between Philadelphia and Los Angeles reflected not only changes in the two cities over time but also America’s divergent regional history. Phoenix, Houston, Las Vegas, and other sunbelt cities more or less followed the Los Angeles model and grew rapidly. Old industrial cities, like Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Detroit, lost manufacturing jobs and population.

Although Philadelphia did not begin to lose manufacturing jobs in the aggregate until after 1950, industrial restructuring had begun to undermine its older manufacturing sectors early in the twentieth century. Philadelphia’s mills started to shift to the non-union South in the 1920s, and ship building, a huge industry early in the century, was a shadow of its former self in 1950. As a share of the workforce, employment in textiles dropped by nearly two-thirds between 1900 and 1940. The experience of the steel, machine tools, locomotive, steam engine, and railroad industries followed the same trajectory.

To some extent, new industries temporarily replaced the old ones. These included consumer-oriented manufacturing such as auto assembly and food processing as well as firms participating in the “second industrial revolution” of chemicals and electronics. The Philadelphia region also played an important role in the radio and early computer industries. But these newer industries lacked the local base of the older manufacturing firms. They were, instead, often branch plants of national or international corporations like RCA and Westinghouse that pulled out of the region to chase cheaper land and labor in the South, Mexico, or Southeast Asia.

Philadelphia never successfully replaced its industrial economy. Service sector growth, while important, never catapulted the Delaware Valley into a competitive spot in the global economy, and its major service sector employers, like its mid-century manufacturers, are usually branch offices of corporations headquartered elsewhere. Public sector employment also became increasingly important. Employment by the federal government multiplied from 1.7 percent to 3.6 percent of the regional workforce between 1950 and 1970 before falling back to 1.9 percent as federal aid to cities declined. To some extent, employment in local government compensated for the federal withdrawal; its share of employment increased from 1.3 percent in 1980 to 1.9 percent in 2000. Where the Philadelphia region grew jobs was in education and health care. Employment in educational services jumped from 1.8 percent in 1950 to 7.9 percent in 2000. Jobs in hospitals multiplied from 1.4 percent of the regional workforce in 1940 to 4.2 percent in 2000. The Delaware Valley’s universities and medical schools, not its factories, had become its major economic assets.

Los Angeles followed a very different...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• The Social Scientist as a Human Being
• Urbanism and Suburbanism as Ways of Life
• People, Plans, and Policies
• The Future of Ethnic Groups and Cultures in America
• Democracy and the News
• More Equality
• Contributor Biographies