Why Don't American Cities Burn?. Michael B. Katz

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СКАЧАТЬ spheres. Indeed, dual city theorists stressed the linkages that joined them—how they produced and depended on one another. Although the dual city metaphor, as its theorists recognized, oversimplified a very complicated situation, it had the virtue of directing attention to the new inequalities that define present-day cities, just as Jacob Riis’s depiction of “How the Other Half Lives” captured the emerging industrial social structure a century ago.

      Outward-looking metaphors link cities, metropolitan areas, regions, and even the world. “Historically,” writes Robert Geddes, “two massive shifts of population have formed American city-regions. The farm-to-city shift after the Civil War is comparable to the massive city-to-suburb shift after World War II. Now more than half the nation’s population lives in the suburbs. Although still separate legal jurisdictions, it no longer makes sense to talk of suburbs and cities as if they were separate; they are economically and ecologically joined in a new kind of human settlement, the city region.”⁵¹ A variety of metaphors—“city-region,” “metropolitan area,” “elastic/inelastic city,” “galactic city”—try to capture the inadequacy of definitions that limit cities to their legal boundaries.

      Three scholars and public intellectuals—David Rusk, Myron Orfield, and Bruce Katz—have led the effort to substitute “metropolitan” for narrowly bounded definitions of current-day cities. For them, the exercise is more than theoretical, because policies needed to counteract the baneful effects of metropolitan political fragmentation require an expanded definition of “city.” No less concerned with inequality than dual city theorists, they focus more on economic and political disparities between central cities and their suburbs than on income gaps among city residents. Grossly unequal public services and tax burdens, environmental degradation, sprawl, racial segregation, job growth: these, they argue, only can be countered through metropolitan-wide actions.

      Where city and suburb rubbed up against each other, they were becoming more alike. As urban problems spread outward, distinctions lessened, and the real differentiation existed between older inner suburbs and those further out on the periphery of metropolitan areas, which, themselves, could not remain immune from the urban problems attendant on growth. Just what a suburb was—what made it distinct—was no longer clear. Recognizing the inadequacy of the conventional city/ suburb/rural distinction, the U.S. Census Bureau began to develop a reclassification of municipalities based on a sophisticated mathematical model.⁵² A number of metropolitan metaphors tried to capture this new metropolitan configuration.

      Historian Robert Fishman proclaimed the death of one metaphor—“bourgeois utopia,” which represented the suburb as a sylvan residential enclave for affluent male commuters and their families. By the 1980s, he held, the classic suburb had been replaced by the “post-suburb” or “technoburb.”⁵³ Others reclassified suburbs differently. Orfield, for one, divided them into six categories based on financial stress and age.⁵⁴ “Suburbia conceals as well as reveals its complexity,” observes historian Dolores Hayden in Building Suburbia. “For years, when urban historians wrote about the ‘city,’ they meant the center, the skyline, downtown.”⁵⁵ Looking closely, she identifies seven suburban patterns. Although the earliest date from before the Civil War, vestiges of all of them still exist. The most famous, or notorious, new suburban forms are Joel Garreau’s “edge cities,” massive configurations of office towers and malls at the crossroads of exurban highways, “A new frontier being shaped by the free, in a constantly reinvented land.”⁵⁶ Recently, Robert E. Lang and his colleagues have identified “boomburbs,” the “ultimate symbol of today’s sprawling postwar metropolitan form.” They are places “with more than 100,000 residents that are not the largest cities in their respective metropolitan areas and that have maintained double-digit rates of population growth in recent decades.”⁵⁷ Others, focusing on the new suburbanization of immigration, have identified a suburban variant they call “ethnoburbs,” “multiethnic communities in which one ethnic minority group has a significant concentration but does not necessarily constitute a ma-jority.”⁵⁸ Peirce Lewis has termed the new urban form that developed “far beyond the old urban fringe” the “galactic city,” defined as “a city where all the traditional urban elements float in space like stars and planets in a galaxy, held together by mutual gravitational attraction but with large empty spaces in between. . . . This new galactic city is an urban creation different from any sort Americans have ever seen before.”⁵⁹ With chain migration linking towns and villages in Latin America and the Caribbean with United States cities, Mike Davis writes of the creation of new suburban forms extending across national boundaries. “To the extent that the sending communities have become as fully integrated into the economy of the immigrant metropolis as their own nation- state . . . they are the de facto ‘transnational suburbs’ of New York, Los Angeles, Chicago and Miami. Indeed, they transform our understanding of the contemporary city.”⁶⁰

      Metropolitan metaphors linked cities to their regions; global metaphors joined them to the world. Saskia Sassen, whose work set the agenda for debate on global cities, identifies a set of global cities at the pinnacle of new urban hierarchies, detached from their regions, connected, instead, to the world of international finance and trade. As “transnational market ‘spaces,’ ” global cities have “more in common with one another than with regional centers in their own nation-states, many of which have declined in importance.”⁶¹ The “finance and producer services complex in each city,” she asserts, “rests on a growth dynamic that is somewhat independent of the broader regional economy—a sharp change from the past, when a city was presumed to be deeply articulated with its hinter-land.”⁶² Rather than regional centers, global cities are “command points in the organization of the world economy.” Economic globalization has made great cities more relevant and important than ever, a point reinforced by a July 2006 report describing the movement of corporate headquarters back to New York City.⁶³

      In contrast to Sassen, Bruce Katz and his colleagues in the Brookings Institution’s Metropolitan Policy Program emphasize economic regions that promote growth as well as higher wages. A regional industry cluster, write Brookings researchers, is “a geographic concentration of interconnected businesses, suppliers, service providers, and associated institutions in a particular field.” These regional clusters “represent a powerful source of productivity and quality jobs at a moment of economic challenge.” The federal government, they contend, “should play a central role in promoting cluster development and growth nationwide.”⁶⁴

      Another outward-looking metaphor defines modern cities by what they produce. For Manuel Castells, the late twentieth-century “informational city” replaces the early twentieth-century “industrial city.” To be sure, knowledge and information processing have been important to every mode of production. What distinguishes the informational mode “is the action of knowledge upon knowledge itself as the main source of productivity.”⁶⁵ The informational city differs from Garreau’s edge city, whose “primitive technological vision that sees the world through the simplified lenses of endless freeways and fiber-optic networks” misses “the core of the new urbanization process” in the United States. Unlike Garreau and Sassen, Castells stresses the interdependence of edge cities and the “functional interdependence” among “different units and processes in a given urban system over very long distances, minimizing the role of territorial contiguity, and maximizing the communication networks in all their dimensions. Flows of exchange are at the core of the American Edge City.” The second point missed by Garreau’s metaphor is the multiple dependencies at the heart of America’s distinctive informational city: “The profile of America’s informational city is not fully represented by the Edge City phenomenon, but by the relationship between fast ex-urban development, inner-city decay, and obsolescence of the suburban built environment.”⁶⁶ Castells’s informational city is better understood as a network than a place, a process rather than an object. A “new urban form,” the informational city takes different shapes in Silicon Valley, Europe, and Asia. Across nations, however, informational cities have crystallized in a “new spatial form, which develops in a variety of social and geographi cal contexts: mega-cities,” СКАЧАТЬ