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

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      Chapter 1

      What Is an American City?

      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. That is, “form,” should be “forms”—an unprecedented configuration of urban places that calls into question the definition of “city” itself. One configuration is represented by the deindustrialized landscape of destitution that is a short, straight ride up Broad Street from the new, revitalized core of Center City Philadelphia. This landscape where Herbert Manes killed Shorty on the night of August 4, 2005, was one face of early twenty-first-century American cities pointed out by dystopian urban critics, but there were other faces as well.

      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 half a century, it retains its powerful impact. I have often assigned it 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 such as Philadelphia, New York, Boston, and 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 New Urbanism an exercise in nostalgia that is out of touch with the forces driving urban change, is represented by Robert Bruegmann in his 2005 book Sprawl: A Compact History, where he approvingly cites architectural writer Alex Krieger 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 research and writing a book on the twentieth century, One Nation Divisible: What America Was and What It Is Becoming, coauthored with Mark J. Stern.⁴ Stern and I set out to examine how the 2000 U.S. Census reflected social and economic trends during the twentieth 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, also 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, such as 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 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 eco nomical 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 (which is also, remarkably, the same year Jacobs’s Death and Life was published), 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 non-urban 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 observed:

      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 СКАЧАТЬ