Urban Policy Reconsidered

Dialogues on the Problems and Prospects of American Cities

Charles C. Euchner, Stephen McGovern, Stephen J. McGovern

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2003
• Print ISBN: 9780415944700
• eBook ISBN: 9781136744525
• Topic: Arquitectura
• Subtopic: Planificación urbana y paisajismo

In the past decade, America has experienced an urban renaissance. Cities as varied as New York, Chicago and Boston are no longer seen as ungovernable and doomed to crime and blight. However, they still face formidable problems. Urban Policy Reconsidered is a comprehensive overview of the issues and problems facing our cities today and cover every important issue in urban affairs. What is poverty? What is economic development? What is education? What is crime? As well as covering all of these fundamental topics in-depth, the author propose a communitarian approach to addressing the many problems of our cities. This book will be the manual for anyone interested in understanding urban policy.

1
Cities and the Life of the Nation

American cities have suffered immensely during the past half-century and yet they continue to capture people's imagination. Despite all the problems—poverty, crime, blight, traffic, poor services—cities still provide a source of energy and inspiration to the nation as a whole.

Think of all of the major symbols and landmarks of cities, and you get an idea of how vital cities are to the life of the nation. New York's Statue of Liberty, Times Square, and Central Park. San Francisco's spectacular Golden Gate Bridge. Boston's Freedom Trail. Chicago's Gold Coast. Miami's South Beach. Magnificent train stations in New York, Chicago, Boston, and elsewhere. San Antonio's Riverwalk. Seattle's Space Needle. The Arch of St. Louis. Philadelphia's Independence Hall. Downtown sports stadiums all over the nation. Cleveland's emerging waterfront district. Tampa's Ybor City. Nashville's Music Row. Washington's Mall, with its unique array of inspiring government buildings, museums, and monuments.

And beyond the awesome symbols and landmarks of urban America are the vital neighborhoods that make up a city. Some bear common names like Chinatown, the North End, Society Hill, and Shady Side, while others feature funky names like TriBeCa, SoBe, the Leather District, Haight Ashbury, Coney Island, and Bourbon Street. At their best, city neighborhoods are diverse, innovative, and dynamic, offering a rich and colorful environment that simply is not available anywhere else. The hearts and minds of even the greatest urban cynics are excited by these stirring images of cities.

Of course, cities are always looking for the best way to present their faces to the world. But underneath the glitter and intrigue, cities have to fulfill basic economic and social functions.

And they do. Cities have always occupied a central place in the economic, social, cultural, and political life of humanity. Time and again, individuals with specialized skills and varied backgrounds have come together in an urban milieu in search of opportunity and to pursue their destinies. The blending of people and talent in concentrated settings allows wonderful things: the exchange of ideas, the inspiration for scientific discovery, the creation of art, the struggle over political values, and the invention of new forms of social organization and physical development. The complexity of cities can be unnerving and chaotic to many, but that complexity provides an opportunity for people to regulate themselves and create a way of life that would be unthinkable in other settings. At their best, cities are places where civilization flourishes and community thrives.¹

So what makes cities so functional? And how do the miracles of cities square with the problems of cities?

Cities offer complex and adaptive systems to organize all kinds of human activities. As the renowned planning critic Jane Jacobs notes, cities grow out of the infinite number of individual decisions that create an overall coherence that no one could design. Countless clusters of diverse people are connected with networks of roads, buildings, tunnels, and open spaces. We sometimes mistake the surface images of cities—the skyscrapers, the odd-looking bohemians, boisterous public events—for the dynamic processes that make these phenomena possible.²

The sidewalk and the street provide the connective tissue of the city—the way to gather, arrange, and link people, places, and activities. Like the neurotransmitters in a brain, they provide a system of regulation and feedback. The constant movement of information—and its organization in streets, blocks, neighborhoods, districts, and corridors—fosters constant adaptation and invention. The social theorist Steven Johnson writes:

This knack for capturing information, and for bringing related packets of information together, defines how cities learn. Like-minded businesses cluster together because there are financial incentives to do so—what economists call economies of agglomeration—enabling craftsmen to share techniques and services that they wouldn't necessarily be able to enjoy on their own. That clustering becomes a self-perpetuating cycle: potential consumers and employees have an easier time finding the goods and jobs they're looking for; the shared information makes the clustered businesses more competitive than the isolated ones.³

Order amid complexity makes cities cities.

One of the root problems of cities in recent decades has been the way these systems of order amid complexity have been broken. Cities have been so desperate for renewal that they have often wrecked the very qualities that give them life. To get suburbanites downtown, cities constructed great highways that slashed through vibrant neighborhoods. To house the cars, cities made room for large parking garages and lots that created desolate voids and exacerbated traffic congestion. To jump-start retail business, cities constructed huge malls that were cut off from the urban fabric. To attract tourists and create a “major league” image, cities erected large convention centers and stadiums that were even more remote. To house poor people apart from middle-class neighborhoods, cities designed grand housing projects that became synonymous with urban blight and crime.

Not all the news is bad—in fact, many cities are enjoying comebacks—but virtually every city in the United States faces the challenge of restoring the systems that made possible order among complexity. That is the job of the next generation.

The Rise and Decline of Cities

Americans have always looked on cities with a certain amount of fear and loathing, haven't they? Has that changed?

If you look at American society in the eighteenth century, you might assume that most citizens viewed cities as being utterly peripheral to their existence. After all, well over 90 percent of the population lived in rural areas working on farms. On the other hand, even farmers had an intimate relationship with urban places. Cities were commercial hubs where farmers journeyed in the springtime to purchase tools and supplies and returned at harvesttime to sell their produce. They interacted intensively with a merchant elite that operated out of coastal cites such as Baltimore, Boston, Charleston, New York, and Philadelphia and served as a vital link between America's vast hinterland and an Old World eager to obtain raw materials from America. Apart from their economic function, such cities became important centers of communications, as news from abroad arrived daily on tall ships. The most widely read newspapers were published in cities. The first libraries, colleges, and hospitals were built in cities. The administration of government occurred mostly in cities. Even for an overwhelmingly rural population, cities were indispensable to the young nation's vitality and even its survival.

The role of cities in American society only expanded during the nineteenth century with the advent of industrialization. The boom in the large-scale mechanized production of goods fueled an unprecedented upsurge in migration to cities, both from the surrounding countryside as well as from other nations. Millions of people flocked to cities in search of work and a fresh start in life. Cities doubled, tripled, and quadrupled in size in a matter of decades. The influx of humanity caused a myriad of problems for cities ill-equipped to cope with mounting congestion, poverty, disease, and crime. Yet urban life, nevertheless, remained alluring, an irresistible magnet pulling people of all kinds to seek their fortune. The nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were the golden age for cities.⁴

Not so for the latter part of the twentieth century. Cities in the United States fell upon hard times. Why?

Technological advances in transportation enabled more affluent residents to move from the congestion and grime of the central city to more tranquil neighborhoods on the outskirts and yet still be near enough to commute to their urban jobs. The so-called “streetcar suburbs” established an enduring American pattern: abandonment of the center and embrace of the periphery. The pace of suburbanization greatly accelerated after World War II with the rapid proliferation of automobiles and extensive construction of highways, all amid a postwar prosperity that made mass relocation to suburbia an affordable proposition for millions of urbanites. At the same time, jobs migrated from cities to suburbs, where real estate for industrial growth was cheaper. Immense factories that had provided employment for countless city dwellers for generations shut down and moved to the periphery.

This decentralization, a process aided and abetted by federal, state, and local policies, proved to be devastating for urban America. The urban tax base dwindled, public services were slashed, and the quality of life deteriorated. By the 1960s, urban neighborhoods were engulfed in riots. Politicians and scholars called for a bold response to the urban crisis.⁵

It seems as though the central aspect of the urban crisis is a breakdown of opportunity and order in communities. The natural response would be to try to find out how to bring those places back to life, right?

Many scholars and policy-makers argue that reviving cities requires nurturing the kinds of places where people want to live and work. If cities provide a strong foundation for individuals and groups to seek their own livelihoods, then a wide variety of urban problems can be solved. The problem of poverty is the paramount problem of the city—from poverty flow all kinds of other social problems, including education, public health, housing, and crime—and poverty itself results from the extreme isolation of certain groups from jobs and other opportunities. Advocates of a policy of place argue that the best approach to fostering equality of opportunity is to provide a robust public sphere—good common places where people can learn, play, work, and look after each other.

Thoughtful observers from Jane Jacobs to Robert Putnam worry that America is losing its common places and, in the process, isolating vulnerable populations from the fundamental opportunities they need to succeed. In the aptly named Place Matters, Peter Dreier, John Mollenkopf, and Todd Swanstrom write: “Today, growing spatial segregation means that economic, social, and political inequalities are piling on top of one another. As rich people gather in privileged places, they enhance their political power and social prestige. Poor and working people are stuck in places that society looks down on and that lack political clout.”⁶ William Julius Wilson's seminal analyses of American poverty argue that social and geographic isolation is the preeminent characteristic of poor people today.⁷ Place not only matters but also acts as an independent force shaping the degrees of opportunity enjoyed by people of all walks of life.

Sounds like a powerful argument. But couldn't the causal arrows go the other way? Maybe the qualities that people bring to a community matter more than the particular characteristics of the place.

That is the argument of other theorists, ranging from the conservative Thomas Sowell to the radicals Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis. These theorists reason that a well-educated and motivated individual can prevail over even the most inhospitable environment. Where the right and left disagree is on the question of why certain individuals assume certain personal characteristics. Conservatives attribute individual character to culture, incentives, and even genetic makeup. Sowell's history of American immigrants, for example, shows that some groups (such as West Indian blacks) succeed in the same ghetto neighborhoods where others (American blacks) do not. The different success rates, Sowell argues, cannot stem from place if the groups share essentially the same kinds of place.⁸ Liberals have a different kind of placeless explanation of urban fortunes. They tend to emphasize the importance of the class system, which empowers some people and disempowers others regardless of where they live.

Who is right?

Not to sound like a difference-splitter, but both sides of the argument are right. People's individual characteristics affect their social and economic mobility, and so do the kinds of institutions and groups within their midst. People and place are “constitutive” of each other. That is a social theorist's way of saying that no single factor exists outside other factors. A person's individual makeup results from the community setting—and that community setting, in turn, results from the individuals who live and work there. The question is how to use policy to make an impact on problems like poverty, education, and crime. Do you focus on changing individuals or changing communities?

Maybe the best way to understand the question is to try to determine what produces great turnarounds in social conditions. Malcolm Gladwell has popularized the notion of the “tipping point”—the stage at which enough elements of an issue change so that the whole character of the issue changes.⁹ When do scattered incidents of crime snowball into a crime epidemic? When does the number of students succeeding or failing begin to affect the whole character of the school? When are there so many arsons in a neighborhood that everyone in the area seems to pick up and leave simultaneously? When are enough homes spiffed up that the area becomes popular and real estate values appreciate? Understanding these issues helps us to understand the relation between the part and the whole—the individual or group, on the one hand, and the larger community, on the other hand. Under a constitutive understanding of people and place, policy would work hard to create a larger environment that is conducive to human achievement and well-being—while at the same time trying to reach enough individuals so that they will create major change.

Let's get specific on the history of American urban policy. How has national policy attempted to respond to the urban crisis?

The federal government, under the leadership of President Lyndon B. Johnson, launched a “war on poverty,” much of it targeted to the nation's cities, with the ambitious goal of constructing a “Great Society” grounded upon civil rights and economic security for all citizens. That effort was a peculiar mix of people- and place-oriented policies. Programs such as Model Cities and Community Action aimed to transform whole inner-city communities, but they did so by targeting individuals for change. Policies for job training, nutrition, counseling, legal aid—with programs concentrated in the most needy communities—would transform both individuals and communities. But before the Great Society could produce a tipping point for either the community or the people who lived there, the programs were cut or modified. No sooner had the war been launched than Washington began to backpedal, as the costs of war in Vietnam mounted and as popular resistance to an expanding welfare state and rising taxes spread. The election of Ronald Reagan to the White House in 1980 symbolized the federal government's retreat from urban issues.¹⁰

But Reaganism was just a sign of a larger trend in nati...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Full Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Cities and the Life of the Nation
• 2 Poverty and the Divided Metropolis
• 3 Economic Development and the Construction of Opportunity
• 4 Housing and the Structure of Place
• 5 Education and the Ladder of Mobility
• 6 Crime and the Levels of Order
• 7 Re-Placing the City
• Notes
• Index