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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 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 Peirce’s “nucleated city.” With its diversified manufacturing base, Philadelphia was an industrial power-house. 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, multicentered, multiethnic 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 midcentury, 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 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 shipbuilding, 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 such as 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 midcentury 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 anchor institutions—major economic assets. Los Angeles followed a very different economic path in the twentieth century. As happened elsewhere in America, agriculture became less important. By the middle of the twentieth century, it accounted for only 1.2 percent of employment in the city. This straightforward decline, however, masks an important change that distinguished the Southwest from the Atlantic Coast: the rise and extent of migrant labor.¹³ Mexicans harvested fruits and vegetables; Japanese immigrants dominated the cultivation and trade in flowers. Los Angeles may have acquired the image of an entertainment and leisure paradise, but its reality was industrialization, which included food processing. In the 1920s, Los Angeles’s population more than doubled and then increased even more with the dust bowl migration of the 1930s and the great migration of African Americans in the decades following World War II. By 1935, Los Angeles had catapulted to fifth-largest manufacturing center in the United States. Its major industries included cinema, petroleum drilling and refining, and aircraft and automobile assembly. It was second in the manufacture of tires, and fourth in apparel and furniture. With the Cold War and wars in the Pacific—Korea to Vietnam—Los Angeles emerged at the apex of the military-industrial complex. From 1940 to 1970, as its population tripled to ten million, it led all other metropolitan areas in manufacturing growth. At its peak in 1980, aircraft production accounted for 3 percent of regional employment; with military cutbacks and outsourcing, that fraction had declined to 1.3 percent in 2000. According to one informed estimate, each defense sector job generated 1.5 to 2.5 jobs in other local sectors of the economy. Los Angeles’s manufacturing preeminence resulted not only from high-tech industries. A large local electronics sector consisted of assembly plants paying low wages to documented and undocumented Asian immigrant workers. Southeast Asians dominated electronics, while Latin Americans engaged in low-wage work for new sweatshops in the apparel industry, which elsewhere had largely fled the United States.

By the late twentieth century, however, services dominated Los Angeles’s economy. Banking, insurance, and various other business services became increasingly important, as they did in Philadelphia. Real estate, though, employed a larger fraction of the workforce than it did in Philadelphia, as did entertainment and recreation. Although employment in higher education and medicine also multiplied, Los Angeles—with its robust manufacturing and high-end services—did not depend on educational and health services as much as Philadelphia. Los Angeles also differed from Philadelphia in the role of public administration. In 2000, local public administration employed 1.9 percent of the region’s adults—roughly half the share in the Philadelphia area. In part, the lesser importance of public employment in Los Angeles reflected the city’s more buoyant private sector. In part, too, it grew out of differences in priorities, which resulted in more privatized police forces, garbage collection, and services for gated communities in greater Los Angeles than there were in the Delaware Valley.

Across the twentieth century, Philadelphia and Los Angeles differed dramatically in their ability to attract new residents. Between 1900 and 1940, no more than 26 percent of Los Angeles residents reported being born in California—most of the rest had arrived from the East, the Midwest, and Mexico. In 2000, only 45 percent were native Californians. Migration from elsewhere in the United States had slowed, but more than 16 percent had been born in Mexico, and 5 percent had been born in Central America. In 1900, Los Angeles’s population was, officially, 98 percent non-Hispanic white; in 2000, the majority was Latino. Asians outnumbered African Americans. Spanish was the first language of 35 percent of Angelenos, a close second to English (42 percent), with Chinese (2.8 percent) and Filipino/Tagalog (2.2 percent) third and fourth, respectively. Los Angeles represented the multicolored, multiracial future of America.

Philadelphia, by contrast, remained to a considerable extent black and white, with shades of other hues working their way in after about 1980. The great migrations of African Americans and Puerto Ricans, when Herbert’s parents arrived in the city, were Philadelphia’s principal migration events in the last half of the twentieth century. In the late twentieth century, between seventy and eighty of every one hundred Delaware Valley residents had been born in Philadelphia or New Jersey. In 1900, immigrants from Ireland composed 7 percent of the region’s population, followed by newcomers from England (3 percent) and Italy (2 percent). Although after 1950 no immigrant group accounted for more than 1 percent of the region’s population counted in the census, in the late twentieth century, immigrants from Asia (including India) and Latin America (mainly Mexico) had begun to transform a number of city neighborhoods and even some suburbs. By 2000, 9 percent of the city’s population was foreign-born—a proportion that would be considerably larger with the inclusion of their children and undocumented immigrants. Compared to Los Angeles, Philadelphia was a low-immigrant city, lacking the opportunities that attracted newcomers to the great urban immigrant magnets. Nonetheless, by every indication, immigration, whose presence was increasingly evident, was making itself felt in the city’s neighborhoods, schools, and workplaces, creating tensions not experienced for nearly a century.¹⁴

The contrasts between Philadelphia’s and Los Angeles’s economic and population histories played themselves out in space. Population density in Philadelphia, for instance, has always been much higher than in Los Angeles.¹⁵ Its downtown high-rises surrounded by vast areas of row houses contrast with the “suburban cities” of the Los Angeles region, the latter of which inspired sociologist William Whyte, author of The Organization Man, to coin the term “urban sprawl.” The Los Angeles region’s suburban central cities have retained a relatively constant share of the area’s population: 51 percent in 1940, 36 percent in 1990. Philadelphia, by contrast, lost population to the suburbs during the entire twentieth century. The fraction of the regional population living in the city declined from 60 percent in 1940 to 25 percent in 2000.

Railroads and streetcars shaped urbanization in the East and Midwest in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The automobile welded together the components of Los Angeles, which led all other American cities in automobile registration and use in the 1920s. As Los Angeles’s outer counties surpassed Los Angeles County in population growth during the last decades of the twentieth century, they inspired a new urban vocabulary: “regional urbanization,” “exopolis,” “flexcity.” Both the Philadelphia and Los Angeles regions, however, remain highly segregated by class, race, and ethnicity. In the Delaware Valley, segregation still largely follows the old model of the Chicago School of sociology. Lower- and middle- income minorities live in row houses and publicly subsidized housing in the inner cities and inner-ring suburbs. In the second half of the twentieth century, much of Philadelphia’s white middle class departed for the suburbs, with minorities composing the majority—45 percent white, 43 percent black, 5 percent Asian, and 7 percent Hispanic. The city of Philadelphia is much more diverse than its region, whose minorities remain concentrated at its center.

The Chicago School model does not apply to Southern California. After World War II, African Americans created what has been called the nation’s “first large suburban ghetto” in South Central Los Angeles. In East Los Angeles, poor Mexicans live in detached, single-family, ranch- style homes more characteristic of suburbs than cities. The ethnic clusters known as Koreatown, Little Saigon, and a new Chinatown are distinctively suburban in population density and housing styles. At the same time, freeways, airports, and manufacturing corridors separate the suburbs populated by middle- and upper-income white workers in Orange, Ventura, and western Los Angeles County from South Central and East Los Angeles. “Los Angeles in the 1960s,” urbanist Robert Gottlieb and his colleagues write, “represented an unusual mix of urban decline and suburban expansion, to the point that Los Angeles appeared to lose any appearance of the classical ‘city.’ ”¹⁶ Philadelphia represents a city surrounded by suburbs, Los Angeles a product of “suburban urbanization,” where center and periphery meld into sprawling cities that lack a meaningful center. The stark contrasts between Philadelphia and Los Angeles—their diverse regional histories, economic and demographic differences, and divergent social ecologies—pose an unavoidable question: In early twenty-first-century America, just what is a city?

Three Transformations

Despite their differences, Philadelphia and Los Angeles experienced the common transformations of economy, demography, and space that have resulted in new American cities. The decimation of manufacturing evident in Philadelphia and other Rust Belt cities resulted from both the growth of foreign industries, notably electronics and automobiles, and the corporate search for cheaper labor. Cities with economic sectors other than manufacturing (such as banking, commerce, medicine, government, and education) withstood deindustrialization most successfully—for example, New York, Miami, Los Angeles, the San Francisco Bay area, Chicago, Boston, and Houston. Those with no alternatives—Baltimore, Cleveland, Buffalo, St. Louis, Detroit—nearly collapsed. Others—Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, the Twin Cities—struggled with mixed success. Cities such as Las Vegas, Phoenix, Albuquerque, and in some ways New Orleans built economies on entertainment, hospitality, and retirement. As services replaced manufacturing everywhere, office towers became the late twentieth century’s urban factories. A broad category, ser vice embraces both demanding and rewarding jobs and low-wage, non-unionized employment that offers few benefits. In fortunate cities such as Los Angeles, new economic functions included the production of the financial and business services and products that served the emergent international economy. They also included, again notably in Los Angeles, the reappearance of small-scale manufacturing drawing on inexpensive immigrant labor.¹⁷

Increasingly, “anchor institutions,” notably “eds and meds,” also sustained the economies of fortunate cities by becoming their principal employers. Late in the twentieth century in the nation’s twenty largest cities, “eds and meds” provided nearly 35 percent of jobs.¹⁸ These institutions—fixed in place, partnering with government, business, and civic sectors—hire thousands of workers and pump massive amounts of money through urban systems. They are often the largest employers in the cities in which they are located. And they have grown in size while manufacturing industries have failed or decamped. “Eds and Meds,” concludes a 2009 report to HUD secretary Shaun Donovan by the Penn Institute for Urban Research, “are playing a crucial role in the economic vitality and competitiveness of their cities and surrounding regions. . . . Across the country, many Eds and Meds are the largest employers in their cities and also fuel local economies through construction dollars and the purchase of goods and services.”¹⁹

The first urban demographic transformation was the migration of African Americans from the South to northern and midwestern, and even, to some extent, western cities. (As James Gregory has shown, in the same years more than twice as many white southerners also moved to the North and Midwest.)²⁰ From World War I to 1920, between seven hundred thousand and one million African Americans moved north, followed by another eight hundred thousand during the 1920s and five million more between 1940 and 1970. The results, of course, were profound. San Francisco’s black population multiplied nearly twenty-five times between 1940 and 1970 while Chicago’s grew five times, to take two examples. As African Americans moved into cities, whites moved out. Between 1950 and 1970, the overall population of American cities grew by ten million people, and the population of suburbs grew by eighty-five million.

As Herbert Gans’s classic The Levittowners showed, even more than racial change, a severe urban housing shortage, a desire to escape urban congestion, and mass-produced suburban homes made affordable by federally insured, long-term, low-interest mortgages pulled whites from cities, where they sped to their suburban homes along the new interstate highway system.²¹ However, aggressive and often unscrupulous realtors, fanning fears of racial change, played a role as well.²² In the North and Midwest, the number of African American newcomers often did not equal the number of whites who left. As a result, city populations and density went down, returning swaths of inner cities to empty lots and weed-filled fields where once working-class housing and factories had stood—a process vividly captured by the great photographer Camilo José Vergara, who has documented the emergence of the “green ghetto” in Rust Belt America, where urban agriculture has emerged as a growth industry.²³ In the Sun Belt, in cities such as Los Angeles, population trends went in the opposite direction. Between 1957 and 1990, the Sun Belt’s urban population, lured by economic opportunity and an appealing climate and boosted by annexation as well as in-migration, climbed from 8.5 to 23 million.

Massive immigration following changes to federal law in 1965 also transformed urban demography. Immigration was the human face of the economic globalization transforming cities around the world.²⁴ More immigrants entered the United States in the 1990s than in any other decade in its history. Three facts about this immigration stand out as especially important. First, it was diverse. Mostly from Asia and Latin America, immigrants altered the ethnic mix of America’s population, most notably of its cities. They fueled most of the urban population growth that occurred during the 1990s.²⁵

Four of five immigrants settled in metropolitan areas, clustering in “gateway” cities: New York, Miami, Los Angeles, and to some extent, Chicago. By 2000, although still clustered, they had begun to spread out across the nation, transforming suburbs and small as well as large cities. In 1910, 84 percent of the foreign-born in Greater Philadelphia lived in the central city. By 2006, the number had plummeted to 35 percent. Similar trends occurred everywhere. Across the nation, the suburbanization of immigration had become a major factor reshaping metropolitan geography. This suburbanization of immigration is the second important fact. Thanks to labor market networks in agricultural work, construction, landscaping, low-end manufacturing, and domestic service, Hispanics, in fact, spread out faster than any other ethnic group in American history.²⁶

The third fact about the new immigration is that it is essential. In New York City, immigration accounted for all of the population growth in the 1990s. In his testimony before New York’s City Council Committees on Small Business and Immigration, Jonathan Bowles, director of the Center for an Urban Future, reported on research which “concluded that immigrant entrepreneurs have become an increasingly powerful economic engine for New York City . . . foreign-born entrepreneurs are starting a greater share of new businesses than native-born residents, stimulating growth in sectors from food manufacturing to health care, creating loads of new jobs and transforming once-sleepy neighborhoods into thriving commercial centers.”²⁷ Immigration also fueled growth and economic revitalization in small cities such as Chelsea and Lawrence, Massachusetts. Two officials of the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston reported that between 1990 and 2000, immigrants accounted for almost half of New England’s population growth, and more in some states, such as Connecticut, where it was responsible for 76 percent of growth. “Overall, the region’s population grew only 5.4 percent over the decade, but without foreign immigration, it would have been virtually stagnant.”²⁸ The New Jersey Urban Revitalization Research Project reported, “Immigration is reshaping many of New Jersey’s older communities, and accounts for the greater part of the population growth of most cities experienced during the 1990s.”²⁹ In metropolitan Philadelphia, immigration was the source of 75 percent of labor force growth between 2000 and 2006.³⁰

Immigration, Mike Davis observes in Magical Urbanism, redefined urban space. “As emergent Latino pluralities and majorities outgrow the classic barrio,” he writes, “they are remaking urban space in novel ways that cannot be assimilated to the earlier experiences of either African Americans or European immigrants.” These Latino metropolises differ from one another in their “geometries,” which Davis classifies with a provisional typology whose newest and unprecedented category, “city-within-a-city,” represented by late twentieth-century Los Angeles, results from the intersection of immigration with the location of low-wage jobs.³¹

Immigration, suburbanization, and racial segregation transformed urban space. Suburban growth, which had begun much earlier, exploded in the years after World War II, with suburbs growing ten times faster than cities in the 1950s. Population, retailing, services, and industry all suburbanized. Suburbs remained predominantly white until late in the twentieth century, when African American suburbanization became an important trend, although even in the suburbs African Americans often clustered in segregated neighborhoods or dominated some suburban towns.³²

The image evoked by the term “suburb” was never accurate. Constructed at various points in history, from the transportation revolution of the nineteenth century to the communications revolution of the late twentieth century, and reconstructed repeatedly by demographic, economic, social, and political change, places labelled “suburb” have always, in fact, varied. Long before World War II, suburbs were industrial as well as residential; they housed working-class as well as middle-class families; and they were home to many African Americans. In the post–World War II era, the massive building of new suburbs like Levittown, highway construction, cheap mortgages, and especially the GI Bill reinforced the popular meaning of “suburb” as a bedroom community populated mainly by families with children. By the last decades of the twentieth century, whatever uniformity had existed among suburbs shattered. A variety of suburban forms dotted metropolitan landscapes as social scientists and regional policy advocates scrambled to create new typologies that would capture the components of the new geography that had rendered the binary of city/suburb obsolete.³³

Both gentrification and dramatic shifts in the balance among family types resulted in new domestic landscapes, further collapsing differences between city and suburb. Gentrification played modest counterpoint to urban renewal. Gentrification refers to rehabilitating working-class housing for use by a wealthier class. Movement into gentrified neighborhoods was not great enough to reverse overall population decline outside of select neighborhoods, but it did transform visible components of cityscapes as it attracted young white professionals with above-average incomes and empty nesters who demanded new services and amenities.

Young professionals and affluent empty nesters repopulating center cities signified transformations of family and life course that undermined old assumptions about urbanism by undermining distinctions between cities and suburbs through the creation of new domestic landscapes. Consider the revolutionary rebalancing of family types between 1900 and 2000. In both years, most people lived in one of four combinations of family and house hold type: married couples with children; female-headed house holds with children; empty-nest couples; and non-family house holds (unmarried young people living together). Over the course of the twentieth century, the relative proportions living in each house hold type changed dramatically. In 1900, married couples with children comprised 55 percent of all house holds, single-mother families 28 percent, empty-nest house holds 6 percent, and nonfamily house holds 10 percent, with a small remainder in different arrangements. By 2000, the proportions had changed: married couple house holds comprised 25 percent of all house holds, single-mother families 30 percent, empty- nest house holds 16 percent, and nonfamily house holds 25 percent.³⁴ (The relatively small increase in single- mother families masks an enormous change. Earlier in the century they mainly consisted of widows; late in the century they were mostly never married, separated, or divorced.)

This new balance among house hold types had accelerated with astonishing speed after 1970. One of its results was a new domestic landscape that changed the meaning of “suburbs.” By 1970, more Americans lived in suburbs than in cities or rural areas. In these early years—captured brilliantly by Herbert Gans in The Levittowners—the suburbs’ primary function was to provide housing for families with children.³⁵ During the last three decades of the twentieth century, suburban demography and function changed, with the result that cities and suburbs grew more alike.³⁶ Between 1970 and 2000, the proportion of suburban census tracts where married couples with children comprised more than half of all house holds plummeted from 59 percent to 12 percent and in central cities from 12 percent to 3 percent. By 2000, the great majority of suburbanites—including those in the Sun Belt as well as the Rust Belt—lived where married couples with children made up a small share of all families. Single mothers replaced many of these traditional families in both suburbs and cities. Between 1970 and 2000, the share of the suburban population living in census tracts where single-mother families made up at least 25 percent of all house holds leaped an amazing 440 percent—from 5 to 27 percent. In cities, it rose 84 percent—from 32 to 59 percent. As suburban populations aged, empty-nest house holds became more common. In suburbs, the share of the population aged sixty-five or older rose from 11 to 16 percent, a 45 percent increase—while it remained virtually the same, 18 percent compared to 17 percent, in central cities. The share of the suburban population living in census tracts where empty-nest house holds comprised more than 45 percent of all house holds shot up from 14 percent to 25 percent, while in central cities it dropped from 30 percent to 21 percent. In central cities, immigration combined with the increase in nonfamily and single- mother house holds to dampen the influence of population aging. Nonfamily households—young, unmarried people between eighteen and thirty-five living alone or without relatives—replaced traditional families in both cities and suburbs. Between 1970 and 2000, the share of the population living in census tracts where nonfamily house holds comprised at least 30 percent of all house holds rocketed from 8 to 35 percent in suburbs and from 28 to 57 percent in cities.

Figures 1.1 through 1.8 illustrate how these trends remapped domestic space. These maps show the change in the distribution of married-couple-with- children house holds and nonfamily house holds in metropolitan Atlanta and Boston between 1970 and 2000. Despite the differences between these Sun Belt and Rust Belt regions, trends were amazingly similar, showing the near disappearance of suburbs dominated by traditional families and the prominence everywhere of unrelated individuals living together.

A new domestic landscape emerged from these remapped house hold types. The concentration of young adults and empty nesters redefined urban economic zones. “Gentrification,” in fact, is shorthand for the impact of changing family and house hold forms on urban space. Increased numbers of single mothers living in poverty shaped new districts of concentrated poverty in central cities and fueled a rise in suburban poverty, especially in suburbs that bordered on cities. At the same time, by bringing young, working-class families back to several cities, immigration slowed the disappearance of traditional families and moderated the gulf separating gentrified neighborhoods from vast areas of concentrated poverty. Waves of immigration and industrial change had repeatedly rearranged the social geographies of cities. But the new domestic landscape demanded nothing less than a redefinition of suburban character and purpose. As the distinctions between city and suburb receded, the question “What is an American suburb?” emerged as the flip side of the question “What is an American city?”

Figure 1 (shaded areas). Census tracts in which nonfamily house holds compose more than 40 percent of all house holds, metropolitan Atlanta, 1970.

Figure 2 (shaded areas). Census tracts in which nonfamily house holds compose more than 40 percent of all house holds, metropolitan Atlanta, 2000.

Figure 3 (shaded areas). Census tracts in which nonfamily house holds compose more than 40 percent of all house holds, metropolitan Boston, 1970.

Figure 4 (shaded areas). Census tracts in which nonfamily house holds compose more than 40 percent of all house holds, metropolitan Boston, 2000.

Figure 5 (shaded areas). Census tracts in which married couple with children house holds compose more than 50 percent of all house holds, metropolitan Atlanta, 1970.

Figure 6 (shaded areas). Census tracts in which married couple with children house holds compose more than 50 percent of all house holds, metropolitan Atlanta, 2000.

Figure 7 (shaded areas). Census tracts in which married couple with children house holds compose more than 50 percent of all house holds, metropolitan Boston, 1970.

Figure 8 (shaded areas). Census tracts in which married couple with children house holds compose more than 50 percent of all house holds, metropolitan Boston, 2000.

Racial segregation also transformed urban space. Racial segregation was much higher in late than in early twentieth-century American cities. In 1930, the average African American lived in a neighborhood that was 31.7 percent black; by 1970, the percentage had jumped to 73.5. These were numbers never before experienced by any group, including the immigrants who poured into the United States in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Sociologists Douglas Massey and Nancy Denton described the situation, without exaggeration, as “American apartheid.” Affluent as well as poor African Americans experienced extreme racial segregation. In northern metropolitan areas in 1980, Massey and Denton revealed, measures of segregation for African Americans with incomes of $50,000 remained as high as for those with incomes of $2,500. In sixteen metropolitan areas, one of three African Americans lived in conditions of such high segregation that Massey and Denton labeled them “hypersegregation.”³⁷

In the 1990s, although segregation in cities declined by an average of 5.5 percentage points, the average African American still lived in a census tract that was 51 percent black, while affluent African Americans were more likely to live near African Americans with modest incomes than near comparably well-off whites, and as Shorty’s neighborhood underlined, many thousands of African Americans still lived in districts marked by the toxic combination of poverty and segregation.³⁸ Nonetheless, in the last third of the twentieth century, Massey and his colleagues show, a “new regime of residential segregation” began to emerge. Despite mass immigration from Asia, Latin America, and the Caribbean, overall levels of ethnic segregation did not rise. Measures of immigrant segregation remained “low to moderate” while, after 1970, “black segregation declined.” As racial segregation lessened, “socioeconomic segregation rose, as indicated by rising levels of dissimilarity between the poor and the affluent and between the college educated and high school graduates, yielding spatial isolation among people at the top and bottom of the socioeconomic scale.”³⁹

Geography reflected income. After the mid-1970s, income and wealth inequality, as Chapter 2 explains in more detail, increased to levels not experienced for perhaps a century, and real wages declined despite rising productivity. “The fundamental reality,” write urban scholars Peter Dreier, John Mollenkopf, and Todd Swanstrom, “is one of growing economic segregation in the context of overall rising inequality. People of different income classes are moving away from each other not just in how much income they have but also in where they live. America is breaking down into economically homogeneous enclaves.” Growing economic as well as racial inequality registered on urban space as economic segregation among whites grew notably after the 1970s. Growing economic inequality marked suburbs as well as cities as inner-ring and older suburbs experienced the poverty, population decline, job loss, and infrastructure decay usually associated with inner cities. In the early twenty- first century, as many poor people lived in suburbs as in cities.⁴⁰

In the decades after World War II, urban redevelopment also transformed city space as urban renewal displaced poor residents, usually without relocating them to alternate housing, and cleared downtown land for reuse as offices, retail sites, and homes for the affluent. Urban renewal resulted from the federal 1949 Housing Act, which authorized city governments to assemble large tracts of land by taking properties through eminent domain and selling them cheaply to developers. Its “goal was to revive downtown business districts by razing the slums, bringing new businesses into the core, and attracting middle-class residents back to the city.” To rehouse families displaced by urban renewal, the 1949 law authorized 810,000 units of public housing. By 1960, only 320,000 had been built. This public housing, by and large, remained confined to segregated districts and never matched existing needs. “Between 1956 and 1972,” observe Peter Dreier and his colleagues, “urban renewal and urban freeway construction displaced an estimated 3.8 million persons from their homes,” rehousing only a small fraction. Urban renewal, they continue, “certainly changed the skyline of some big cities by subsidizing the construction of large office buildings that housed corporate headquarters, law firms, and other corporate activity.” But it did so at a price, destroying far more “low-cost housing than it built,” while doing little “to stem the movement of people and businesses to the suburbs or to improve the economic and living conditions of inner-city neighborhoods. On the contrary, it destabilized many of them promoting chaotic racial transition and flight.”⁴¹

Destabilized cities marked by high concentrations of poverty and declining job opportunities for low-skilled workers proved fertile grounds for crime. By the late 1970s, the fear of collective violence aroused by the civil disturbances that began in the 1960s (discussed in Chapter 3) largely had given way to fears of murder, assault, and robbery reinforced by the outbreak of crack cocaine use in the 1980s, while within the segregated, impoverished cores of old cities, gangs fought each other, and black men like Herbert and Shorty killed each other (and, too often, innocent bystanders) in horrifying numbers. The number of violent crimes per 100,000 population, as reported by the FBI, rose from 160.9 in 1960 to 363.5 in 1970, 596.6 in 1980, and 729.6 in 1990 before reversing direction, declining to 506.5 in 2000 and 457.5 in 2008.⁴² Although actual crime rates declined in the 1990s, crime continued to preoccupy city residents and dominate the image of city centers. After September 11, 2001, fear of terror also stoked anxieties about urban safety. One result was a preoccupation with security that transformed urban landscapes. “Fortress L.A.” is the title of one chapter in Mike Davis’s powerful dystopian analysis of Los Angeles, City of Quartz. “Welcome to post-liberal Los Angeles,” he writes, “where the defense of luxury lifestyles is translated into a proliferation of new repressions in space and movement, undergirded by the ubiquitous ‘armed response.’ This obsession with physical security systems, and, collaterally, with the architectural policing of social boundaries, has become the zeitgeist of urban restructuring, a master narrative in the emerging built environment of the 1990s.” One “universal and ineluctable consequence of this crusade to secure the city is the destruction of accessible public space.”⁴³

The securitization of urban space results from what geographer Stephen Graham, in Cities Under Siege, labels the new “military urbanism,” whose technologies move back and forth between “Western cities and those on colonial frontiers.” In both, “hard, military-style borders, fences, and check-points around defended enclaves and ‘security zones’ are proliferating. Jersey-barrier blast walls, identity check-points, computerized CCTV, biometric surveillance and military styles of access control and protected archipelagos of fortified social, economic, political or military centres from an outside deemed unruly, impoverished or dangerous.” In Western cities, they are emerging “around strategic financial districts, embassies, tourist and consumption spaces, airport and port complexes, sports arenas, gated communities and export processing zones.” The new military urbanism rests on a paradigm shift “that renders cities’ communal and private spaces, as well as their infrastructure—along with their civilian populations—a source of targets and threats.” Cities are “at war against drugs, against terror, against insecurity itself.” A “complex mass of security and military thinkers . . . now argue that war and political violence centre overwhelmingly on the everyday spaces and circuits of urban life.”⁴⁴ The military transformation of urban space normalizes the permanence of war as a feature of city life.

Clearly, by the early twenty-first century, economic, demographic, and spatial transformations had undercut existing definitions of “urban,” “city,” and “suburb.” A variety of new urban metaphors competed to replace them.

Urban Metaphors

One set of metaphors for “urban” and “city” looks inward toward central cities; another set looks outward from them; and one urban metaphor—the “fortress city” of Mike Davis and Stephen Graham—looks in both directions at once, its new spatial organization and architectural forms designed to protect against both internal insurgencies and external threats. Urban metaphors are not mutually exclusive. Sometimes the same writers use different metaphors to capture the increasingly fractured reality of “urban” or “city.” All of them, however, try to make sense of the patterns of inequality that grew out of the economic, demographic, and spatial transformation of American cities in the second half of the twentieth century. The inward-looking metaphor that still very often comes first to mind is “inner city,” which, since the 1960s, has served as shorthand for a bundle of problems—disorder, crime, drugs, poverty, homelessness, out-of-wedlock births.⁴⁵ As a metaphor, “inner city” was colored poor and black. So pervasive did the image become that it spawned a new genre of pop u lar culture, which diffused outward from inner cities to the American heartland. “Urban music,” a category that includes “funk, soul and hip hop, as well as R and B” became “the biggest selling genre in the United States.”⁴⁶

“Post-industrial,” another inward-looking metaphor, focused on the loss of urban manufacturing rather than, as with “inner city,” demography and social structure. Political scientist John H. Mollenkopf identified a “profound transformation” that had “seriously eroded the nineteenth-century industrial city. For lack of a better term, it might be called ‘the postindustrial revolution.’ This second urban revolution grew out of and in many ways constituted a reaction against the first. If labor and capital concentrated into factories defined the industrial city, the postindustrial city is characterized by the geographic diffusion of production and population. The office building, not the factory, now provides the organizing institution of the central city.”⁴⁷ Vivid though it was, “post-industrial’s” analytic usefulness was limited. For it defined city by what it was not rather than by what it had become, thus limiting the idea’s helpfulness in reinterpreting the emergent meaning of “urban” in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.

“Dual city,” a third inward-looking metaphor, focused on the social structure that had emerged from economic and demographic transformation abetted by governments—federal, state, and local—that remapped the distribution of classes and functions across urban space and, through funding cuts, decimated services.⁴⁸ Growing class polarization, a problem everywhere in the nation (and, indeed, as Mike Davis shows, emerging in even more extreme forms around the globe), appeared most vividly in big cities.⁴⁹ Increasingly bereft of their middle class, city populations divided between rich and poor, the former buoyed by jobs in finance, information, and high-end services, the latter barely sustained by low-end service jobs, the informal economy, or government assistance. Writing in the New York Times in July 2006, economist Paul Krugman observed:

The story of the New York economy isn’t entirely a happy one. The city has essentially lost all of its manufacturing, and it’s now in the process of outsourcing both routine office work and many middle-management functions to other parts of the country.

What’s left is an urban economy that offers a mix of very highly paid financial jobs and low-wage service jobs, with relatively little in the middle. Economic disparities in New York, as in the United States as a whole, are wider than they have been since the 1920’s.⁵⁰

This was the dual city. Its two worlds, the gleaming office towers and condos and the run-down housing and public ghettos of the poor, were not two separate 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,” which, although huge, are not defined by size but as “the nodes of the global economy, concentrating the directional, productive, and managerial upper functions all over the planet: the control of the media; the real politics of power; and the symbolic power to create and diffuse messages.”⁶⁷ In the United States, the information age also has given rise to a distinctive suburban form—what Margaret Pugh O’Mara identifies as “cities of knowledge,” residential and high-tech industrial nodes built around major research universities.⁶⁸

In the early twenty-first century, these metaphors—inner city, post- industrial city, dual city, fortress city, city-region, edge city, galactic city, global city, informational city, city of knowledge—compete to answer the question “What is an American city?” All are both useful and partial. Their utility depends on the angle of interest—inward versus outward, national versus global—and the concern—inequality, environmental degradation, crime, terrorism, aesthetic value, political fragmentation, the possibility of community, for instance. They are, moreover, not entirely consistent. Examples are Garreau’s cheerful optimism about the role and future of edge cities contrasted with Hayden’s withering attack and Sassen’s emphasis on the importance of place and contiguity in global cities compared to Castells’s stress on a-geographic networks. The work of assessing and reconciling multiple metaphors for cities, and of exploring their implications, is a central and urgent task for interdisciplinary twenty-first-century urban studies. Economic, demographic, and spatial transformation have exploded old ideas of cities and suburbs, turning them into encumbrances to the reformulation of helpful public policies.

* * *

At both ends of the twentieth century, profound economic change forced redefinitions of “city.” In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the industrial city emerged as the new urban form, and a host of commentators tried to define its character. The problems they identified, and the issues on which they concentrated, are remarkably similar to those on the agenda of urbanists and public officials in the early twentyfirst century. Only now, as we have seen, the model of the old industrial city clearly is gone forever. The question, then, is how to characterize what has taken its place. What is an American city? The answer, I have tried to show, remains far from clear, with various metaphors competing for dominance.

For progressive urbanists in the early twentieth century, population density or, as they more often termed it, congestion, resulting from massive immigration posed a massive challenge to public health and morals as well as to urban infrastructure and governance.⁶⁹ A century later, urbanists confronting population loss, abandoned housing, districts returned to fields of weeds, and sprawl searched for ways to turn around the city’s de-densification and fill in empty suburban spaces with clustered housing and retail. Another huge and consequential difference between the early and late twentieth century lies in the response to urban redefinition. Consider the early twentieth-century example described by Peter Dreier and his colleagues:

In the early 1900s, New York City was a cauldron of seething problems—poverty, slums, child labor, epidemics, sweatshops and ethnic conflict. Out of that turmoil, activists created a progressive movement, forging a coalition of immigrants, unionists, muckraking journalists, settlement house workers, middle-class suffragists, socialists, and upper-class philanthropists. They fought successfully for workplace, tenement, and public health reforms. Although they spoke many languages, the movement found its voice through organizers, clergy, and sympathetic politicians. Their victories provided the intellectual and policy foundations of the New Deal three decades later.⁷⁰

Early twentieth-century urban reformers, struggling to define and tame industrial cities, grappled with the consequences of massive immigration by people with different cultures, the lack of affordable housing, the growth of poverty and homelessness, crises in public health and sanitation, and the impact of growing concentrations of wealth on society and politics. They worried about the role of privatization in municipal services, the heavy hand of state government, the weakness of mayoral executive authority, the corruption of machine politics, the inefficiencies and inequities of the courts, and the regressive and inadequate foundation of city finances on property taxes.⁷¹

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, cities tried to respond to these issues with active government—what historians have labeled progressivism. Despite the persistence of corruption, widespread poverty, and racial discrimination, in these decades cities increased municipal expenditures, professionalized their administrations, and constructed buildings and infrastructures that supported the most vibrant and successful era in American urban history. In the late twentieth century, by contrast, the response was the withdrawal of active government, evident in reduced federal funds, reliance on market-based solutions to urban problems, and the need to turn to private initiatives, like special service districts, to carry out public functions such as street cleaning and security. The results are everywhere to be seen, in homelessness on city streets, poverty spreading outward to inner suburbs, uncontrolled sprawl eating up open space, crumbling infrastructure, gross inequity in spending on public education, the future of urban finance mortgaged to casino gambling, and the incapacity to prevent or respond effectively to the devastation of Hurricane Katrina in 2005 or the subprime mortgage crisis of 2008. The widely heralded comeback of American cities is thin and fragile. Move away from shiny center cities, and it is not nearly so visible. Look at city budgets, and it does not seem nearly so robust. “What is an American city?” has begun to elicit both a cacophony of definitions and an array of intelligent and promising ideas about how to respond. But these have not coalesced into a new urban progressivism. Without the will to forge an effective and coordinated political response, the future of American cities, however defined, is unlikely to be as buoyant as their past.