Cities in the urban age: a dissent

230 Pages·2019·1.248 MB·English

by  Beauregard, Robert A

Cities in the Urban Age

Cities in the
Urban Age
A Dissent
ROBERT A. BEAUREGARD
The University of Chicago Press Chicago and London
The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637
The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London
© 2018 by The University of Chicago
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced
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Published 2018
Printed in the United States of America
27 26 25 24 23 22 21 20 19 18 1 2 3 4 5
ISBN-1 3: 978- 0-2 26-5 3524- 1 (cloth)
ISBN-1 3: 978- 0-2 26-5 3538- 8 (paper)
ISBN-1 3: 978- 0-2 26-5 3541- 8 (e-b ook)
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/[9780226535418].001.0001
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Beauregard, Robert A., author.
Title: Cities in the urban age : a dissent / Robert A. Beauregard.
Description: Chicago ; London : The University of Chicago Press,
2018. | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifi ers: LCCN 2017024308 | ISBN 9780226535241
(cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780226535388 (pbk. : alk. paper) |
ISBN 9780226535418 (e-book)
Subjects: LCSH: Cities and towns. | Cities and towns—Social
aspects. | Urban economics. | Cities and towns—Political aspects. |
Cities and towns—Social aspects—United States. | Cities and
towns—Political aspects—United States.
Classifi cation: LCC HT151 .B38 2018 | DDC 307.76—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017024308
This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48– 1992
(Permanence of Paper).
Contents
Preface vii
1 The City 1
2 Wealth, Poverty 22
3 Destructive, Sustainable 56
4 Oligarchic, Democratic 87
5 Intolerant, Tolerant 120
6 Encountering Contradictions 152
Acknowledgments 173 Notes 175 Index 209

Preface
With few exceptions, those who currently write and speak
about the city do so in celebration. They portray the city
as the driving force of national economies—a hinge that
connects countries to global fl ows of capital, people, and
ideas. The city nurtures innovation, brings forth unlim-
ited opportunities to pursue fame and fortune, and, with
its high density and large- scale infrastructures, offers the
best hope for environmental sustainability. To live in
this city is to be surrounded by a vast and rich array of
culinary, cultural, and consumer pleasures. There, people
from different backgrounds, national origins, and life-
styles create a vibrant and a tolerant public realm. And,
while some people might choose to live elsewhere, no
country can prosper without such cities.
At least this is what we are told.
One would have to be mean- spirited to deny to those
who make this argument their fascination with the city.
I, too, am endlessly intrigued and, at times, even in awe.
What bothers me, though, is the subtext of progress. The
underlying premise is that, over the centuries, the city
has become better and better at serving the needs of the
planet. Today’s boosters would have us believe that hu-
mans have slowly but relentlessly devised a form of h uman
settlement that offers security and prosperity while hold-
ing forth the possibility of surmounting the mundane
demands of everyday life. For such urbanists, the claim
that more than one- half of the world’s population now
resides in cities is less an empirical observation than a
thinly veiled, triumphal boast. National fanaticism, wars,
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PREFACE
religious intolerance, and institutionalized corruption might resist all
of our efforts to eliminate them, but the city ostensibly exists as the
one human achievement that has become increasingly adept at meet-
ing our needs.
As two well- known policy experts recently wrote: “The metropolis
is humanity’s greatest collective act of invention and imagination.”
They are not alone in their opinion: the economist Edward Glaeser
has declared that cities “enable the collaboration that makes humanity
shine most brightly.” More equivocally, but no less enthralled, Nan
Rothschild and Diane diZerega, both archaeologists, claim that
cities “are arguably the most signifi cant of human inventions.” Such
laudatory, even hyperbolic, statements are not only prevalent in the
contemporary literature on the city but generally uncontested as well.1
The city, and specifi cally the US city— the topic of this book—w as
not always so inviting. In fact, throughout much of its history it has
been under the sway of contradictory impulses with prosperity exist-
ing alongside impoverishment and tolerance entwined with prejudice
and discrimination. In short, the city is not wholly advantageous. As
recently as the early twentieth century, its residents were overwhelmed
by epidemics, were made ill by contaminated water, lacked basic health
care, and had limited access to education. Most people of the time con-
demned the city as a pestilence and abomination that signaled the de-
cay of civilization, not its realization. The cities’ residents, noted one
observer in 1911, “lived in smoke, amid ugly and incongruous build-
ings with unattractive highways, often poor and almost always inade-
quate, and without suitable parks, park space, trees, and other aesthetic
essentials.”2 The city seemed more of a burden than a blessing.
In the mid- twentieth century, these same cities— all former manu-
facturing centers— entered a period of unrelenting and chronic loss of
population and jobs. Soon thereafter, deprived of tax revenues, their
local governments began to reduce the public services that had kept
the city clean and well maintained and its residents protected from
harm. Conditions deteriorated even further when African-A mericans
rioted in protest of police brutality and the dismal conditions under
which they were forced to live. For some, these years of “urban cri-
sis” marked the death of cities and presaged their eventual extinction.
The future seemed to lie in less dense forms of human settlement— the
mass- produced suburbs in particular. A generalized aversion to c ities
— an anti-u rbanism— became part of the national culture in many in-
dustrialized countries.3 Yet, a mere fi fty years later, the city has been
rescued from this dire fate and has ostensibly become—o nce again—a
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PREFACE
symbol of human civilization and a cultural achievement of immense
signifi cance.
This widely shared and fl attering view rests on the presupposition
that the city exists and endures because it allows us to share lives of
prosperity, opportunity, and fulfi llment. As the world’s population has
grown, innovations have proliferated, economies have expanded, and
people have been drawn together on the land. Across the centuries, we
are told, the city has emerged as the settlement form that best enables
people to provide for their needs and nurture their aspirations. The city
seems to solve many of the problems that people confront in fi nding a
place to live, raising families, creating communities, forming societies,
and inventing nations. This is what progress looks like.
Praise is always comforting, and the point of view that gives rise to
this fl attery is so prevalent and so embedded in how we think about
the city that it is impossible to imagine a more appropriate way of
bringing people and activities together. What would be the alternative?
Any replacement would seem to require a radical change in how people
engage with each other, the many ways they meet their needs, and
how they wish to be governed. Such an alternative borders on science
fi ction. We can no more imagine a world without large cities than we
can imagine a future without smartphones, automobiles, and surveil-
lance cameras.
Contemporary urban commentary is rooted in this assumption of
progress, of a successive overcoming of challenges and a corresponding
improvement in how we live together. New construction techniques,
medicines, means of communication, production processes, and com-
modities mark the advance of civilization. This assumption of progress,
however, is wrong.
The city has a dark side, acknowledged by even its most rabid advo-
cates, of concentrated poverty, slums, racial discrimination, environ-
mental destruction, anti- immigrant sentiment, and (now) terrorism.
Too many residents in too many cities are exploited, marginalized,
or treated unjustly. Although we have made advances in disposing of
human waste, providing housing for large numbers of people, protect-
ing the natural environment, and maintaining public health, thereby
making it possible for large and dense cities to function, many of the
problems these advances address— contaminated water, the paucity of
inexpensive and high- quality housing, for example— persist. Moreover,
the benefi ts have not accrued to everyone. Neither have contemporary
cities banished the injustices and inequalities that plague all human
relations. Nor are they ever likely to do so.4
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