What is an American City?

...A huge difference between the early and late twentieth century lies in the response to urban redefinition...

...One point about this history requires emphasis...

...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 Camillo Jos‚ Vergara, who has documented the emergence of the "green ghetto" in rustbelt America...

...URBAN METAPHORS By the early twenty-first century, economic, demographic, and spatial transformations had undercut all the existing definitions, and a variety of new urban metaphors competed to replace them...

...Suburbs remained predominantly white until late in the twentieth century, when immigrants and African Americans began moving out of the center cities in significant numbers-although even in the suburbs African Americans often clustered in segregated neighborhoods or dominated some suburban towns...

...Philadelphia and Los Angeles, for instance, provide especially apt comparisons because they embody the old and the new urban America...

...The decimation of manufacturing evident in Philadelphia and other rustbelt cities resulted from both the growth of foreign industries, notably electronics and automobiles, and the corporate search for cheaper labor...

...With chain migration linking towns and villages in Latin America and the Caribbean with U.S...

...By 2000, they had begun to spread out across the nation, transforming suburbs and both small and large cities...

...All of them are both useful and partial...

...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...

...More immigrants entered the United States in the 1990s than in any other decade in its history...

...These changes subverted the suburbs' historic function as providers of housing for families with children...

...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 current-day cities, just as Jacob Riis's depiction in How the Other Half Lives captured the emerging industrial social structure a century ago...

...As urban problems spread outward, distinctions lessened, and the real differentiation separated older inner suburbs from those further out on the periphery of metropolitan areas, which, themselves, could not remain immune from the urban problems attendant on growth...

...A variety of outward-looking metaphors"city region," "metropolitan area," "elastic/inelastic city," "galactic city"-try to capture the extension of cities beyond their legal boundaries...

...Old industrial cities, like Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Detroit, lost manufacturing jobs and population...

...They are, moreover, not entirely consistent...

...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...

...If any one person can be anointed patron saint of urban studies, Jacobs deserves the crown...

...As services replaced manufacturing everywhere, office towers became the late twentieth century's urban factories...

...A keen observer, in fact, could find the dissolution of conventional urban form described much earlier than the closing decades of the twentieth century...

...Philadelphia, on the other hand, could not surmount its place as a second-order city on the international stage...

...regions...

...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...

...Census reflected social and economic trends during the preceding century...

...Three public intellectuals-David Rusk, Myron Orfield, and Bruce Katz-have led the effort to substitute metropolitan for narrowly bounded definitions of current-day cities...

...To be sure, knowledge and information processing have been important to every mode of production...

...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...

...Phoenix, Houston, Las Vegas, and other sunbelt cities more or less followed the Los Angeles model and grew rapidly...

...Recently, I 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...

...TRANSFORMATIONS Despite their differences, Philadelphia and Los Angeles experienced the common transformations of economy, demography, and space that have led to new American cities...

...So pervasive did the image become that it spawned a new genre of popular culture that diffused outward from inner cities to the American heartland...

...globaland the concern-inequality, environmental degradation, aesthetic value, political fragmentation, the possibility of community, for instance...

...Economic, demographic, and spatial transformation have exploded old ideas of cities and suburbs, turning them into encumbrances to the reformulation of helpful public policies...

...Cities such as Las Vegas...

...The original container has completely disappeared: the sharp division between city and country no longer exists...

...global metaphors joined them to the world...

...Their utility depends on the angle of interestinward vs...

...The first urban demographic transformation was the migration of African Americans from the South to northern and midwestern, even, to some extent, western cities...

...Racial segregation was much higher in late- than in early-twentieth-century American cities...

...A broad category, service embraces both demanding and rewarding jobs and low-wage, nonunionized employment that offers few benefits...

...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...

...another set looks outward to metropolitan areas...

...Sometimes the same writers use different metaphors to capture the increasingly fractured reality of "urban" or "city...

...Form" should be "forms"what we have today is an unprecedented configuration of urban places that calls into question the definition of city itself...

...Historian Robert Fishman proclaimed the end of the era of the suburb defined as a sylvan residential enclave for affluent male-headed families, a "bourgeois utopia" of commuters...

...But we have yet to see a powerful and pervasive new urban progressivism...

...and, to some extent, Chicago...

...Garreau's cheerful optimism about the future of edge cities contrasts with Hayden's withering attack, and Sassen's emphasis on the importance of place and contiguity in global cities contrasts with Castells's stress on a-geographic networks...

...With Jacobs's criteria, they never can qualify as good cities...

...At both ends of the twentieth century, profound economic change forced redefinitions of "city...

...outward, national vs...

...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...

...Others, like Max Weber and Georg Simmel, searched for its essence as they advanced new theories of the city...

...THE NEW AMERICAN CITY What is an American city...

...By the 1980s, he held, the classic suburb had been replaced by the "post-suburb" or "technoburb...

...In the decades after the Second World War, 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, retailing, and homes for the affluent...

...These are places "with more than one hundred thousand residents that are not the largest cities in their respective metropolitan areas and that have maintained doubledigit rates of population growth in recent decades...

...Political scientist John H. Mollenkopf identified a "profound transformation" that had seriously eroded the nineteenth-century industrial city...

...Stern and I set out to examine how the 2000 U.S...

...Metropolitan metaphors linked cities to their regions...

...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...

...Grossly unequal public services and tax burdens, environmental degradation, sprawl, racial segregation, anemic job growth: these, they argue, can be countered only through metropolitanwide actions...

...Recognizing the inadequacy of the conventional city/suburb/rural distinction, the U.S...

...Another emerges clearly from contrasting actual cities...

...Recently, Robert E. Lang and his colleagues identified "boomburbs," the "ultimate symbol of today's sprawling postwar metropolitan form...

...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 work of assessing and reconciling multiple metaphors and exploring their implications is a central and urgent task for interdisciplinary urban studies...

...Suburbanization and racial segregation transformed urban space...

...Others reclassified suburbs differently...

...What has taken their place...

...The emergence of this new urban form energized late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century social science and reform...

...He cites approvingly a writer 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...

...In the late twentieth century, by contrast, the response to similar issues 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...

...They sped to their suburban homes along the new interstate highway system...

...Even though service industries dominated its economy to an unprecedented degree, Los Angeles probably was America's most important twentieth-century industrial city...

...cities, Mike Davis writes of the creation of new suburban forms extending across national boundaries as "transnational suburbs...

...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...

...Certainly, the former view-the belief in a core set of ideas defining healthy urbanism-underlies one of the most influential urban design movements of today: new urbanism...

...Even more than Jacobs's death, what forced me to confront the protean quality of today's urbanism and the inadequacy of singular definitions was my research on a book, One Nation Divisible: What America Was and What It Is Becoming, co-authored with Mark J. Stern...

...The same situation occurred during the transition from the nineteenth to the twentieth century, when an emergent industrial civilization, based on a global economy, shattered existing ideas, producing, among other changes, a new urban form: the industrial city...

...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 have undermined the standard concepts with which we interpret public life: work, city, race, family, nationality...

...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 updated edition of his book The Price of Citizenship: Redefining the American Welfare State was recently published by University of Pennsylvania Press...

...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...

...The other view, which finds new urbanism an exercise in nostalgia out of touch with the forces driving urban change, is represented by Robert Bruegmann in his 2005 Sprawl: A Compact History...

...At the same time, married couples with children made up a shrinking percentage of suburban populations...

...In the fortunate cities like Los Angeles, new economic functions included the production of the financial and business services and products that served the emergent international economy...

...Between 1957 and 1990, the sunbelt's urban population, lured by economic opportunity and an appealing climate and boosted by annexation as well as in-migration, climbed from eight-and-a-half to twenty-three million...

...Rather than regional centers, global cities are "command points in the organization of the world economy...

...Is the fault with these cities or with the criteria...

...has begun to elicit both a cacophony of definitions and an array of intelligent and promising ideas about how to respond...

...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...

...But is this a useful assessment...

...Gentrification, the rehabilitation of working-class housing for use by a wealthier class, played a modest counterpoint to urban renewal...

...They worried about the role of privatization in municipal services, the heavy hand of state government, the weakness of mayoral 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...

...One set of metaphors looks inward toward central cities...

...For Manuel Castells, the late-twentieth-century "informational city" replaces the early-twentiethcentury "industrial city...

...and, indeed, the world...

...At least implicitly, this makes recapturing the past the goal of urban reform...

...Vivid though it was, analytic usefulness of the metaphor "postindustrial" was limited...

...According to Maclean's, "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...

...The office building, not the factory, now provides the organizing institution of the central city...

...After more than forty years, it retains its powerful impact...

...Although the book has the same effect on me-new delights emerge every time I read it-recently, I wonder if it does as much to inhibit as to advance our grasp of American cities today...

...Massive immigration following changes to federal law in 1965 also transformed urban demography...

...Did Jacobs bequeath us a definition of urbanism or do we need a different set of markers to characterize what makes a city-and a good city-in earlytwentyfirst-century America...

...The result was a new domestic landscape that increasingly called into question the meaning of "suburb" as well as "city...

...The answer remains far from clear...

...Their conventional meanings lie smashed, badly in need of redefinition...

...In the sunbelt, in cities like Los Angeles, population trends went in the opposite direction...

...The problems they identified, and the issues on which they concentrated, are remarkably similar to those on the agenda of urbanists in the early twenty-first century...

...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...

...New urbanism does not take Jacobs's criteria literally, although her spirit is visible in its emphasis on density, mixed residential and commercial use, pedestrian-friendly streets, and vibrant public spaces...

...The question, then, is how to characterize what has taken its place...

...Four of five settled in metropolitan areas, clustering in "gateway" cities: New York...

...MICHAEL B. KATZ For many years I have argued that in the decades after the Second World War, economic, demographic, and spatial transformations in the United States resulted in an urban form unlike any other in history...

...For years, when urban historians wrote about the `city,' they meant the center, the skyline, downtown...

...Although the earliest date from before the Civil War, vestiges of all of them still exist...

...If you poke around just a little in current writing about cities it pops up, either explicitly or by implication...

...The two sets are not mutually exclusive...

...Public housing, by and large, remained confined to segregated districts and never matched existing needs...

...Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, and the Twin Cities struggled with mixed success...

...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...

...Others, like geographer Wei Li, focusing on the new suburbanization of immigration, have identified a suburban variant they call "ethnoburbs," which "serve as bridges between historical ethnic neighborhoods and the broader region...

...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...

...They also included, as, again, notably in Los Angeles, the reappearance of small-scale manufacturing drawing on inexpensive immigrant labor...

...Its two worlds, the gleaming office towers and condos and the rundown housing and public ghettos of the poor, were not two separate spheres...

...The "finance and producer services complex in each city," she asserts, "rests on a growth dynamic that is somewhat independent of the broader regional economya sharp change from the past, when a city was presumed to be deeply articulated with its hinterland...

...More recently, in his iconoclastic history of sprawl, Bruegmann observes, "With the penetration of urban functions into the countryside, the old distinctions between urban, suburban, and rural have collapsed...

...In 1910, 84 percent of the foreign born in greater Philadelphia lived in the central city...

...The widely heralded comeback of American cities is thin and fragile...

...With the book as a yardstick, they find that currentday cities come up short...

...Louis, Detroit-nearly collapsed...

...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 exurban development, inner-city decay, and obsolescence of the suburban built environment...

...The contrast between Philadelphia and Los Angeles reflected not only changes in the two cities over time but also America's divergent regional history...

...Saskia Sassen, whose work set the agenda for debate on global cities, identifies a set of such cities at the pinnacle of new urban hierarchies, detached from their regions and connected, instead, to the world of international finance and trade...

...Those with no alternatives-Baltimore, Cleveland, Buffalo, St...

...Mostly from Asia and Latin America, these immigrants altered the ethnic mix of America's population, most notably of its cities, and fueled most of the urban population growth that occurred during the 1990s...

...In the early twenty-first century, these metaphors-inner city, postindustrial city, dual city, city-region, edge city, galactic city, global city, informational city, city of knowledgecompete to answer the question, What is an American city...

...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 more than half black, while affluent African Americans were more likely to live near African Americans with modest incomes than near comparably well-off whites...

...and, in some ways, New Orleans built economies on entertainment, hospitality, and retirement...

...In the North and Midwest the number of African American newcomers often did not equal the number of whites who left...

...All of them have lost their moorings in the way life is actually lived today...

...My point that we need new answers to the question of what constitutes an American city is hardly original...

...The inward-looking metaphor that still 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-ofwedlock births...

...As James Gregory has shown, in the same years, more than twice as many white southerners also moved to the North and Midwest...

...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, the incapacity to prevent or respond effectively to the devastation of Hurricane Katrina in 2005, and the subprime mortgage crisis...

...Growing economic as well as racial inequality reconfigured urban space as well...

...A second outward-looking metaphor defines modern cities by what they produce...

...Suburbia conceals as well as reveals its complexity," observes historian Delores Hayden in Building Suburbia...

...Its identification of mixed use, short blocks, multi-age dwellings, and density as defining a healthy neighborhood is based on models of old cities like Philadelphia, New York, Boston, or many of the cities of Europe...

...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...

...Clearly, though, 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...

...In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, cities tried to respond to these issues with active government-what historians have labeled progressivism...

...Look at city budgets, and it does not seem nearly so robust...

...Between 1950 and 1970, overall, the population of American cities grew by ten million people, and the population of suburbs by eighty-five million...

...Early-twentieth-century 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...

...Despite the persistence of corruption, widespread poverty, and racial discrimination, cities increased municipal expenditures, professionalized their administrations, and constructed buildings and infrastructures that supported the most vibrant and successful era in American urban history...

...Nearly every trend that is currently transforming the United States...has appeared in some form in Los Angeles...

...Within this territory, the "old distinctions between rural and urban" no longer applied...

...Los Angeles emerged as a major center in the Pacific basin and an important player in the global economy...

...Although Megalopolis was most developed in the northeastern United States, it represented the future of the world...

...The April 25, 2006, death of Jane Jacobs was one of the events that prompted me to rethink my narrative of recent urban history...

...L.A.'s heterogeneous population-far more diverse than Philadelphia's ever was-came from around the globe as well as from all over America...

...Phoenix...

...Its charter defines a set of principles it considers adaptable to a wide array of places from suburbs to shopping malls...

...Within cities, racial segregation increased through 1970, with growing numbers of African Americans clustered in districts of concentrated poverty...

...Looking closely, she identifies seven suburban patterns...

...The question, "What is an American city...

...Suburban growth, which had begun much earlier, exploded in the years after the Second World War, with suburbs growing ten times faster than cities in the 1950s...

...Similar trends appeared everywhere...

...In The Next Los Angeles, Robert Gottlieb and his colleagues observe, "To understand the future of America, one needs to understand Los Angeles...

...This was the dual city...

...In the same years, the share of the suburban population living in census tracts where young, unmarried people between eighteen and thirtyfive living alone or without relatives predominated rocketed from 8 percent to 35 percent...

...Death and Life resonates with their ideal of urbanism and gives them a set of criteria for identifying a good city...

...Census Bureau began to develop a reclassification of municipalities based on a sophisticated mathematical model, which, if it works, should greatly facilitate comparative urban research and policy development...

...As African Americans moved into cities, whites moved out...

...This new megalopolis was shaped by the automobile rather than the railroad, which, along with the streetcar, did so much to define America's industrial cities in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries...

...Indeed, dualcity theorists stressed the links that joined them: they produced and depended on one another...

...Only now, as we have seen, the model of the old industrial city is gone forever...

...Movement into gentrified neighborhoods was not large enough to reverse overall population decline outside of select neighborhoods, but it did transform cityscapes as it attracted young, white professionals with aboveaverage incomes and empty-nesters who demanded new services and amenities...

...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...

...At mid century, 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...

...Orfield divided metropolitan areas into six categories of municipalities based on their financial capacity and age...

...This second urban revolution grew out of and in many ways constituted a reaction against the first...

...Michael B. Katz is Walter H. Annenberg professor of history at the University of Pennsylvania...

...Growing class polarization, a problem everywhere in the nation (and, indeed, as Mike Davis shows, in even more extreme forms around the globe), appeared most vividly in big cities...

...Her 1961 Death and Life of Great American Cities must be the most widely read and influential book ever written about American cities...

...The geographer Peirce Lewis calls this urban form, described "in any sixthgrade geography book written before the [Second World] war" as the "nucleated city...

...In a sample of fourteen representative metropolitan areas, between 1970 and 2000, the proportion of suburban census tracts where married couples and their children composed more than half of all households plummeted from 59 percent to 12 percent...

...Flows of exchange are at the core of the American edge city...

...L.A.'s sprawling, multicentered, multiethnic regional development posed a dramatic contrast to the old model of a single, dense core surrounded by residential zones and a suburban periphery, exemplified by the Philadelphia region...

...If you move away from shiny center cities, it is not nearly so visible...

...Yet, the growing, dynamic, vibrant components of urban America are more like Phoenix and Los Angeles than the old East Coast cities...

...He wishes to thank Domenic Vitiello, who did the research for the comparison of Philadelphia and Los Angeles...

...Population, retailing, services, and industry all suburbanized...

...Where city and suburb rubbed up against each other, they were becoming more alike...

...Just what a suburb was, what made it distinct, was no longer clear...

...As a metaphor, inner city was colored poor and black...

...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...

...This nucleated city and its compact suburbs no longer exist...

...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...

...mutant forms of urbanism, they repel rather than attract anyone who loves cities...

...Castells's informational city is better understood as a network than a place, a process rather than an object...

...By 2006, the number had plummeted to 35 percent...

...It defined the city by what it was not rather than by what it had become...

...For lack of a better term, it might be called "the postindustrial revolution...

...Economic segregation among whites, for instance, grew notably after the 1970s...

...Aggressive and often unscrupulous realtors, fanning fears of racial change, played a role as well...

...Pronouncements by authorities are one way to illustrate the need to redefine what city means in the early twenty-first century...

...Miami...

...What distinguishes the informational mode "is the action of knowledge upon knowledge itself as the main source of productivity...

...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 nonurban surroundings...

...In the same year (also, remarkably, the same year as Death and Life), 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...

...Thanks to labor market networks in agricultural work, construction, landscaping, lowend manufacturing, and domestic service, Hispanics spread out faster than any other ethnic group in American history...

...Across the nation, the suburbanization of immigration became a major factor reshaping metropolitan geography...

...Postindustrial," another inward-looking metaphor, focused on the loss of urban manufacturing rather than on demography and social structure...

...Los Angeles...

...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...

...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...

...Albuquerque...

...I have assigned it often to students, who invariably find it moving and convincing...

...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...