The Existential Problem of Urban Studies
Katz, Michael B.
ARTICLES The Existential Problem of Urban Studies MICHAEL B. KATZ When I became director of the undergraduate Urban Studies Program at the University of Pennsylvania in 1983, I was surprised to...
...Louis but pointedly avoided the very neighborhoods in which that decline was most palpable...
...Public housing developments are often better—and certainly more affordable—than apartments available to the poor in the private housing market...
...There is a continuity that has made it possible to retain the intellectual framework of the course while updating the reading list to include, for instance, the surge in immigration and the recent decline in crime...
...and the state-and federally-funded expansion of "anchor institutions"—hospitals and universities—and even the 1965 repeal of nationality-based immigration quotas that opened the gates to the newcomers who have revived stagnating cities...
...In these new histories, government was as much the problem as the solution...
...many recent metropolitan trends, as "The State of Metropolitan America," a 2010 Brookings Institution report, makes clear, point in troubling directions...
...There were, to begin with, the facts on the ground...
...Was the narrative of failure the only game in town...
...What accounts for this uncharacteristic consensus across ideological lines...
...Attacks on public bureaucracy from the political Left and withering criticisms of public institutions and programs helped legitimate and fuel the Right's drive to shrink government, unleash markets, and privatize public programs and institutions...
...Locating politically conservative, card-carrying historians of recent urban America is difficult...
...moral hazards introduced by generous public programs...
...Their answers focused on the reproduction of class, race, and gender inequalities and on the dysfunctions of bureaucracy...
...It tells a story of deindustri-alization, population decline, racial segregation, failed public housing, and so on—all of it true and inescapable...
...Erickson argues that decentralized networks of Community Development Corporations, public agencies, private partners, fiscal intermediaries, and others have replaced top-down, centralized housing authorities as builders of affordable housing...
...In her brilliant 2009 book Poverty Capital: Microfinance and the Making of Development, Ananya Roy puts the dilemma this way: In teaching my course [Global Poverty] at Berkeley I am struck by a contrast...
...I teach in the impossible space between the hubris of benevolence and the paralysis of cynicism...
...But it is not complete...
...Writers on both the political Left and Right tell essentially the same story about the history of American cities since the Second World War...
...There are probably 500,000 families on the waiting lists of the nation's 3,060 local housing authorities...
...The author wishes to thank Professor Daniel Amsterdam for a helpful and perceptive reading of a draft of this paper...
...But the high-rise projects, most of them in the largest cities, accounted for many of the most problematic developments and cast a giant shadow on the whole program...
...A half century of urban renewal and redevelopment programs," Gordon observes, "not only failed to stem the decline of central St...
...Louis in 1972-1974...
...The answer, of course, is no...
...The bits and pieces of a new narrative illustrating the constructive role of government lie scattered, waiting to be assembled into a coherent story...
...To critics on both the Left and Right, the growth of large, rigid, unresponsive bureaucracies shielded public officials from the people they served and the consequences of their actions...
...urban problems (segregation, poverty, unemployment, fiscal crisis) spilling into the inner suburbs...
...The giant shadow cast over public housing by high-rise projects in large cities has obscured not only low-rise developments but, as well, the "housing policy revolution" identified by David James Erickson in his 2009 book, The Housing Policy Revolution: Networks and Neighborhoods...
...Or had urban scholars grown lazy and unimaginative...
...Many of those high-rise projects have been demolished in the last two decades...
...In the 1980s and 1990s, they even began to use the same metaphor, "urban underclass," to describe the stigmatized women and men who embodied the urban crisis and the failures of public policy...
...Where writers on the Right and Left diverge is in their stories about the origins of urban decline...
...The Great Recession has decimated city budgets, increased homelessness and hunger, and pushed up poverty rates in suburbs as well as cities...
...obstacles that inhibited market processes...
...On the one hand, I have students who are brimming with enthusiasm to do good...
...The Left was trapped because it lacked a viable counter-narrative...
...Despite their different ontologies, in the 1960s and 1970s progressive and conservative versions of urban crisis shared a common enemy: bureaucracy...
...selfish labor unions that drove up costs without corresponding increases in productivity...
...The years since have witnessed extraordinary changes in cities, so great, in fact, that the first part of the title, "urban crisis," probably is an anachronism...
...In the 1960s and 1970s, when historians finally began to rip away the veil that obscured uncomfortable images of America's past, they discovered jarring contradictions between the theory and practice of major institutions, such as public schools, mental asylums, reformatories, welfare agencies, and public housing...
...Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid...
...No such book existed...
...new forms of public/private partnerships...
...Locating and occupying this impossible space is the existential dilemma of urban studies—and of the American Left as well...
...How do we construct a coherent and realistic narrative that does not leave our students either cynical or depressed...
...Nor was it possible to ignore the coincidence of urban crisis with both the major successes of the civil rights movement and unmatched federal spending on cities and urban-related programs...
...But its effects are all around us, from the hegemony of market models in public policy to public opinion polls showing that huge majorities of Americans distrust government and lack faith in its capacity to solve public problems...
...Then the Left lost control of this emerging narrative of failure, which was appropriated by the political Right...
...How the narrative of failure permeates American life— threading back from the Great Society to the New Deal—is a topic for another time...
...Researchers unearthed ever more instances of publicly sanctioned racial discrimination, badly flawed public housing, venal politicians and realtors, government-encouraged suburban sprawl, and on and on...
...indeed, it leaves me depressed...
...And it leaves students depressed...
...The story begins with the idealistic hopes of the 1930s, dashed by a deadly mix of racism, mean-spirited public officials, and an overdose of modernist, high-rise architecture...
...Most historians have told more or less the same story about failures in different cities...
...In many cities, it takes between two and five years—and sometimes longer—to get off the waiting list and into public housing...
...As urban historians piled on accounts of failed policies and programs, they naturalized public failure as the master narrative of urban history...
...Useful, even energizing, as they are, they do not add up to a coherent response to the narrative of failure that dominates writing about recent urban history...
...In this, my experience teaching the course parallels a wider dilemma confronting urban studies as a field...
...ARTICLES The Existential Problem of Urban Studies MICHAEL B. KATZ When I became director of the undergraduate Urban Studies Program at the University of Pennsylvania in 1983, I was surprised to find that it lacked a multidisciplinary course that aimed to provide a coherent interpretation of contemporary urban America...
...So we are back where we started...
...The problem of writing recent urban history is the same as the problem of teaching it...
...With regard to affordable housing, the narrative of failure, if Erickson is correct, has become an anachronism...
...So I have searched for rays of hope, examples of progressive change, and found many...
...What, historians now asked, had been the actual purposes and results of state-led institution building...
...None of what they said or wrote (and I include myself among them) was untrue or unimportant...
...Full disclosure: I was one of the historians coming of age professionally in the late 1960s and early 1970s who contributed to this interpretation...
...But I had a problem in teaching the course...
...A story that subordinates urban decline and failed urban polices—that substitutes Pollyanna for Cassandra—would be no more complete or helpful than its opposite...
...The climax comes with the demolition of high-rise public housing projects in city after city, starting with the Pruitt-Igoe complex in St...
...More material for a new narrative derives, as well, from urban politics revived by grassroots social movements...
...But most public housing never consisted primarily of high-rise towers, and whatever the critics think, public housing developments usually have long waiting lists...
...They include the results of federal urban policies, notably the Community Reinvestment Act and Hope VI, and the indirect consequences of other public programs that pour money into cities, for instance, jobs created through Great Society programs...
...Similar stories could be told about accounts of public education, social welfare, mental hospitals, reform schools, and criminal justice by historians on the political Left...
...Both sides use the same trope, "urban crisis," to sum up the results of post-Second World War urban history...
...In City of the Right, his review of recent conservative thought on cities, Gerald Houseman points out that the late Milton Friedman concluded, "The record of government in dealing with urban problems is one of miserable failure...
...a failure so complete that it is impossible to name a single governmental program developed over recent decades and aimed at poverty, or urban problems, or social welfare, or 'reform,' that has achieved its objectives...
...This dilemma, in turn, encapsulates the failure of the American Left to reclaim the narrative of recent American history...
...Still, replacing the narrative of failure is a project for the American Left...
...But maybe not...
...Wonderful young people, eager to help change the world, confront a tale of powerful structural forces abetted by ambitious politicians, by every level of government, by racism, greedy real estate and corporate interests, and academic researchers impotent to suggest realistic avenues for change...
...Despite the popular stereotypes, a decade ago high-rises accounted for only one-quarter of public housing buildings...
...Michael B. Katz is Walter H. Annenberg Professor of History at the University of Pennsylvania and the founder and co-director of the Graduate Certificate Program in Urban Studies...
...and, sometimes, as in Los Angeles, multi-ethnic coalitions...
...There don't seem to be any...
...If they didn't, how should they incorporate their radical criticism of social policy into a counter-narrative that subordinated "market price to social value," to borrow a phrase from T. H. Marshall...
...As left historians composed a narrative of failure, they unwittingly gave the Right a gift— an interpretation that could be appropriated in the campaign to reduce the size and influence of government and privatize public functions...
...employment and the tax base continuing to sprawl to the outer suburbs...
...In his 2008 Public Housing that Worked: New York in the Twentieth Century, Nicolas Dagen Bloom shows that some cities managed high-rise public housing well...
...Most American cities emerged from the heyday of urban renewal in similar shape—central city decay punctuated by the occasional stadium or convention center...
...On the other hand, I have students who are cynical, those who are able to level sharp critiques of structures of injustice but not believe that change is possible...
...There are innumerable examples...
...The temptation to jettison the narrative of urban failure in favor of progress and hope must be resisted...
...Consequently, the Left found itself trapped in an ideological box from which it could not easily escape...
...But they virtually stopped looking for a story that would support a different politics...
...Conservatives tended to blame the urban crisis on the inherent inefficiency and wastefulness of government...
...Cities face huge unsolved problems...
...most public housing developments today are garden apartments, low-rise walk ups, and single family homes or town-houses...
...From the Left, consider Colin Gordon's extraordinary 2008 book, Mapping Urban Decline: St...
...They include, too, the surprising identification of a local urban liberalism that moderated the impact of deindustrialization—a story told by Guian McKee in his extraordinary 2009 book, The Problem of Jobs, and the signs of neighborhood revival reported by Paul S. Grogan and Tony Proscio in Comeback Cities: A Blueprint for Urban Neighborhoods...
...They believe they can...
...All that is true...
...I wanted to give the students a single book that explained it all...
...Louis and the Fate of the American City...
...The political Left linked urban crisis to a number of factors: deindustrialization and job loss, the impact of the Vietnam war on money for federal urban and social spending, the institutionalized racism that still tainted public policies and institutions, greedy state and local politicians unwilling to relinquish power or resources, narrowly self-interested homeowners who resisted racial integration, Americans' historic distrust of cities and contempt for their dis-advantaged residents, and federal policies that fueled the growth of suburbs...
...and disastrous, if "politically correct," policies, such as affirmative action and busing...
...Is this the vision that I want to leave with our students...
...What accounted for deindustrialized, segregated, financially strapped, often violent cities with their failed public institutions and surrounding white suburbs...
...In the Web-based Talking Points Memo, housing expert Peter Dreier observes that, the best-kept secret about public housing is that it actually provides decent, affordable housing for many people...
...Did left-leaning historians really believe that government was the problem, not the solution...
...But myriad conservative commentators have framed a narrative about post-Second World War cities remarkably similar to the one offered by the political Left...
...Grogan and Proscio find the "American inner city rebounding—not just here and there, not just cosmetically, but fundamentally...
...Urbanists' relentless emphasis on government complicity in the failures of public housing and the growth of urban ghettos opened doors through which other writers with different agendas happily passed...
...I called the course "Urban Crisis: American Cities Since World War II," and first taught it in 1984...
...In the circumstances, I felt compelled to undertake the task of synthesis myself in a single, introductory-level course...
...The physical deterioration of American cities, increase in concentrated poverty, rise in crime, flight of industry and jobs, loss of white population, spread of segregation, failure of urban schools—all exacerbated by a shrinking tax base and inadequate revenues—could not be missed or minimized by any honest reporter of urban conditions...
...they want to save the world...
...The history of public housing supplies an interesting case...
...Although their explanations of trends and the morals they draw differ, they agree that recent urban history is an account of failure...
...Success stories fill the early history of public housing...
Vol. 57 • October 2010 • No. 4
