EPILOGUE
LOOKING TO
THE FUTURE
Since changes are going on
anyway, the great thing is to
learn enough about them so
that we will be able to lay
hold of them and turn them
111 the direction of our desires.
Conditions and events are
neither to be fled from nor
passively acquiesced in; they
a re to be utilized and directed.
John Dewey, Reco11structio11
in Philosoph y
CHAPTER
18
The Shape of Things
to Come
Themes and Counterthemes
We end this book as we began, invoking themes of urban life, economics, and
politics. But as we have learned, the city is in large part a place of contradic
tions; for every set of themes, counterthemes can be invoked as well.
The Function of Cities
• Every city is a web of government and politics, of social relationships,
of economic enterprises.
• With rare exceptions, every city is a collection of houses and apartments
that shelter its residents. They are domiciles as well as commodities,
bought and sold in the market.
BUT, a place where one lives is more than just a place to live. It repre
sents status, social class, and a way of life. Thus, few things roil the politics of
a city more than perceived threats to that way of life.
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Epilogue: Looking to the Future
A City of Friends and Strangers
• Cities are place of people, both friends and strangers. In small towns,
most encounters are among friends, while in large cities most encoun
ters are among strangers.
• The essential purpose of a city's government is to make urban life prac
tical and possible—with lives lived among friends and strangers, reason
ably safe, comfortable, and free from violence.
BUT, to accomplish these purposes, every city is surrounded by and
contained within a web of ordinances and statutes. Early in our country's his
tory, each of the states assumed responsibility for its cities' well-being. During
the Great Depression, the national government took on a large share of that
responsibility, and in so doing unleashed a political debate that is still with us:
does primary responsibility for the cities lie with the states or with the
national government? Stated more realistically, if responsibility is to be shared,
which level of government shall do what?
Governing Urban America
• The statutes and ordinances that affect and control urban life aim at
achieving one or more policy purposes.
BUT, there is often a sizeable gap between intent and accomplishment.
Of the many conclusions to be drawn about public policy, two surely stand
out. First, policies have unintended consequences. Urban renewal, for exam
ple, destroyed more housing than it built. And public housing developments,
intended to bring a good life to the poor, all too often have become unlivable places, lacking the maintenance to keep them in good repair and subject
to the violence of warring street gangs and drug dealers. Second, most poli
cies emerge from the ideologies of their sponsors. Thus, the most strenuously
contested policies tend to be those that advance or diminish deeply held val
ues (for example, policies intended to improve the lives of the poor by mak
ing taxes more progressive).
The Contested City
• Cities tend to be judged by the quality of life led by those who live in
them. High on any list of things necessary for a good life are personal
security and freedom from assault and violence.
BUT, as important as personal security is for evaluating the quality of
urban life, it proves to be an elusive goal. The contested city has always been
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The Shape of Things to Come
part of urban life. From their beginnings, American cities have been arenas of
social, political, racial, and ethnic strife—Native Americans versus colonials,
rich versus poor, old settlers versus new, speakers of English versus immigrants
with no command of that language, reformers versus those who benefit from
the status quo, whites versus blacks—and the list goes on. Usually, such con
flicts are resolved within the political process, but more often than most would
like to admit, the conflict has flared into group and personal violence.
The Culture of Cities
• Cities—especially big cities—are the creators and repositories of many
of our cultural and artistic achievements.
BUT, the bigger the city, the more likely it is that its social, racial, and
ethnic conflicts will be prolonged and difficult to manage. Two implications
follow. First, the competition for funds is likely to be fierce, often pitting those
who seek support for the city's cultural foundations against those who seek
support for social services and neighborhood restoration. Second, as poverty
and racial or ethnic conflict in a city become more overt and visible, they are
likely to keep away the very people who may be attracted to the city by its
cultural and artistic achievements.
The City in History
• As units of government, as networks of social roles and economic enter
prises, and as carriers of our culture, cities are shaped by what has gone
before, which is to say that the urban web is anchored to history.
BUT, that history is not exclusively urban. It is shared and shaped by
larger social, economic, and political forces. For example, the victories of the
Civil Rights movement were largely won in the rural parts of the Mississippi
delta, in small-town lunch counters and bus stations, and in some middle-sized
cities in the South. These victories brought with them a revolution of rising
expectations that had profound repercussions in all American cities, even
though there was nothing uniquely urban about Civil Rights.
As another example, the national economy has experienced a number
of transformations since the founding of the republic, from small-scale man
ufacturing, to large-scale industry, to the postindustrial, computer-driven,
and service-oriented society. Each transformation has brought new chal
lenges and new opportunities to the cities and to the nation as a whole. In
each of these examples, and a thousand more like them, the city is merely
a reflection of the larger American society, which after all is increasingly
urban. But as the United States has become more urbanized, national trends
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Epilogue: Looking to the Future
take on a more magnified and immediate appearance in the cities (particu
larly the big cities), often creating the impression that cities are what is
wrong with America.
If history has anything to teach us about American cities, it is that cities
are constantly changing, constantly remaking themselves to meet the chal
lenges and take advantage of the opportunities created by a changing nation
and world. Accordingly, as epilogue, an important question confronts us here:
What lies ahead for the American city?
The Physical Shape of Things to Come
History is a teacher, but hardly an infallible guide. Of the clues for the future
that the past provides, the strongest is physical change, shaped and molded by
changing technologies. Following the Civil War, America entered a steam-dri
ven industrial age. The city center and the area beyond became factory sites.
Employment opportunities beckoned, and immigrating Europeans swarmed
to cities to find jobs and the promise of economic and social advancement.
As public transport improved, managers (and then workers) moved to
ringlike settlements farther and farther from factory sites. By the 1920s, the
automobile created a new urban frontier, the suburb. In the 1940s, wartime
employment opportunities and the mechanization of southern agriculture
sent millions of southern blacks streaming to northern cities, exacerbating
racial tensions there. In the 1950s, a new system of federally funded roads (the
interstate highways) made white-flight from cities to suburbs socially and eco
nomically feasible. Businesses and factories followed. By the 1960s, the present
pattern of metropolitan sprawl was firmly fixed. Edge cities and megacounties
are the newest forms of that sprawl.
Edge cities are primarily office centers, often high-rise buildings, usu
ally sited in the unincorporated countryside. Those who work in edge cities
can come and go only by means of the automobile. To save time and improve
the quality of their lives, many of those who work in edge cities choose to
make their homes in nearby, newly established incorporated suburbs. But oth
ers choose unincorporated clusters whose residents live under the rules and
services of a private government (often called common interest develop
ments; legally these are noncities). Both edge cities and new unincorporated
suburbs increasingly rely on services provided by what has become an urban
ized, densely populated county, a megacounty that takes responsibility for pro
viding what in past times were exclusively urban services—police and fire pro
tection, sewer and water lines, and sanitation.
Megacounties, of course, contain more than just office towers and res
idential suburbs. They also contain such urban amenities as restaurants, the
aters, and shopping centers. As new settlers and newly recruited workers con
tinue to move out from the central city and its immediate suburbs, problems
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The Shape of Things to Come
and political challenges arise to trouble the future. High on any list of chal
lenges to urban sprawl are the costs to society in commuting time, in high
way construction and upkeep, and in the import of foreign oil.
It is estimated that 60 percent of every mile the motorist drives on the
multi-billion-dollar suburban highway network is subsidized by taxes (gas
taxes, property taxes) borne by the public at large. With so many other calls
on the public purse, advocates for the poor have challenged any future expan
sion of America's highway network. In addition, environmentalists are increas
ingly concerned with the ways in which new roads pave over the country
side and traffic congestion spews pollutants into the atmosphere.
In addition to the concerns about the economic and environmental
costs of highways, familiar tensions challenge suburban growth. For example,
the tension between property as commodity and property as lifestyle lead
some to applaud the rising property values that accompany suburban growth
but lead others to lament the increased traffic, crime, and other "big city"
problems that growth brings to their neighborhoods. Those already settled in
the countryside, fearful for their own futures, often oppose low-cost housing
and fight proposed new roads ("Not in my back yard!"). They enact nogrowth legislation to control their own communities and they lobby state leg
islatures and county governments to do the same. Thus, suburban growth
creates tension between conflicting ideologies, pitting those who seek to use
politics and government to regulate access to a good life (social equity) against
those who wish to rely on the marketplace (market equity) for redress and
change.
Urban sprawl will probably continue well into the coming century.
Whatever the cost-benefit calculus, American dependence on the automobile
is so ingrained in the public consciousness that it is unlikely to change any
time soon. For many, all the costs of suburban sprawl seem trivial compared
with the benefits of escaping from the rigors of life in the central city.
Increasingly, in the popular press and in the public mind, central cities are per
ceived as unsafe, unhealthy places, with failing schools, high crime, and high
taxes. Those who can afford it—white, black, Hispanic, and Asian—continue
to seek the safety and security of suburban and exurban life. Moreover, com
mitment to a market economy is a cornerstone of American society. At the
local level, market equity may be occasionally sacrificed to achieve social
equity, but thus far such restrictions of the market have been rare.
1. For example, in Mequon, a Milwaukee suburb with low crime and low taxes,
property developers were kept away by anti-growth ordinances that required every builder
to provide cost-benefit environmental and traffic-impact analyses with their application for
a building permit; to conform to zoning regulations requiring a significant percentage of
green space on every lot; and to use expensive building materials in each new structure
(The Economist, Aug. 13, 1994).
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Epilogue: Looking to the Future
Population Shifts and Demographic Trends
Outward migrations from central cities to suburbs and beyond are not the
only important migrations. Overall, the population of the entire country has
been shifting southward and westward, to the so-called sunbelt. Some of this
shift attaches to the "greying of America," with a longer living, older gener
ation moving to the sunbelt to escape the rigors of northern winters. Some
of this shift is for economic advantage and necessity. As the older industrial
cities of the Northeast (the "rustbelt") have seen their heavy industries (steel,
automobiles) close, many of their unemployed workers have looked south for
replacement jobs.
Still another component of this shift can be traced to foreign-born
immigrants—both legal and illegal. The United States, today as before, beck
ons those who seek a better life. New York City and Florida are now home
to recently arrived Caribbean immigrants. California, Oregon, and
Washington have become a settler's land for recently arrived southeast Asians
and Koreans, who take their places (albeit in separate communities) alongside
older Japanese and Chinese communities. And Texas and California are
increasingly home to newly arrived Latinos, especially those from across the
Mexican border.
Most, but not all, of the newly arrived immigrants have settled in cities.
As was the case for the European immigrants of a century ago, cities provide
immigrants with communities where their native languages are spoken and
where their cultures can be preserved and cherished. But, as was the case a
century ago, the new settlers arouse resentment and hostility. The state of
California, for example, has sought to deny social services and public benefits
to all but legal immigrants; and the 1996 welfare reform legislation exempts
even legal immigrants (unless they have become citizens or worked in the
United States for ten years or more) from welfare benefits. As another exam
ple, black communities in Los Angeles (and elsewhere) display resentment—
and sometimes violence—toward recent immigrants (e.g., Koreans) in their
midst.
The parallels between the past and present are instructive but far from
complete. The cities of the nineteenth century were cities of heavy indus
try, with an expanding labor force and assembly-line production that could
find ready places for immigrants with strong arms and limited education.
Upward advancement was promised to all who would and could work hard.
Today's immigrants confront a changed America, a postindustrial society.
America's good-paying jobs are increasingly the preserve of an educated
social class. Entry-level and service jobs are the only jobs available for the
unskilled and uneducated, whether they are old settlers or new, and the
competition is often fierce for any job paying more than minimum wage.
Thus, the city is once again an arena of economic and social rivalries orga482
The Shape of Things ro Come
nized along ethnic and racial lines, and in an uncertain environment, these
can easily turn violent.2
Urban Riots and the Two Societies
Thirty years ago, large-scale urban riots erupted across the nation. More than
257 cities were involved, including New York, Detroit, Washington, and Los
Angeles. In 1967 alone, more than five hundred thousand persons were
arrested for rioting, eight thousand were injured, and two hundred killed (see
Feagin and Hahn, 1973, for more details).
Almost all the rioting took place in predominantly black urban areas.
For many who attempted to analyze and explain the riots, their cause and
meaning were clear: blacks were angry and frustrated over their relative
poverty in a nation of affluence, their thwarted attempts to climb the ladders
of economic opportunity, and their lack of full access to the political equal
ity promised in the Constitution. A presidential commission agreed. The
causes of the riots, it concluded, were rooted in the social and economic
structure of our society. Our nation, said the commission,
is rapidly moving toward two increasingly separate Americas . . . , a white
society located principally in the suburbs . . . and in the peripheral parts of
large central cities, and a Negro society largely concentrated within large
central cities. (National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders 1967,
Introduction)
Since the commission's 1967 report, large-scale urban riots have continued to
erupt. In 1980 and 1982, the Liberty City area of Miami exploded in riots.
In the first instance, rioting was precipitated by the acquittal of white police
officers who were charged with beating a young black businessman to death;
in the second, it was triggered by a Hispanic police officer killing a black
teenager. During the late 1980s, several highly publicized, racially motivated
acts of violence in New York City triggered protests, none of which resulted
in riots but all of which brought intensified scrutiny of the state of race rela
tions in the United States. These violent acts include the attacks on Yusuf
Hawkins in Bensonhurst and Michael Griffith in Howard Beach, the "wild
ing" attack on a white woman jogging in Central Park, and the subway shoot2. Several months before the 1992 Los Angeles riot, a Korean merchant in southcentral Los Angeles shot and killed a black girl he accused of shoplifting. This and other
events had heightened tensions between blacks and Koreans, and during the riot Korean
merchants in Koreatown were targets of much of the destruction. Los Angeles is not the
only city where these kinds of racial tensions exist. Chafets (1990) documents the tension
between Arab storeowners in Detroit's inner city neighborhoods and the black residents
of those neighborhoods. The topic was also the subject of Spike Lee's film Do the Right
Thing.
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Epilogue: Looking to the Future
ings by Bernhard Goetz. More recently, in Los Angeles in 1992, acquittal of
a white police officer accused of beating black motorist Rodney King trig
gered the worst urban riot in U.S. history.
Given this background and the fact that the United States continues to
separate into socially and economically disparate societies, black and white,
few (if any) observers would predict a riot-free future for our large cities. But
by the same token, the earlier worry (dating back to the 1960s) that the
United States stands on the precipice of civil insurrection (Bienen 1968) now
seems somewhat overblown. Perhaps we have grown used to rioting, or per
haps our experience thus far suggests that riots burn themselves out and do
not escalate into a permanent state of siege. Or perhaps today's riots have
come to be seen as no more than an extension of the everyday violence that
has become so much a part of inner-city neighborhoods!
Urban Problems and Urban Policies
For the immediate and probably distant future, large and middle-size cities
will continue to be beset by a long list of massive problems. To talk about
these problems makes the future of the city seem bleak, but to ignore them
is an even greater risk to the future of the city. These problems include home
less people living and sleeping in the streets, high crime, inner-city unem
ployment, housing decay, white flight, juvenile street gangs, drug dealing and
drug abuse, school dropouts, the obsolescence and breakdown of the city's
physical plant (water and sewage lines, bridges, and the like), the decline of
public transportation, and for many cities, a sharply declining tax base, which
limits their ability to deal with these and other problems.
When local problems appear insoluble, policy entrepreneurs (both in the
past and today) seek the assistance of the national government. In the past, the
national government has responded to many of these needs with programs
such as public housing, urban renewal, and the Great Society (to name just a
few). But for several reasons, few such national programs are likely to be
launched in the near future.
One reason is the lack of money. The federal deficit and the ongoing
attempts to achieve a balanced budget have left relatively few federal dollars
for the cities, and the nation's priorities have shifted elsewhere. Second, when
funds are scarce, policy proposals tend to be constrained by caution. Programs
tend to gain support only after assurances are given that they will achieve
intended results quickly, with minimal unintended consequences. Even in the
best of policy times, such assurances are not easily given, and the history of
past federal programs makes such assurances even more difficult to give. And
major policy proposals (including costly proposals to aid the cities) will be
forced to undergo close ideological scrutiny, and they may not survive the
conflict that such scrutiny is bound to create. [The theory of ideology. J
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The Shape of Things to Come
On the one hand, economic conservatives take the view that city prob
lems are closely linked to the operation of market societies. Capital flows to
places of greatest profitability, they argue, and while dislocations (such as urban
sprawl, joblessness, housing decay, and unemployment) are among the social
costs of a market economy, the long-term benefits are greater than the costs.
More important (they would probably argue) massive interventions to save the
cities do no great good. Since 1965, the federal government has spent more
than $2.5 trillion on programs of direct and indirect aid to cities (see Moore
and Stansel 1992), yet the problems are, if anything, getting worse. Perhaps
government ought to assist those who suffer economic dislocations as needed
(they may say), but it should not engage in any more massive programs to save
the cities.
On the other hand, liberals tend to argue the case for federal help to
the cities, not so much to help the cities per se but to assist those who live
there. They argue their case on grounds of compassion and social equity: pub
lic assistance to the poor, if directed toward job training and education, will
constitute an investment in human capital that, in the long run, will ensure
national prosperity and a rising standard of living for the entire nation (see
Reich 1983 and Thurow 1980). What is more, liberals argue, the problems of
the cities are not of their making but rather are embedded in larger social
problems; as such, government at every level has an obligation to come to the
aid of the cities and those who live there.
However forceful the liberal arguments may be, they are not likely to
carry the day. In the immediate (and probably in the farther) future, existing
social programs financed by the federal government are likely to be curtailed,
and new ones are unlikely to be funded. As we approach a new century, the
public mood seemingly has shifted from such programs and interventions.
Things to Do, Programs to Be Tried
While federal aid may be limited, states are not likely to neglect their cities,
nor will cities cease their own attempts at creative problem solving. The sit
uation in Camden, New Jersey, illustrates that state's continuing involvement
with its cities. Camden, with a population of eighty-seven thousand, is a city
in massive decay. In 1995, it recorded sixty murders, or one for every 1,450
residents. Street after street has "houses without windows, cars without doors."
Those who are able to do so move the short distance to Philadelphia, for all
its problems a better run and more prosperous city than Camden (The
Economist, Aug. 10, 1996). By 1996, the state of New Jersey was forced to take
control of the city's housing and parking authority and was considering the
need to take control of federal funds earmarked for Camden. Much more
directly, the state contributes about $50 million of the city's $96 million bud
get, and Governor Whitman announced that the state would appropriate $8.3
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Epilogue: Looking to the Future
million to demolish a tract of slum housing and replace it with a new hous
ing development (New York Times, May 19, 1996).
In addition to interventions by state governments, private initiatives (in
Camden and elsewhere) play an important role in solving urban problems.
One private initiative is gentrification, a term commonly used to describe the
process whereby individual householders and small business firms buy up and
transform an entire city neighborhood. Notable examples of gentrification
include German Village in Columbus, Ohio; the Lincoln Park area of
Chicago; Queens Village in Philadelphia; and Capitol Hill and Adams Morgan
in Washington, D.C. As the term suggests, gentrification restores to former
glory the physical character of a residential neighborhood, and brings to the
area a gentry (i.e., middle class)—along with a rising tax base and up-scale
stores and shops. In Seattle, for example, Capitol Hill had a seedy reputation
and a high crime rate during the 1960s and into the early 1970s. But inex
pensive land and an expensive housing market in many other parts of the city
offered the opportunity to make a handsome profit on investments in the
neighborhood, and a number of people did invest by buying both homes and
businesses. Today, Capitol Hill is one of the fashionable shopping areas in
Seattle, with a seemingly endless supply of ethnic restaurants, boutiques, and
now an all-night, used-book store.
Urban restoration is the commercial counterpart of gentrification, where
old commercial buildings are restored through private initiatives.
Restoration projects usually receive some form of government assistance,
and the restored projects are usually updated to house a variety of shops and
boutiques. In 1966, Congress established a National Register of Historic
Buildings, with buildings designated for inclusion in the register to be pro
tected from the wrecker's ball. More important, registered buildings are eli
gible for several types of restoration grants and thus become attractive
investments for mortgage lenders. Several cities now proudly display restored
areas of Victorian and Romanesque architecture. These include Pioneer
Square in Seattle, the former Tivoli Brewery in Denver, and the Old Post
Office in Washington, D.C. (see Collins et al., 1991, for a discussion of
downtown preservation projects).
Enterprise and empowerment zones, as their names suggest, are urban areas
selected by federal and state agencies to receive funding and other forms of
aid intended to attract private business investment to the inner city. With busi
ness investment in offices, warehouses, and factories, employment opportuni
ties for inner-city residents may rise, potentially setting in motion a further
set of changes. Neighborhood restoration may result; cities and their residents
may achieve a sense of empowerment, enabling them to take control of their
lives and futures; and indicators of neighborhood pathology (e.g., crime, drugs,
teen pregnancy) may begin to decline. Of course, such far-reaching results are
seldom, if ever, likely to be achieved in their entirety. But they can help make
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The Shape of Things ro Come
a difference in some neighborhoods, particularly if they are combined with
another type of private initiative—community development. This is an effort,
usually initiated by foundations (although sometimes in partnership with local
government), to promote social integration within the neighborhoods. It
encourages residents to establish connections with each other and with neigh
borhood institutions (e.g., churches, neighborhood associations, retail busi
nesses, schools), and through these connections to develop a sense of direc
tion and purpose in lives that are all-too-often buffeted by crisis and
uncertainty (empowerment is a term that is used to describe this transforma
tion). These community development initiatives encourage residents to work
together to remove the physical symptoms of blight from their neighborhood,
including vacant and deteriorating buildings, abandoned cars, and rubbishfilled empty lots. Examples of inner-city community development efforts
include the Dudley Street Neighborhood Initiative in Boston and the Atlanta
Project.
All of these forms of private initiative have produced some successes,
even though they proceed slowly. But taken together, even small successes are
encouraging, and they lead some urban analysts to assert the importance of
revitalizing inner cities one block at a time—as one writer puts it, to "take
big steps, modestly" (Gratz 1989).
The Urban Poor
Sooner or later, most attempts at improving, revitalizing, or saving our cities
lead us to reconsider the urban poor. The millions of urban residents who are
mired in poverty live their lives in and around a vast circle of attendant prob
lems: street violence, hunger, inadequate medical attention, poor housing,
woeful schools, indifferent education, joblessness, single-parent households,
and teenage mothers (a world in which children beget children). The "two
nations" of the Kerner Report still stand, separated and intact. Also intact (and
perhaps growing worse) are the social and economic conditions that continue
to erupt in riots.
Poverty, wherever found, is a matter of social conscience and concern,
but it is the poverty of the urban ghetto that causes greatest concern. For it
is a commonplace observation that the urban ghetto has nurtured a destruc
tive culture—a culture, according to some views, where "sane, healthy adults
refuse to follow norms of behavior that most of society endorses," and that
"approves (or at least fails to disapprove) of idleness, single parenthood, theft,
and violence" Qencks 1988, 23).
Proposals to change the urban ghetto are easy to come by but exceed
ingly difficult to carry through. One proposal, discouraging in the extreme, is
to leave the ghettos alone. Cities, wrote George Sternlieb (1971), no longer
perform their historic functions. Formerly, with their deep pools of immigrant
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Epilogue: Looking to the Future
labor, they provided the work force that ran the American industrial system.
But the need for strong backs and the fifteen hour workday
has been reduced to almost nothing by the transportation revolution,
which has the effect of homogenizing time and distance. Much of our
labor-intensive work is now imported from abroad. Welfare legislation,
minimum wages, maximum working hours, and the like have minimized
the economic functions of the conglomerations of poor-but-willing peo
ple in our cities.
The city, said Sternlieb, has become a sandbox, a place where our society has
parked those who are no longer productive, so that the rest of society "can
get on with the serious things of life" ( p. 17).
It is true, of course, that our contemporary, postindustrial economy has
relatively little employment for the uneducated, even if willing, worker. Such
jobs as are available tend to be low-paying service jobs. Moreover, many of
the entry-level, unskilled jobs once found in the cities have moved out to sub
urbs and edge cities—where bus lines do not go and where the poor with
out cars cannot travel (e.g., Wilson 1996).
Even so, America is not likely to abandon its fight to improve the lives
of the urban poor. For the foreseeable future, national aid to the cities (how
ever much reduced in dollar amounts) is likely to come by way of block
grants that will encourage the states to experiment with improving inner-city
lives. The welfare reform legislation of 1996 is a portent. The act provides for
block grants to the states and encourages each state to create its own version
of a welfare program. More significantly, the act sets limits on the years of wel
fare payments, with the express purpose of ending long-term dependence on
welfare (to end the welfare culture). Workfare, not welfare, is its purpose; but
if this purpose is to be accomplished, bringing the poor into the workforce
will also require such additional government programs as medical assistance,
job training, incentives to the young to stay in school, financial incentives to
employers to hire the unemployed, and perhaps government as the employer
of last resort. If and when government becomes the employer of last resort,
some of the job holders may be at work cleaning litter and possibly improv
ing long neglected streets. But this scenario hardly begins to canvass the future
of our cities. What, then, lies in store for our cities?
Cities and the Future: Through the Glass Brightly
and Darkly Seen
The poverty and pathologies of the city will continue to challenge us.
Governments at every level—and in varying degrees of effort—will attempt
to ameliorate that poverty and (it will be hoped) curtail those pathologies. But
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The Shape of Things ro Come
as is the case for most all government programs, amelioration will be slow and
uncertain. And while we wait for improvement, most of us will continue to
fear inner-city violence and be greatly concerned about the city's racial and
ethnic tensions. We will worry about urban crime and riots, and we will con
tinue to watch middle-class flight from cities to suburbs. One scenario of the
future, somber and pessimistic, is that some cities will implode, that they will
collapse in on themselves as their residents move out, as houses and shops con
tinue to be boarded up, as streets becomes increasingly unsafe.3
A Contravening Interpretation
But too much can be made of a dark future for our cities. Recall that
American cities historically have been viewed with pessimistic suspicion.
Given that history, we could reasonably ask, Are today's cities worse then the
cities of, say, the 1890s? Many of the readily labeled urban crises of recent
times have had an exceedingly short lifespan. For example, the 1970s were
regarded as the decade of urban financial crisis, and New York City exempli
fied the city run aground on unsound fiscal practices, a declining tax base, and
too many services. Today, a mere twenty years after its financial collapse, New
York is on sound fiscal footing, held up as an example of how the modern
American city should conduct its finances.
In a similar (albeit less dramatic) way, trends and fashions cast their
shadows across our cities. A scant decade ago, Minneapolis was widely
touted as one of the most liveable cities. Today, it has a disturbingly high
homicide rate, and judgments concerning its liveability have changed.
Perhaps, in a few years time, the homicide rate will decline, or perhaps pub
lic judgment concerning the qualities that make for liveability will shift. If
so, those looking at Minneapolis's history may puzzle over today's critical
account of life there.
Consonant with the foregoing ideas, it is useful to remember that the
daily lives of most Americans are largely unaffected by today's urban crises.
Even within Chicago, where the residents of Henry Horner Homes, CabriniGreen, and Robert Taylor Homes face daily challenge and hardship created
by their surroundings, most of the city's residents go on with their daily lives,
not giving so much as a thought to the inner city and its problems. Nationally,
no more than 10 million people live in ghetto neighborhoods, representing
only about 5 percent of urban dwellers. Looking at numbers alone, we might
conclude that the underclass and their struggle (some would say their lifestyle)
3. Devils Night in Detroit is a real-life embodiment of this pessimistic scenario. For
the past several years, on the night before Halloween the city explodes in flames. In an
orgy of anger and frustration (and mindless entertainment), hundreds of fires are deliber
ately set in abandoned houses and factories—and sometimes in homes still occupied
(Chafets 1990).
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Epilogue: Looking to the Future
is but a minor issue for cities. But numbers tell only part of the story. For
those who worry about the well-being of our society, the underclass problem
is of grave concern, and it has become the dominant issue confronting most
large cities (and many smaller cities). But even so, city councils meet, families
attend PTA meetings, children go to school, and parents go to work, and a
thousand and one other urban events occur unimpeded by the underclass (or
even by thoughts of the underclass). In reality, the crisis of the cities is a cri
sis for the people who live in ghetto neighborhoods and for those who study
and govern cities; it is no more than a passing concern for most other urban
residents.[The theory of multiple realities.]
Again consonant with the foregoing ideas, the national society needs
constant reminding that the horrifying events that frequently occur in cities
are not always attributable to an urban pathology, that comparable events also
occur in nonurban settings.Violence, though widely viewed as an urban prob
lem, is also present in rural America—as exemplified in Truman Capote's In
Cold Blood and in the shoot-out and conflagration outside Waco, Texas.
Accordingly, and when considering our cities, it will be useful to keep in mind
that most Americans live in urban areas, and as a consequence, violence is,
perforce, more prevalent there than elsewhere. But violence is not, in and of
itself, an urban problem.
Violence in cities (whatever its true state, whatever the statistics may tell
us) is entangled in public perceptions, those who make municipal policy may
be too readily tempted to seek policy remedies—especially in response to
public outcry over acts of random violence—that promise quick and decisive
results. But the problems of the city, and most especially the problems of the
inner city, cannot be addressed either quickly or decisively. In attempting to
fix today's problems, urban leaders risk being diverted from their larger task
of identifying the functions the city should serve for its residents and devel
oping policies to further those ends. Downtown revitalization is a step in the
right direction. Revitalization builds on the city's strengths (its downtown, its
people) and, at the same time, presents it in a new light to a doubting pub
lic. But, in the process of appealing to public perception, urban leaders ought
not forget that the city is at its core a place of people, and that their longterm vision for its future must acknowledge the importance of all its inhabi
tants—including those who live in its ghetto neighborhoods.
Through the Glass Brightly: A Turn to the Future
In contrast to views of the cities as places of perennial crisis, an optimistic sce
nario reminds us that cities are more than the sum of their problems. They
are social enterprises that symbolize what we and the rest of the world regard
as the "American way of life." (After all, the modern skyscraper was invented
in Chicago.) Cities are forever recreating and reinventing themselves, coping
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The Shape of Things to Come
with adversity through change and adaptation. Examples include gentrifica
tion and restoration projects, bringing the equivalent of the suburban shop
ping mall downtown, rewriting zoning ordinances to encourage conversion of
empty industrial buildings into apartments and studios, and offering tax
inducements to industries willing to relocate to the inner city.
To the optimist's eye, big cities especially are seen and understood as the
carriers of culture, places of industrial and business leadership, streets of daz
zling architecture, places for chance and challenging encounters, creators of
wealth, centers of creativity, vast shopping bazaars, and levers of social and
political change. In short, and as the optimist would write a scenario of what
lies ahead, cities will continue to be satisfying places to live and visit; true to
their history, they will continue to change in ways that will blunt adversity
and assure a reasonably successful future. As Jean Gottmann (1989, 168) says,
"The modern metropolis is the largest and most complex artifact that
humankind has ever produced."
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