Clearly, by the early twenty-first century, economic, demographic, and spatial transformations had undercut existing definitions of “urban,” “city,” and “suburb.” A variety of new urban metaphors competed to replace them.
Urban Metaphors
One set of metaphors for “urban” and “city” looks inward toward central cities; another set looks outward from them; and one urban metaphor—the “fortress city” of Mike Davis and Stephen Graham—looks in both directions at once, its new spatial organization and architectural forms designed to protect against both internal insurgencies and external threats. Urban metaphors are not mutually exclusive. Sometimes the same writers use different metaphors to capture the increasingly fractured reality of “urban” or “city.” All of them, however, try to make sense of the patterns of inequality that grew out of the economic, demographic, and spatial transformation of American cities in the second half of the twentieth century. The inward-looking metaphor that still very often comes first to mind is “inner city,” which, since the 1960s, has served as shorthand for a bundle of problems—disorder, crime, drugs, poverty, homelessness, out-of-wedlock births.45 As a metaphor, “inner city” was colored poor and black. So pervasive did the image become that it spawned a new genre of pop u lar culture, which diffused outward from inner cities to the American heartland. “Urban music,” a category that includes “funk, soul and hip hop, as well as R and B” became “the biggest selling genre in the United States.”46
“Post-industrial,” another inward-looking metaphor, focused on the loss of urban manufacturing rather than, as with “inner city,” demography and social structure. Political scientist John H. Mollenkopf identified a “profound transformation” that had “seriously eroded the nineteenth-century industrial city. For lack of a better term, it might be called ‘the postindustrial revolution.’ This second urban revolution grew out of and in many ways constituted a reaction against the first. If labor and capital concentrated into factories defined the industrial city, the postindustrial city is characterized by the geographic diffusion of production and population. The office building, not the factory, now provides the organizing institution of the central city.”47 Vivid though it was, “post-industrial’s” analytic usefulness was limited. For it defined city by what it was not rather than by what it had become, thus limiting the idea’s helpfulness in reinterpreting the emergent meaning of “urban” in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.
“Dual city,” a third inward-looking metaphor, focused on the social structure that had emerged from economic and demographic transformation abetted by governments—federal, state, and local—that remapped the distribution of classes and functions across urban space and, through funding cuts, decimated services.48 Growing class polarization, a problem everywhere in the nation (and, indeed, as Mike Davis shows, emerging in even more extreme forms around the globe), appeared most vividly in big cities.49 Increasingly bereft of their middle class, city populations divided between rich and poor, the former buoyed by jobs in finance, information, and high-end services, the latter barely sustained by low-end service jobs, the informal economy, or government assistance. Writing in the New York Times in July 2006, economist Paul Krugman observed:
The story of the New York economy isn’t entirely a happy one. The city has essentially lost all of its manufacturing, and it’s now in the process of outsourcing both routine office work and many middle-management functions to other parts of the country.
What’s left is an urban economy that offers a mix of very highly paid financial jobs and low-wage service jobs, with relatively little in the middle. Economic disparities in New York, as in the United States as a whole, are wider than they have been since the 1920’s.50
This was the dual city. Its two worlds, the gleaming office towers and condos and the run-down housing and public ghettos of the poor, were not two separate spheres. Indeed, dual city theorists stressed the linkages that joined them—how they produced and depended on one another. Although the dual city metaphor, as its theorists recognized, oversimplified a very complicated situation, it had the virtue of directing attention to the new inequalities that define present-day cities, just as Jacob Riis’s depiction of “How the Other Half Lives” captured the emerging industrial social structure a century ago.
Outward-looking metaphors link cities, metropolitan areas, regions, and even the world. “Historically,” writes Robert Geddes, “two massive shifts of population have formed American city-regions. The farm-to-city shift after the Civil War is comparable to the massive city-to-suburb shift after World War II. Now more than half the nation’s population lives in the suburbs. Although still separate legal jurisdictions, it no longer makes sense to talk of suburbs and cities as if they were separate; they are economically and ecologically joined in a new kind of human settlement, the city region.”51 A variety of metaphors—“city-region,” “metropolitan area,” “elastic/inelastic city,” “galactic city”—try to capture the inadequacy of definitions that limit cities to their legal boundaries.
Three scholars and public intellectuals—David Rusk, Myron Orfield, and Bruce Katz—have led the effort to substitute “metropolitan” for narrowly bounded definitions of current-day cities. For them, the exercise is more than theoretical, because policies needed to counteract the baneful effects of metropolitan political fragmentation require an expanded definition of “city.” No less concerned with inequality than dual city theorists, they focus more on economic and political disparities between central cities and their suburbs than on income gaps among city residents. Grossly unequal public services and tax burdens, environmental degradation, sprawl, racial segregation, job growth: these, they argue, only can be countered through metropolitan-wide actions.
Where city and suburb rubbed up against each other, they were becoming more alike. As urban problems spread outward, distinctions lessened, and the real differentiation existed between older inner suburbs and those further out on the periphery of metropolitan areas, which, themselves, could not remain immune from the urban problems attendant on growth. Just what a suburb was—what made it distinct—was no longer clear. Recognizing the inadequacy of the conventional city/ suburb/rural distinction, the U.S. Census Bureau began to develop a reclassification of municipalities based on a sophisticated mathematical model.52 A number of metropolitan metaphors tried to capture this new metropolitan configuration.
Historian Robert Fishman proclaimed the death of one metaphor—“bourgeois utopia,” which represented the suburb as a sylvan residential enclave for affluent male commuters and their families. By the 1980s, he held, the classic suburb had been replaced by the “post-suburb” or “technoburb.”53 Others reclassified suburbs differently. Orfield, for one, divided them into six categories based on financial stress and age.54 “Suburbia conceals as well as reveals its complexity,” observes historian Dolores Hayden in Building Suburbia. “For years, when urban historians wrote about the ‘city,’ they meant the center, the skyline, downtown.”55 Looking closely, she identifies