Why Don't American Cities Burn?. Michael B. Katz

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.”⁵⁶ Recently, Robert E. Lang and his colleagues have identified “boomburbs,” the “ultimate symbol of today’s sprawling postwar metropolitan form.” They are places “with more than 100,000 residents that are not the largest cities in their respective metropolitan areas and that have maintained double-digit rates of population growth in recent decades.”⁵⁷ Others, focusing on the new suburbanization of immigration, have identified a suburban variant they call “ethnoburbs,” “multiethnic communities in which one ethnic minority group has a significant concentration but does not necessarily constitute a ma-jority.”⁵⁸ 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.”⁵⁹ With chain migration linking towns and villages in Latin America and the Caribbean with United States cities, Mike Davis writes of the creation of new suburban forms extending across national boundaries. “To the extent that the sending communities have become as fully integrated into the economy of the immigrant metropolis as their own nation- state . . . they are the de facto ‘transnational suburbs’ of New York, Los Angeles, Chicago and Miami. Indeed, they transform our understanding of the contemporary city.”⁶⁰

      Metropolitan metaphors linked cities to their regions; global metaphors joined them to the world. Saskia Sassen, whose work set the agenda for debate on global cities, identifies a set of global cities at the pinnacle of new urban hierarchies, detached from their regions, connected, instead, to the world of international finance and trade. 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.”⁶¹ The “finance and producer services complex in each city,” she asserts, “rests on a growth dynamic that is somewhat independent of the broader regional economy—a sharp change from the past, when a city was presumed to be deeply articulated with its hinter-land.”⁶² Rather than regional centers, global cities are “command points in the organization of the world economy.” 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.⁶³

      In contrast to Sassen, Bruce Katz and his colleagues in the Brookings Institution’s Metropolitan Policy Program emphasize economic regions that promote growth as well as higher wages. A regional industry cluster, write Brookings researchers, is “a geographic concentration of interconnected businesses, suppliers, service providers, and associated institutions in a particular field.” These regional clusters “represent a powerful source of productivity and quality jobs at a moment of economic challenge.” The federal government, they contend, “should play a central role in promoting cluster development and growth nationwide.”⁶⁴

      Another outward-looking metaphor defines modern cities by what they produce. For Manuel Castells, the late twentieth-century “informational city” replaces the early twentieth-century “industrial city.” To be sure, knowledge and information processing have been important to every mode of production. What distinguishes the informational mode “is the action of knowledge upon knowledge itself as the main source of productivity.”⁶⁵ 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. 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. Flows of exchange are at the core of the American Edge City.” 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 ex-urban development, inner-city decay, and obsolescence of the suburban built environment.”⁶⁶ Castells’s informational city is better understood as a network than a place, a process rather than an object. A “new urban form,” the informational city takes different shapes in Silicon Valley, Europe, and Asia. Across nations, however, informational cities have crystallized in a “new spatial form, which develops in a variety of social and geographi cal contexts: mega-cities,” which, although huge, are not defined by size but as “the nodes of the global economy, concentrating the directional, productive, and managerial upper functions all over the planet: the control of the media; the real politics of power; and the symbolic power to create and diffuse messages.”⁶⁷ 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.⁶⁸

      In the early twenty-first century, these metaphors—inner city, post- industrial city, dual city, fortress city, city-region, edge city, galactic city, global city, informational city, city of knowledge—compete to answer the question “What is an American city?” All are both useful and partial. Their utility depends on the angle of interest—inward versus outward, national versus global—and the concern—inequality, environmental degradation, crime, terrorism, aesthetic value, political fragmentation, the possibility of community, for instance. They are, moreover, not entirely consistent. Examples are Garreau’s cheerful optimism about the role and future of edge cities contrasted with Hayden’s withering attack and Sassen’s emphasis on the importance of place and contiguity in global cities compared to Castells’s stress on a-geographic networks. The work of assessing and reconciling multiple metaphors for cities, and of exploring their implications, is a central and urgent task for interdisciplinary twenty-first-century urban studies. Economic, demographic, and spatial transformation have exploded old ideas of cities and suburbs, turning them into encumbrances to the reformulation of helpful public policies.

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      At both ends of the twentieth century, profound economic change forced redefinitions of “city.” 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. The problems they identified, and the issues on which they concentrated, are remarkably similar to those on the agenda of urbanists and public officials in the early twentyfirst century. Only now, as we have seen, the model of the old industrial city clearly is gone forever. The question, then, is how to characterize what has taken its place. What is an American city? The answer, I have tried to show, remains far from clear, with various metaphors competing for dominance.

      For progressive urbanists in the early twentieth century, population density or, as they more often termed it, congestion, resulting from massive immigration posed a massive challenge to public health and morals as well as to urban infrastructure and governance.⁶⁹ A century later, urbanists confronting population loss, abandoned housing, districts returned to fields of weeds, and sprawl searched for ways to turn around the city’s de-densification and fill in empty suburban spaces with clustered housing and retail. Another huge and consequential difference between the early and late twentieth century lies in the response to urban redefinition. Consider the early twentieth-century example described by Peter Dreier and his colleagues:

      In the early 1900s, New York City was a cauldron of seething problems—poverty, slums, child labor, epidemics, sweatshops and ethnic conflict. Out of that turmoil, activists created a progressive movement, forging a coalition of immigrants, unionists, muckraking journalists, settlement house workers, middle-class suffragists, socialists, and upper-class philanthropists. They fought successfully for workplace, tenement, and public health reforms. Although they spoke many languages, the movement found its voice through organizers,