Randall Bartlett. The Crisis of America's Cities. Armonk, London: M.E. Sharpe, 1998. xiii + 290 pp. $32.95 (paper), ISBN 978-0-7656-0302-9; $85.95 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-7656-0301-2.
Reviewed by Christian Montes (Department of Geography, University of Lyon, France)
Published on H-Urban (April, 1999)
The relationship between Americans and their cities has always been an ambiguous one. Torn between the myth of an agrarian society and the necessities of modern life, they often consider the "unnatural aggregation" which is the city, specially the big city, more as an unavoidable evil than the expression of Paradise Lost. The current, notorious, situation of central cities, mauled by poverty, crime and physical decay, strengthens such a negative conception. Randall Bartlett, Professor of Economics and Director of the Urban Studies Program at Smith College, is willing to go behind this well-known dark screen. He proposes a study of American cities spanning all their quite short lives to stress the causes of present dysfunctioning before presenting the solutions he thinks could alter the evolution "before it is too late" (p. 270).
The book is divided in four parts, the first "exploring cities," the second following "the path from the past," the third analyzing "the role of policy," the last proposing "prospects for the future." According to the author, four elements are building the cities we know: the existence of an agricultural surplus, the ability to produce ample trade goods, the evolution of transportation techniques, public policies and perceptions. Three main tools are used to understand the emergence of urban crisis:
1. Housing sub-markets, which create core / suburb differentiation and concentration of poverty in the core.
2. Transportation techniques, which favor urban sprawl and worsen the urban situation.
3. Global economy, which undermines the basis of low skill employment and cuts poor from new peripheral labor markets.
Obviously written for the layman, the book is easy to read, due to didactical writing and to the use of enlightening examples. It succeeds in retracing the emergence of America's cities from eighteenth century compact and low commercial cities to contemporary endless conurbations through the birth of c.b.d. one century ago and the federally aided urban sprawl (freeways and "Fanny May"). However, maps or photographs would have been useful. It also succeeds in sweeping away popular misconceptions viewing the present crisis as brand new or linking it to a play between Evil and Good in favor of a historical exploration stressing the law of unintended consequences.
A popular work nevertheless has some hindrances. Most of the book (pp. 41-207) is devoted to history and aims more at convincing non-academic people than academic ones. The bibliographical references therefore are limited. No mention is for instance made of well-known books as Sam Bass Warner, Jr.'s The Urban Wilderness[1] or Eric H. Monkonnen's America becomes urban,[2] nor to the works of Peter Hall, Saskia Sassen, nor, for the radicals, Mike Davis, David Harvey and Manuel Castells. This leads to a text mostly reflecting well-known facts about America's urban history, without giving real clues as to the solutions to the urban crisis: the text shows that present day cities are indissociable from urban history, that we are heirs and no more pioneers.
The future is analyzed in an alternate way: first, showing that the continuation of current trends would inevitably worsen an already difficult situation, creating a "permanent underclass." Secondly, presenting his way to ease the crisis, even if he states that he "is not optimistic" (p. 265) in the multicentered webs based on high skills that cities are going to be. This way means not looking towards past solutions, linked to past functioning of the city (as public transport or current housing programs that are considered inefficient), but towards the future. The solution is to "revolutionize education and reduce the spatial concentration of poverty" (p. 246), by adaptation to future labor markets (more equity in school funding, school vouchers, and changing the culture, from within the poor, to valorize education). On the other hand, the poor "must be dispersed and joined to the larger community" (p. 259). To make dispersal profitable, in this "mixed-income housing" a National Program has to be set up, subsidizing "reasonable" quality housing, using vouchers. Besides, the core should be restructured, by "maintaining an employment base and replacing poverty concentrations with households representing the full range of incomes" (p. 256). Only with coordinated urban redevelopment projects, with "bonds of trust strong enough to overcome the individualist calculus" (p. 267), during decades, can this goal be achieved.
This book rises some fundamental questions:
1. The author underlines that "the process should not be overpersonalized" (p. 66) and that there should not be an "emphasis on inevitability" (p. 120), but they exist. An a posteriori mea culpa is not as good as an a priori caveat!
2. Even if the author concedes that suburbs also have their problems, in his zeal to show the urgency of inner-city problems, he exaggerates core / periphery opposition (following the classical Marxist model). In fact, Robert Bruegman[3] states that "these boundary lines do not correspond to any real geographic or sociological division but to the vagaries of annexations at given moments of the past" (p. 342). The author also exaggerates the suburbs homogeneity[4] and the edge city movement: "by concentrating on decentralization the countervailing tendency to centralize has been largely ignored" as in Los Angeles or Houston (Bruegman, id. p. 346). Saskia Sassen makes a similar analysis.[5] On the other side, he seems to forget that suburbs had jobs from the beginning, thus overestimating the "edge city" movement.
3. This stems perhaps from a marked orientation towards the eastern Megalopolis. The idea of an all-American urban model can be misleading, as the H-Urban discussion on slow-growing cities has shown. Indeed, it stresses the fact that globally centers have a brighter future than Bartlett states (as in the cases of Cincinnati, which never underwent a big crisis or Atlanta, where people come back to the center because of worsening congestion, for instance).
4. The idea of an urban reorganization resulting from a post-industrial global economy "assumes a fixed set of cause-and effect relationships, that the underlying reality is economic and the changes in the landscape are symptoms" (Bruegman, p. 349). The author being an economist is reflected in a certain bias towards the physical side of the city, even if reference is made to policies and perceptions. All decisions here analyzed, even if he rightly states that they are mostly unconscious, are a little too rational. As in the case of the cotton "gin" or the steamboat, someone invents something, which leads to industrialization, then to organizations able to finance it, which in turn leads to a new spatial organization. Is it so linear?
4. According to Bartlett "Where you are in space affects where you are in life" (p. 176). Such a link between poverty and organization of space is more a confession of urban segregation than a proof, as can be seen in the very interesting answer to Chris Leo by Terry Nichols Clark (University of Chicago) on H-Urban (end November 1998, Slow-growing Cities). In these "hotly disputed" issues, reasons can be found in race or in the impact of programs developed by cities, both arguments rapidly rejected by Bartlett. More, contrary to Bartlett, Sassen indicates that there is an increase in low-wage, non-professional jobs in the center of cities.
The solutions proposed by Bartlett are interesting, but stem from an ideological point of view. For him, the question is "not if but how and when the cities will finally succumb" (p. 190). The rejection of public transportation solutions also forgets the fact that, even if they do not cover their costs, this is also true of the road. The huge federal and local authority transportation budgets and the low taxation of gasoline remind us of the fact that the car has always being heavily subsidized in the United States. Moreover, what if local communities are democratically willing to pay for some public transport (through additional cents)? The reason can also stem from the will to give a city a "world-class" image, as in the case of Los Angeles subway, only presented by Bartlett as a white elephant.
This book offers a vivid overview of America^Òs urban history, some interesting solutions for the inner-city crisis. Bartlett also reveals some important and debated epistemological questions upon the expression of causality and the status of monograph in historical explanation, upon the existence of an urban model in the United States. The answers given seem however too clear and simple to suffice, but are a useful introduction to the mined field of urban crisis.
Notes:
[1]. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972-1995. xxxiv + 304 pp.
[2]. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998. xvi + 334 p.
[3]. The American City, in M.A. Cohen et al., Preparing for the Urban Future Washington: Woodrow Wilson Center, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996, pp. 227-367.
[4]. For an more balanced analysis, J. John Palen, The Suburbs, New York: Mc Graw Hill, 1994. 236 pp.
[5]. The Global City Princeton University Press, 1991. xvi + 400 pp.
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Citation:
Christian Montes. Review of Bartlett, Randall, The Crisis of America's Cities.
H-Urban, H-Net Reviews.
April, 1999.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=2966
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