The New York Review of Ideas » Reviews | June 2009

The Global City

Welcome to the Urban Revolution, by Jeb Brugman.

By Flora Fair

Ever since builder Robert Moses looked out over New York and envisioned a great network of highways and parks, America’s cities were reshaped for the car. The resulting suburban sprawl has changed what it means to live in a community and to have a city center.

In his latest book, Welcome to the Urban Revolution: How Cities are Changing the World, Jeb Brugmann urges readers to consider the city as it once was, and to restore cities as hubs of innovation—“urban labs” capable of solving problems like poverty and sustainability.

Brugmann, who has been an urban strategy consultant to major cities around the world, reframes the idea of globalization as a global spread of urbanization—forming a single, worldwide system that he refers to as “the City.” Through it, local events are amplified as global ones. In Brugmann’s view, urban planning and the emergence of cities has shifted from an organic process based on industry and community. It is now about driving profit, even if it means building communities in unstable and unsustainable living conditions.

“In the 1960-80s, we abandoned a very different approach to city building—American traditions of urbanism that had made our country an industrial and cultural powerhouse, such as the mixed industrial-commercial-residential neighborhoods of the early- and mid-20th century,” he explained in a recent interview. “We replaced urbanism as an approach to city building with the industrial batch production of standard-issue single-function cityscapes.”

The result of this new “mass-production approach” to city building is that, instead of creating “efficient and productive place-based systems,” we are trading in communities as commodities, “to be purchased, flipped and traded as generic square-footage like pork bellies or bitumen.”

Brugmann clings heavily to his conceit, blaming the mismanaged growth of modern cities for everything from climate change to terrorism. He traces the rise of the city as a democratizing phenomenon, where a population collects, forms centralized communities, and then organizes in order to work toward its own best interest.

His focus is on planning and design—not only in the physical sense, but also in a philosophical sense. Considerations about blending residential, commercial and industrial space are comparable to considerations about nurturing equality and a sense of community.

“All this brings us face-to-face again with the failed public-private model of government zoning and development subsidies,” he said. The result is thousands of square miles of temporarily profitable, homogenous areas that are automobile-based.

In a sense, Brugmann is arguing for the collective power of a dense city as the ultimate form of grassroots living. It offers a connected community, not rows of tract homes and a strip mall, but an interconnection of neighborhoods, central meeting spaces and commercial opportunity. Cities generally provide their residents with higher levels of education, larger social networks and more resources, enabling them to leverage their own power for social and political change. It is what Brugmann calls “society’s self-organizing potential” that keeps cities democratic.

Though the outlook may be willfully single-minded, it still offers a unique perspective on the tendency of people to move toward centers of opportunity, to socialize and organize around some cause greater than the one inside their own homes. In an age of gated communities, where commuters move from one isolated building to another in their climate-controlled bubbles, Welcome to the Urban Revolution reconsiders the value of urban living as a green and democratic enterprise.

From emerging villages in Ecuador to the skyscraper cities of Japan, Brugmann traces the success of all modern social experiment to the city lab. He concludes with a discussion of how the current economic crisis is a direct result of communities planned as investments, with artificial social spaces popping up to serve these ready-made neighborhoods, but without the social infrastructure that makes a community sound. Brugmann argues that a mall is not a city center, and a movie theater is not an entertainment district.

His words will resonate with those who are suffering through the current mortgage crisis, trapped in overvalued homes in poorly planned, hastily concocted suburbs. ♦

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