Urban Renewal Revisited

With neighborhoods annihilated by foreclosure, city budgets stretched thin, and cookie-cutter suburbs dulling the landscape, the future of the American city is far from certain. As the U.S. launches hundreds stimulus-funded municipal projects, several urban planning experts suggest books (old and new) for insight on rebuilding the American city for the 21st century and beyond.

Jeb Brugmann, faculty of the University of Cambridge’s Business and Poverty Leadership Program. Brugmann is the author of Welcome to the Urban Revolution (Bloomsbury, 2009).

Urban nations, like the United States, need honed practices of urbanism, not just industrial-scale building delivery systems. Urbanisms are nuanced approaches to design, technology, building and governance (including community engagement) that create robust and resilient place-based systems of economic and social life. The Option of Urbanism: Investing in a New American Dream (Island Press, 2007) by Christopher B. Leinberger perhaps tops the list. He provides a detailed analysis of the evolution of “industrial batch” (my term) city building as a thin substitute for robust urbanism. Douglas Rae’s City: Urbanism and Its End (Yale University Press, 2003) explores the history of early 20^th century urbanism in New Haven, Conn. My argument (and I presume his as well) is that urbanisms need to be renewed in the face of new challenges, and that the U.S. gave up doing urbanism when in got into government-subsidized suburban sprawl and inner-city “urban renewal,” rather than engaging a true urbanist revival. Reinventing Los Angeles: Nature and Community in the Global City (MIT Press, 2007) by Robert Gottlieb documents local efforts to evolve a particularly “green” urbanism in that metropolis. He highlights the social and political dimension of creating urbanisms. And the all-time masterwork on the political dimension of urbanism in the U.S. is Clarence Stone’s Regime Politics: Governing Atlanta 1946-1988 (University of Kansas Press, 1989). Stone was a founder of a political theory about how cities are made governable, called “regime theory.” Since his historical interpretation of the informal alliances between Atlanta’s business leaders, the media, local political party organizations, property developers, and the Black middle class that allowed Atlanta to develop into such a unique economic center in the South, regime theory has gone a bit overboard with trying to categorize cities. But the basic explanatory power of Stone’s book about the political conditions required for progressive change is unsurpassed. Finally, Zoned Out (Resources for the Future Press, 2006) by Jonathan Levine provides a more contemporary political analysis that complements the arguments made by Leinberger and me. In this book he responds to those who argue that suburban sprawl is a rational “free market” response to empowered consumers. He shows the extent to which government zoning is at the heart of the industrial production of suburbs as a form of city building. He goes on to argue that in a more unregulated market, the United States would develop much more diverse kinds of mixed-use urban areas. In other words, there would be more economic space in which new American urbanisms could evolve.

David Bell, co-author of the upcoming book Pleasure Zones: Bodies, Cities, Spaces (Syracuse University Press, 2009) teaches cultural studies at Staffordshire University, where he explores how sexuality defines urban space, including everything from gay/lesbian neighborhoods to red-light districts.

First, I’d suggest Dolores Hayden’s A Field Guide to Sprawl (W.W. Norton, 2004), which tells us everything that’s wrong with American cities today. The book shows a dehumanized landscape where buildings and planning have been reduced to pure function, and the result is alienating. Its photos show starkly how the American landscape now looks. One recent retrospective (and also future-spective) that’s full of rich ideas is Neil Bingham et al’s Fantasy Architecture 1500-2036 (Hayward Gallery/Royal Institute of British Architects, 2004). It posits alternative to sprawl—an optimistic, utopian idea that architecture can be amazing and also livable, and make people’s lives better. For a different way of thinking about the future, I’m always drawn back to past utopian projects, and to continuing to hold out some hope that we might get renewed inspiration there. Finally, on the future of planning, Leonie Sandercock’s Cosmopolis II: Mongrel Cities (Continuum International Publishing Group, 2004) is pretty visionary (though I don’t agree with all of it). Sandercock does similar to Bingham with planning as a process—to re-enchant it, maybe, through things like participation. My main quibble with her is her faith in community arts.

Richard Florida is the author of Cities of the Creative Class (Routeledge, 2004) and Who’s Your City (Basic Books, 2008), both of which explore the relationship between creativity and city development. He is a columnist, professor of business and creativity at the University of Toronto, and researcher exploring the interplay of economics, demographics and innovation.

One answer: Jane Jacobs, The Economy of Cities (Vintage, 1970). It is the MOST important book on cities, and in my view, maybe the most important book for understanding economy and society since Marx. The book provides the basic theory, not just for how cities work or why they are important social and economic entities, but for how they are key drivers of economic and social development.

James Howard Kunstler is a writer and lecturer who studies urban planning in the modern city. His books include The Geography of Nowhere (Simon & Schuster/Free Press, 1994) and The City in Mind: Notes on the Urban Condition (Simon & Schuster/Free Press, 2002).

By far the best book for this purpose is Leon Krier’s new one, The Architecture of Community (Island Press, 2009). This new book is a much-better-organized edition of writings and diagrams of his than had been published previously in books that were not well-edited. His ideas, however, remain the same. They are presented most coherently in this. I’d also include one of my latest, The Long Emergency (Atlantic Monthly Press, 2005), which sets out the limitations and problems we face vis-à-vis the permanent energy predicament. ♦