Review essay: Urbanism for all?

 

Alex Krieger, City on a Hill: Urban Idealism in America from the Puritans to the Present (Belknap/Harvard, 2019).

Stacy Mitchell, Big-Box Swindle: The True Cost of Mega-Retailers and the Fight for America's Independent Businesses (Beacon, 2006).

A few years ago, I began a talk on urbanism by reading from the excellent novel The Golem and the Jinni by Helene Wecker (Harper, 2013). The author describes in detail the golem's first encounter of late 19th century New York City, full of energy and community and poverty and garbage. I told the group that urbanism was more or less an effort to recapture the energy and community Wecker describes without the yucky stuff.

It seems urbanism is not the first movement in American history to try to pull this off. Most of Alex Krieger's prodigious book is a chronicle of hope, as a succession of dreamers takes advantage of the vast American continent, as well as ever-improving technology, to leave whatever mess they were in to seek economic and social opportunity (chs 1, 9, 12, 16, 18), contact with nature (chs 2, 6, 7, 13), better communities (chs 4, 5, 14, 15), or just some fresh air. These (predominantly white) Americans had big ideas of how they could somewhere produce a mode of living that provided the best of both worlds--be those individualism/community, culture/nature, stimulation/security, e.g.--without the yucky parts of existing arrangements. Existing cities were typically perceived as anti-nature, rushed, stressful, crowded, dirty, noisy, corrupt, and full of disease and poverty and crime. Also difference (ch. 3). 

Las Vegas's wide streets are for people who are going places

So successive generations of dreamers struck out for a new start, either individually or in like-minded communities. Krieger covers a bunch of urban design trends over the centuries, as well as profiles of indicator cities like Washington (ch. 10), Chicago (ch. 11), and Las Vegas (ch.16). He is gentle and sympathetic in his portrayals, dismissing reflexive snobbery (of the "what they wanted was stupid" variety) and cynicism ("it was stupid to want/hope for that"). He pays some but not a whole lot of attention to the continental vastness being dependent on ignoring the presence of Native Americans, or to the nonwhite minorities and poor whites who suffered the impacts of whatever actions were taken towards the next utopia.

Eventually, Krieger's tone turns critical. Late in this exhaustive history of American approaches to place design comes this hint at the author's overall message: When Thomas More coined the term Utopia, the U came from the Greek words for "good" and "no" (p. 336). By chapter 18, on the back-to-the-city movement of "yuccies" and younger retired people in the early 21st century, he is scoring what the utopians have produced: swaths of environmental destruction, isolation or displacement of less powerful poor and nonwhite groups, and hoarding of goods and opportunities. He cities a number of critics of gentrification, including Joel Kotkin and Peter Moskowitz, contrasting their findings with a 1931 quote from James Truslow Adams, who defined the American Dream as a dream of social order in which each man and each woman shall be able to attain to the fullest stature of which they are innately capable, and be recognized by others for what they are, regardless of the fortuitous circumstances of birth or position (The Epic of America, pp.214-215, quoted on p. 344). Boy, is this ever not happening. (See Piketty 2014, Reeves 2017).

Finally, in chapter 19 ("Postscript"), he turns cautiously hopeful again. We can and must do better, as we've already striven to do, though not by leaving places and people behind to build a new city on a new hill. Rather, we must our places and their people get better. Like Richard Florida in The New Urban Crisis (Basic, 2017), he has a to-do list: 

1. sharing access to the abundance of America
2. minimizing inequality, especially by careful public policy investment choices
3. stewardship of the environment, especially by curbing excessive consumption
4. responsibility to a broad idea of common purpose/good

Now, that's my kind of urban idealism! It stands in contrast to displacement-by-gentrification, or to urban renewal (ch. 14).

Stacy Mitchell's occasionally anachronistic but still powerful argument describes another American would-be utopia: the massive "big-box" stores operated across America by massive chains like Home Depot, Target, and the empire that is Wal-Mart. (Frequent mentions of Borders, Blockbuster, and K-Mart are jarring, but the arguments remain current in the age of Amazon.) The chains' promised paradise is one of large quantities of low-cost consumer goods, which would be nirvana to people who identify primarily as consumers. Local governments are attracted to the promise of single-shot job creation. In chapter 2, she tackles "the jobs mirage," including a study by Kenneth Stone of Iowa State University that found Wal-Mart's first ten years in Iowa (1983-1993, at the end of which there were 45 superstores) corresponded with statewide losses of "555 grocery stores, 591 hardware and building-supply dealers, 161 variety stores, 88 department stores, 291 apparel stores, 153 shoe stores, 116 drugstores, 111 jewelry stores, and 94 lawn and garden stores," and all their jobs with them. The low costs that attract consumers (ch. 5) are illusory, too, based on loss leaders and temporary cuts to drive out competition. These putative consumer paradises come at costs to local tax bases, domestic manufacturing, local and global wages, the landscape, the environment, and so on.

Mitchell is one of America's foremost advocates for locally-owned small businesses. Happily she concludes on hopeful notes: how communities have (sometimes) successfully fought back against chains, and how small businesses have banded together to make themselves stronger. Her evidence is thorough, yet her writing remains passionate, which is a difficult combination for any writer. Any observation of the American landscape, however, will show the lessons of all the research she details have been imperfectly learned.

 

Marion, IA, Black Friday 2019