To put the question simply, will technology be a substitute for the regular social contact of Jacobs’s day, or will it provide a crucial supplement? As anyone who walks down an urban street knows, a significant proportion of the cell phone conversations that take place are simply logistical arrangements, as people seek to reveal to others where they are in space and how soon they can meet one another at an agreed-upon location. Social media are, among other things, ways for large numbers of people to settle on mutual congregating spaces instantly. And what of the long, personal conversations that take place on the street between lovers, coworkers, siblings, parents and children, and casual friends talking about that night’s NFL football game? Are most of those simply replacing conversations that would have been held in the old days in person or over old-fashioned landlines? Or are they new forms of communication that would not have taken place in the old days?
Those are crucial issues, it seems to me, for the legacy of Jane Jacobs and for ourselves. There is no question that for people who have been displaced from their physical neighborhoods, or even have left them voluntarily, the products of the information technology industry are a startlingly effective way of maintaining relations that have been disrupted by the processes of physical dislocation. Young former residents of public housing projects in Cleveland who agree to meet on a corner in Cleveland Heights or East Cleveland are preserving social contact in ways that would have been utterly impossible before. The existing residents of Cleveland Heights may not be pleased with the gatherings that result, but social action has been preserved nevertheless.
But what of the coming generation of city dwellers—the millennials raised on suburban cul-de-sac streets who see no reason to live there as adults; the young people raised in cities who wish to live out their lives there? What are we to make of these people? One can argue that they are so plugged into the technological inventions of the past quarter century that it hardly matters where they live. They can tweet from anywhere. The closely connected world of physical contact that Jane Jacobs idealized may have no meaning for them. The point of living in the city, the argument could run, is to spend less time commuting and more time communicating via gadget to a circle of friends who hardly ever meet up in person.
That is possible. But to say it is to miss the whole point of demographic transformation. The more that people are enabled by technology to communicate with one another while remaining physically solitary, the more they crave a physical form of social life to balance out all the electronics. People do not move to the center of cities merely to be able to get to and from work a quarter of an hour faster. They are settling in cities—those who have a choice—in large part to experience the things that citizens of Paris and Vienna experienced a century ago: round-the-clock street life; café sociability; casual acquaintances they meet on the sidewalk every day. This is the direction I think we are heading in.
The twenty-three-year-old student glued to a laptop computer in a corner café in a Chicago neighborhood like Sheffield should not be seen as too different from the Viennese reading his newspaper in a café on Vienna’s Ringstrasse in 1910. He remains a social animal. He merely expresses the balance between his sociability and his individuality in a different, twenty-first-century way.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I am no Jane Jacobs, but over the past decade or so I have spent time in many cities and tried to remember the way she said cities were best understood: by walking around them with as few preconceptions as possible and trying to understand the way they worked and the ways in which they were changing. What I saw, to recapitulate briefly the argument of this book, was a radical rearrangement in which people who possessed money and choice were increasingly living in the center, while newcomers and the poor were settling in the suburbs, often in the outer reaches of suburban territory. In short, many American metropolitan areas were coming to look more like the European versions of a century ago than like the places we grew accustomed to in the latter decades of the twentieth century. The more places I visited, the more convinced I became that this was a development of crucial importance to American society, but it was one that had attracted comparatively little attention from the media or even from scholars whose business it was to write about the challenges of urban life.
By 2008, I found myself wishing to present what I had seen in a systematic way. I was fortunate to attract the interest of Frank Foer, then-editor of The New Republic, who encouraged me to write a long article, “Trading Places,” which documented the altered urban arrangements of the previous few years to the extent that I understood them at that time. This article appeared as a cover story in The New Republic in August 2008.
There was much more for me to learn and to say, however, and I set about trying to expand my ideas into a broader argument that might be persuasive at book length. I was lucky enough to attract an outstanding literary agent in Chris Parris-Lamb of the Gernert Company, and eventually a talented editor in Andrew Miller at Alfred A. Knopf. Both have been patient listeners to my ideas, suggestions, and complaints over the past couple of years. Chris is the best agent I have ever worked with or hope to work with; he also returns e-mails faster than any agent I have ever heard of.
And so the article called “Trading Places” grew into a book, informed by extended visits I made to eight different American metropolitan areas during 2009 and 2010. The project benefited immensely from the generosity of many dozens of sources in the eight places I chose to focus on. There is no way for me to name them all, but I want to express my special gratitude to Frank Beal in Chicago, Marina Peed in Atlanta, Camille Barnett in Philadelphia, and Peter Brown in Houston, all of whom served as guides and facilitators as well as interview subjects. Frank and Marina were also kind enough to review chapter drafts that I sent them later, as were Alex Marshall in New York, Feather Houstoun in Philadelphia, David Crossley in Houston, Dennis Keating in Cleveland, Don Keuth in Phoenix, and Sam Mamet in Denver. I am particularly grateful to several of these people who spent considerable time reviewing my work even though they did not agree with everything I chose to say.
Meanwhile, I was discussing and developing my ideas through conversations with colleagues and friends at the two places where I have worked in the past few years: Governing magazine and the Pew Charitable Trusts. I particularly want to thank Chris Swope, John Buntin, Alan Greenblatt, Peter Harkness, Richard Greene, Katherine Barrett, and Elder Witt. David Kidd was a great help to me not only as a photographer but as a patient listener and sometime traveling companion. David Merrill produced just the maps I was looking for. Susan Urahn and Lori Grange of the Pew Center on the States provided a challenging and rewarding work environment upon my arrival there early in 2010.
As this process was unfolding, several urban scholars published work on the same subjects I was pursuing, and I have benefited from the opportunity to read the books and articles they have produced. In no particular order, I would like to single out Christopher Leinberger and William Frey of the Brookings Institution, Richard Florida of the University of Toronto, Witold Rybczynski of the University of Pennsylvania, and Edward Glaeser of Harvard University. While none of these authors would agree with everything I say in this book, each has been a source of new ideas and provocative arguments.
It is customary at the end of acknowledgment pages to thank the members of one’s family, and I would be delinquent in not doing so now. My daughters, Lizzie and Jennie, have served as sounding boards and sources of ideas that added to the contributions of professionals in the field. And without veering off too far in the direction of sentimentality, I must try my best to express thanks to my wife, Suzanne, who has performed at various times the roles of critic, researcher, proofreader, counselor, and source of overall moral support. In this effort, as in so many phases of my life, I would be nowhere without her.
NOTES
PROLOGUE: TRADING PLACES
1 In some places, the phenomenon of demographic inversion: Data taken from American Fac
t Finder, U.S. Census Bureau, 2009.
2 At the time of the September 11 attacks: Survey by New York Downtown Alliance, 2007.
3 No American city looks like Vancouver: Alan Ehrenhalt, “Extreme Makeover,” Governing, July 2006, p. 26.
4 Burgess was right about: Ernest W. Burgess, “The Growth of the City: An Introduction to a Research Project,” 1925, www.tsjugephd.com/PCC…/
file_Burgess_The_Growth_of_the_City.pdf.
5 “submerged regions of poverty”: Ibid.
6 The urban historian Robert Bruegmann goes so far as to claim: Summarizes material in Robert Bruegmann, Sprawl: A Compact History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005).
7 In the peak baby boom period: Arthur C. Nelson, “The New Urbanity: The Rise of a New America,” Annals, American Academy of Political and Social Science, November 2009.
8 If you were part of the servant class: Frederic Morton, A Nervous Splendor: Vienna 1888/1889 (New York: Penguin, 1980), p. 58.
9 “an endless succession of factory-town main streets”: A. J. Liebling, Chicago: The Second City (New York: Knopf, 1952), reprinted in Liebling at Home (New York: Wideview Books, 1982), p. 166.
10 Christopher Leinberger, the real estate developer and urban planning scholar: Christopher Leinberger, The Option of Urbanism: Investing in a New American Dream (Washington, D.C.: Island Press, 2008).
CHAPTER ONE: A BACKWARD GLANCE
1 “If we are to achieve an urban renaissance”: Donald J. Olsen, The City as a Work of Art: London, Paris, Vienna (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1986), p. x.
2 “the nineteenth century invented modernity”: Jean-Christophe Bailly, Preface to François Loyer, Paris Nineteenth Century: Architecture and Urbanism (New York: Abbeville Press, 1988), p. 10.
3 “Apartment houses destroy private life”: Sharon Marcus, Apartment Stories: City and Home in Nineteenth-Century Paris and London (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), p. 57.
4 “as soon as it awakes”: Alfred Delvau, Les Dessous de Paris, 1860, quoted ibid., p. 149.
5 “we find it tiresome”: Alfred Delvau, Histoire anecdotique des cafés et cabarets de Paris, 1862, quoted ibid., p. 148.
6 “the interior is going to die”: Comments by Edmond and Jules de Goncourt, 1861, quoted ibid., p. 139.
7 “Gray does not have a good name”: Bailly, Preface to Loyer, Paris Nineteenth Century, p. 9.
8 “It is not an illumination but a fire”: Edmondo de Amicis, Studies of Paris, 1882, quoted in Norma Evenson, Paris: A Century of Change, 1878–1978 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1981), p. 6.
9 “Everything is neat and fresh”: Ibid., p. 2.
10 “The sidewalks provided”: Evenson, Paris, p. 20.
11 “nothing can more thoroughly demoralize”: Eugene Viollet-le-Duc, quoted in Marcus, Apartment Stories, p. 160.
12 “Montmartre was to become the dynamo”: Nigel Gosling, quoted in Peter Hall, Cities in Civilization (New York: Pantheon, 1998), p. 230.
13 “The young artists”: Hall, Cities in Civilization, p. 237.
14 “the smells from the kitchen”: Fernande Olivier, Picasso and His Friends (New York: Appleton Century, 1965), quoted ibid., p. 227.
15 “the great ordering system”: James Howard Kunstler, The City in Mind: Meditations on the Urban Condition (New York: Free Press, 2002), p. 3.
16 “Second Empire Paris became”: Loyer, Paris Nineteenth Century, p. 232.
17 “For hours I could stand”: Carl Schorske, Fin-de-Siècle Vienna: Politics and Culture (New York: Vintage, 1981), p. 46.
18 “the Minister-President or the richest magnate”: Stefan Zweig, The World of Yesterday (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1964), p. 15.
19 “The first glance”: Ibid., p. 14.
20 “It is a sort of democratic club”: Ibid., p. 39.
21 “dismal tenement landscape”: Frederic Morton, A Nervous Splendor: Vienna 1888/1889 (New York: Penguin, 1980), p. 58.
22 “If the British empire was the most powerful”: Jonathan Schneer, London 1900: The Imperial Metropolis (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1999), p.19.
23 “a true Londoner”: Ford Madox Ford, quoted in Peter Ackroyd, London: The Biography (New York: Nan A. Talese, 2000), p. 569.
24 “The Strand of those days”: H. B. Creswell, quoted in Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities (New York: Vintage, 1992), p. 341.
25 “The leisure class in London”: Olsen, The City as a Work of Art, p. 217.
26 “The East End became a terra incognita”: Tristram Hunt, Building Jerusalem (New York: Henry Holt, 2005), p. 390.
27 “where filthy men and women live”: Arthur Morrison, quoted in Asa Briggs, Victorian Cities (New York: Harper & Row, 1963), p. 326.
28 “a great mysterious movement”: H. G. Wells. Tono-Bungay, quoted in Ackroyd, London, p. 581.
29 “some hoary massive underworld”: D. H. Lawrence writing to Lady Ottoline Morrell, May, 14, 1915, in The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, vol. 2, ed. George J. Zytaruk and James T. Boulton (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1981), p. 339.
30 “the habit of living”: Hunt, Building Jerusalem, p. 409.
31 “the little clump of shops”: H. G. Wells, Ann Veronica, quoted in Briggs, Victorian Cities, p. 357.
32 “The center of population is shifting”: Sidney J. Low, “The Rise of the Suburbs,” The Contemporary Review 60 (October 1891): 550.
CHAPTER TWO: A NEIGHBORHOOD IN CHICAGO
1 “At first glance”: Susan Chandler, “Flaunting It,” Chicago Tribune Magazine, October 8, 2006, p. 12.
2 “The city is changing”: Richard M. Daley quoted by Fassil Demissie, “Globalization and the Remaking of Chicago,” in The New Chicago: A Social and Cultural Analysis, ed. John Koval et al. (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2006), p. 22.
3 The loss of factory jobs: Figures taken from John Koval, “An Overview and Point of View,” Introduction to Koval et al., The New Chicago, p. 8.
4 “Manufacturing was still more important”: David Moberg, “Economic Restructuring: Chicago’s Precarious Balance,” in Koval et al., The New Chicago, p. 36.
5 This did not change for a long time: Bill Testa, “What Are the Opportunities in Central Cities,” in Midwest Economy, a blog from the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago (www.midwest.chicagofedblogs.org), posted May 21, 2009.
6 “a watershed in Chicago planning history”: Joseph P. Schwieterman and Dana M. Caspall, The Politics of Place: The City in the Twenty-first Century (New York: Pantheon, 2000), p. 70.
7 “Virtually every garage”: Erich Teske, quoted in Voices and Visions of Lincoln Park, a film produced by the Lincoln Park Community Research Initiative, 2005.
8 “You ride the length of Chicago”: Jack Mabley, Chicago Daily News, 1957.
9 “Living west of Halsted”: Diane Levin, personal interview, June 2009.
10 The Ravenswood line was in financial trouble: Alan Ehrenhalt, “A City in Transit,” Preservation, March/April 2001, pp. 43–49.
11 “They’re turning what was a vibrant urban neighborhood”: Blair Kamin, “Exercises in Isolationism,” Chicago Tribune Magazine, October 8, 2006, p. 12.
12 “a tremendous diminution in participation”: Martin Oberman, personal interview, June 2009.
13 “The young people here”: Laura Wolfgang, Midwest Magazine of the Chicago Sunday Sun-Times, July 23, 1972, p. 12.
14 “In Chicago, … gentrification follows”: Martin Oberman interview.
15 “High-rise villages and communities”: Koval, “An Overview and Point of View,” p. 12.
CHAPTER THREE: RE-CREATION IN NEW YORK
1 Following September 11, 2001, many predicted: Joseph J. Salvo, Arun Peter Lobo, and Joel A. Alvarez, “A Pre- and Post-9/11 Look (2000–2005) at Lower Manhattan,” paper prepared for March 2007 annual meeting of the Population Association of America.
2 In 2009, the median family size: Alliance for Downtown New York, Survey of Lowe
r Manhattan Residents, Summary of Findings, May 2010.
3 New residents of the Financial District were eligible: Lloyd Dixon and Rachel Kaganoff Stern, Compensation for Losses from the 9/11 Attacks (Santa Monica, Calif.: RAND Institute for Civil Justice, 2004), p. 78.
4 By the summer of 2009, official city estimates: Amanda Fung, “Shadow Units Cast Pall; Not-Yet-Marketed Condominiums Mean Apartment Glut Is Worse Than It Looks,” Crain’s New York Business, August 10, 2009, p. 2.
5 Some developers were making unsold units: Hilary Potkewitz, “Hotels Spring Up in Unsold Condos; Wall Street Area Contains New Crop of Illegal Rooms; Neighbors Annoyed,” Crain’s New York Business, December 15, 2008, p. 1.
6 One building on John Street: Vivian S. Toy, “The Diaper District,” New York Times, February 22, 2009, p. RE1.
7 “Shaded by poplars and elms”: Ron Chernow, Alexander Hamilton (New York: Penguin, 2004), p. 50.
8 “a residential population would stimulate”: Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities (New York: Vintage, 1992), p. 156.
9 “I live just about geographic dead center”: Ro Sheffe, personal interview, August 2008.
10 “More than anywhere else in the city”: Deborah Brown, personal interview, August 2009.
11 “We get a lot of calls from Europe”: Kevin Lindamood, personal interview, August 2009.
12 In June 2009, the first Bushwick biennial: James Kalm, “Bushwick Biennial: Venice It Ain’t,” www.brooklynrail.org, July/August 2009, www.brooklynrail.org/2009/07/artseen/brooklyn-dispatches-new.
13 “I think it’s bizarre”: Jeremy Sapienza, comments section of “Vito Lopez to ‘Yuppie Newcomers’: Drop Dead,” www.BushwickBK.com, September 11, 2008.
14 “in a five-year period”: Martin Gottlieb, “F.H.A. Case Recalls Bushwick in 70’s,” New York Times, February 2, 1986, p. 35.
The Great Inversion and the Future of the American City Page 25