The Urban West

The Koolhaas Kage

I recently characterized the new Seattle public library, designed by Rem Koolhaas, as a “disasterous” structure. Is the adjective over the top? Perhaps, but I want to counter what was the initial response among architectural critics, from the New York Times to my home paper the Oregonian, which I would describe as over the top adulation.

I think it is great that Seattle invested in a new downtown library that is more striking than the uninspiring box it replaced, and also great that the library is well used. I’ve observed people lining up by the dozens waiting for it to open, as well as packing its banks of computer terminals. I suggest as a thought experiment, however, that any well equipped central library would get the same use in our current economy and information ecology. Certainly Portland’s central library does, in a renovated building from the 1910s.

The Koolhaas exterior is a matter of taste. It doesn’t excite me, but it is interesting in a relatively bland downtown, and it does have to cope with one of Seattle’s steeply sloping blocks.

It is interior arrangements that I fault. The lower level entrance spaces and reading room spaces are strike me as poorly arranged for efficient circulation and ease of finding the standard library components (checkout, reference services, and the like). From the entrance spaces to the stacks you ride an escalator up past an isolated, mysteriously color-coded middle floor whose access and purpose are hard to read. Get to the top of the building (nice views, of course) and it is difficult to get from one level of the stacks to another without convoluted maneuvers. The stacks themselves were built to show off an architectural conceit rather than designed to be easy to understand. Elevators and stairs are hard to find. I’m sure that regular users figure out the tricks, but a building of this sort should be easy to use, not a puzzle box.

I’m told that the librarians who work there are some of the most critical of the building’s users.

Framing U.S. Urban History: Charles Glaab and The American City: A Documentary History (1963)

In the early 1960s, Americans were rediscovering cities as objects of intellectual inquiry as well as targets for public policy.

The single year 1961 saw publication of Lewis Mumford’s The City in History, Jean Gottmann’s Megalopolis, and Jane Jacobs’ The Death and Life of Great American Cities. These books took different intellectual stands, but all of the authors agreed that modern cities were phenomena that required fundamental rethinking/new thinking about current trends. Cities weren’t decentralizing properly said Mumford. Cities were killing their centers said Jacobs. Cities were growing into new forms that neither Mumford not Jacobs quite understood said Gottmann.

The next year came the book that I judge to be Glaab’s intellectual foil, namely Morton and Lucia White’s The Intellectual Versus the City.

Morton White was a professor of philosophy at Harvard and an expert on the American tradition of pragmatic reform and its failings. His landmark book was Social Thought in America (1949) with an examination of John Dewey, Charles Beard, and Thorstein Veblen. He grew up in the intellectually intense and politically charged environment of interwar Manhattan. He was an intellectual historian for whom ideas were fascinating in themselves, and who was therefore interested in the thinkers who occupied what were commonly recognized as the loftiest peaks of intellectual endeavor. The protagonists in The Intellectual Versus the City were men like Thomas Jefferson, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Herman Melville, Henry Adams, and Frank Lloyd Wright.

The general impression that a new graduate student took away from the book a few years after its publication was that cities were unlovable—perhaps necessary, but little to be admired. According to the back cover of my 75-cent 1964 paperback, “Our nation’s most distinguished artists, leaders, and intellectuals have proclaimed open hostility toward the city. Unlike the Englishman’s London or the Frenchman’s Paris, they have found nothing to love in the sprawling American metropolis. This significant and thoughtful study analyzes for the first time the major intellectual reactions to urbanism . . . .and offers some provocative conclusions as to why our cities have been the traditional object of prejudice, fear, and distrust.”

The Whites wrote their book from the academic citadels of Cambridge and Princeton and acknowledged advice from luminaries like Carl Schorske, Perry Miller, John Burchard, Lloyd Rodwin, and Arthur M. Schlesinger among others.

Charles Glaab came out of a very different environment—born in Williston, North Dakota, educated at North Dakota University and then the University of Missouri, employed first in Kansas, then Wisconsin, then Ohio. His monographs dealt with places very much different from New York or Cambridge—Kansas City, Neenah-Menasha, Toledo. As someone who still, after years in Oregon, considers the Miami Valley of southwestern Ohio to be the garden of the world, these are choices after my own heart.

The documentary history that Glaab assembled and edited from his base at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee has fundamental merits as a text that still gives it a place on my bookshelf, its cover substantially assisted by duct tape. Its organization and categories are clear. Its excerpts are drawn heavily from magazines and popular journalism, and thus readable and accessible for novices. The selections are substantial enough to be helpful to instructors and researchers as well as students. Richard Wade assigned the book when I took his course in urban history at the University of Chicago in 1967. Ray Mohl reports that Bayrd Still assigned it in his urban history class at NYU in 1964.

Apropos of my argument, The American City is also an antidote to the Whites.

Reading through the selections, we get a much better feel for popular ideas as well as elite critiques. The intellectual protagonists in its pages are the sorts of civic leaders who tried to keep up on events and solve problems while leading otherwise busy lives. They are the travelers and journalists who want to explain phenomenal cities to their readers (or perhaps to titillate them). They are the reformers who addressed practical problems while trying to understand the urban dynamics

I count only one author—the interminable Henry James—who held himself completely above the fray. Other “intellectuals” were also politicians (Jefferson, Woodrow Wilson) or activist/practitioners (Daniel Drake, Frederick Law Olmsted, Jane Addams)

We also get a balanced view. Readers encounter fearful and negative evaluations, for where would a course in urban history be without The Dangerous Classes of New York or The Shame of the Cities? However, there are also evaluations that are variously excited, positive, and hopeful. European visitors with unhappy views of American cities (Alexis de Tocqueville, Rudyard Kipling) are balanced by those more sympathetic (Michael Chevalier, Anthony Trollope rather than his cranky mother). We get the views of important social scientists like F. J. Kingsbury, Adna F. Weber, Richard Ely, Paul Kellogg, and Graham Taylor. There are reformers and critics aplenty, but also indefatigable promoters like DeWitt Clinton and Jesup Scott and John S. Wright.

And Glaab’s selections introduced me to two of my favorite commentators: George Tucker, one of the founding faculty from Thomas Jefferson’s University of Virginia writing The Progress of the United States in Population and Wealth in the 1840s, and the Urbanism Committee of the National Resources Committee writing in the 1930s. Without Charles Glaab, how long would it have taken me to encounter Our Cities: Their Role in the National Economy?

As much as anything, The American City: A Documentary History sketches out a comprehensive intellectual history of American urbanization that recognized that, as George Tucker wrote, “whatever may be the good or evil tendencies of populous cities, they are the result to which all countries, that are at once fertile, free, and intelligent, tend.”

[This is a retrospective review of Richard Wade’s The Urban Frontier, originally published on H-Urban.]

As the United States entered the 1950s, highway engineers were eagerly completing plans for Middle Western toll highways and anticipating national freeway system. Automobile stylists were turning Studebakers into rocket ships and dreaming of ways to turn rear fenders into tailfins. Meanwhile, Richard Wade was determinedly following the route of the early Ohio River boatmen. His itinerary took him downriver from Pittsburgh to Cincinnati to Louisville and then to St. Louis on the Mississippi, with side trips
to Lexington and the limestone soil of the bluegrass country. His stops over several years of research were the local history rooms of public libraries, city and state historical societies, newspaper archives, and dusty rooms full of early municipal records in the
city hall basements and municipal annexes. At least in Pittsburgh, home of political boss and king-maker David Lawrence, Wade’s budding career as a Democratic Party activist helped to open records that were still carefully guarded after 150 years.

The result of sweltering summers of note-taking and writing was a Harvard University Ph.D. dissertation for the elder Arthur Schlesinger, published by the Harvard University Press as The Urban Frontier: The Rise of Western Cities, 1790-1830 in 1959. In the 1960s it entered the paperback world as The Urban Frontier: Pioneer Life in Early Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, Lexington, Louisville, and St. Louis. In 1996 University of Illinois Press has reissued this American history classic under its original title with a valuable preface by Zane L. Miller, one of Wade’s most accomplished and influential students.

The Urban Frontier propounded a simple and startling thesis. Cities were the spearheads of the Anglo-American frontier. Frederick Jackson Turner had gotten the order of events mixed up. Urbanization didn’t follow the farmer–it made the development of
agriculture possible. On successive frontiers in the Ohio Valley, around the Great Lakes, at the margin of the Great Plains, on the Pacific Coast, and in the western mountains, urban settlements provided the necessary foundation for intensive resource
development. They processed and marketed crops, timber, and minerals; they furnished merchandise and supplies; they mobilized capital and management expertise to build roads, canals, and railroads; they provided the refinements of civilization that westering Anglo-Americans so desperately wanted.

Obvious as this point may seem to H-Urban subscribers, it contradicted the strongest trend in regional history in the 1950s. A few years before The Urban Frontier, R. Carlyle Buley won the Pulitzer Prize for The Old Northwest: Pioneer Period, 1815-1840
(Indianapolis: Indiana Historical Society, 1950). Buley’s book is a thick, nearly unreadable compendium of tidbits about farm life and pioneer society in the early Middle West. It assumed that Middle Western history was rural history and it romanticized the quaint practices of the folk. For fiction readers, Ross Lockridge’s immensely popular Raintree County (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1948) offered the same message in a novel set in the Cincinnati hinterland of southeastern Indiana. The full title of the Lockridge book shows the power of the romanticizing impulse: “Raintree County … which had no boundaries in time and space, where lurked musical and strange names and mythical and lost peoples, and which was itself only a name musical and strange.”

The Urban Frontier in this context was a wakeup call. “Get real!” it says. Take a look at social and economic realities. Look at the way that cities expressed and promoted the commercial capitalism that lies at the heart of the American experience. Wade’s study
thus extended the historical understanding of American growth that was being outlined in Louis Hartz’s brilliant Liberal Tradition in America (New York: Harcourt Brace 1955), David Potter’s equally powerful People of Plenty (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1954), and the studies of state economic development policy by Oscar and Mary Handlin, Hartz, and others.[1]

Wade’s insight rang true for me when I read the book as an undergraduate who wanted to be a historian but was not quite sure what to study. Wade was writing about my part of the country, for I was a fifth-generation Ohioan. He was also writing about my ancestors, who had been townspeople–storekeepers, telegraph operators, artisans, clerks, land speculators (quite unsuccessful, I might add). I decided then, and still believe, that Wade managed a great conceptual feat. The book confirms that Fred Turner asked the right questions about the process and meaning of American expansion, but just needed his answers turned inside out.

A key concept in The Urban Frontier is “urban imperialism.” A term originally used by Wade’s mentor Arthur Schlesinger in his classic essay “The City in American History,” urban imperialism is a historical-geographic framework for understanding the ways in which urban commercial networks organize and develop hinterlands through trade and investment. The concept has been applied successfully in other regions from Texas to California. It resonates with geographer James Vance’s model of a mercantile pattern of settlement and it underlies William Cronon’s recent sophisticated analysis of Chicago’s interactions with its region.[2]

The concept assumes that the United States was born in commercial capitalism. In Wade’s Old Northwest we find no gradual coalescence of rural subsistence society into a more complex economy. Rather the Great West grows as an outpost of New York, London, and Hamburg, striving from the start to reach distant markets and fertilized by
investment and migration. The mentalite of this Middle America was improvement, not stasis. As has been true for two centuries, the battles were over the right sharing of the fruits of growth, not the possibility of economic modernization.

Also basic to Wade’s interpretation is the role of cities in the transit of culture. Wade’s Cincinnatians and Louisvillers were a conservative bourgeoisie, interested in recreating the society that they left behind. They borrowed street names from Philadelphia, filled churches and meeting halls, and looked for guidance to east coast communities. Here Wade’s interpretation extended Daniel Aaron’s previous study of Cincinnati society and complemented Earl Pomeroy’s argument about the social and cultural conservatism of far western settlement.[3]

Like most other historians of the 1950s, Wade looked for patterns in the written record. In using public records, newspapers, and published documents, he engaged in very traditional historical research. He did not explore quantitative data sources, the built
environment, or other sources of information that could have enriched his interpretation–although he certain encouraged his own students to do so and later used such sources to great effect in Chicago: The Growth of a Metropolis (University of Chicago Press,
1969), co-authored with geographer Harold Mayer. Nor did he explicitly test social theory in the way that his second book, Slavery in the Cities (New York: Oxford University Press, 1964) would test sociological generalizations about the effects of
urbanization on social institutions and individual freedom.

Covering forty years of growth in five cities, Wade’s study is necessarily broader than it is detailed. It is a sketch map of a vast intellectual territory drawn from the most accessible sources. An explorer like Henry Schoolcraft or William Clark, he mapped broad contours and described large patterns that later intellectual surveyors and entrepreneurs could fill in. Those broad patterns, however, included all of the core topics of urban development, from economic growth to the differentiation of social classes to the creation of political and cultural institutions.

Wade’s study triggered a vast literature including case studies of individual western cities and comparative discussions on other urban frontiers and imperial realms. A generation of urban historians learned that the way to do urban history was to explore a theme across a multitude of cases. The result was outstanding studies by Ken Jackson, Howard Rabinowitz, Blaine Brownell, David Goldfield, Don Doyle, Timothy Mahoney, and many others.[4]

The Urban Frontier is a study of the public city–that is, the ways in which early city builders conceived and promoted their communities as economic engines and civic entities. The book describes ethnic differences, the presence of free and enslaved
African-Americans, and the stirrings of class divisions, but these are secondary to the theme. Many questions that we would now pose about the roles and experiences of women went unasked. Nevertheless, Wade’s book remains the most accessible study of the founding of an urbanized nation. It still carries the excitement of intellectual discovery that has made it so influential.

Notes:

[1]. Oscar Handlin and Mary Handlin, Commonwealth: A Study of the Role of Government in the American Economy: Massachusetts, 1774-1861 (New York: New York University Press, 1947); Louis Hartz, Economic Policy and Democratic Thought: Pennsylvania, 1776-1860 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1948).

[2]. Arthur Schlesinger, “The City in American History,” Mississippi Valley Historical Review (June 1940): 43-66; James Vance, This Scene of Man: The Role and Structure of the City in the Geography of Western Civilization (New York: Harper’s College Press, 1977); William Cronon, Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West (New York: Norton, 1991).

[3]. Daniel Aaron, Cincinnati: Queen City of the West, 1819-1839 (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1992); Earl Pomeroy, “Toward a Reorientation of Western History: Continuity and Environment,” Mississippi Valley Historical Review (March 1955): 579-600.

[4]. This lesson I learned in Wade’s University of Chicago seminar and tried to apply in my dissertation. Published as Boosters and Businessmen: Popular Economic Thought and Urban Growth in the Antebellum Middle West(Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1981), it was a self-conscious effort to take Wade’s study into the next generation of Middle Western history.

Suburbia and the Dual City in The Iron Heel

Mention Jack London and most of us think about adventures stories with large-than-life figures contending with the forces of nature. We all remember Buck, the Saint Bernard who is forced to confront the wilderness of the Far North in The Call of the Wild. We may think about White Fang, the wolf from the Yukon, or the human “sea-wolf” Wolf Larsen, captain of the seal-hunting ship Ghost.

Poke further into London’s massive output, however, and we find him anticipating something that looks a lot like the twenty-first century American city—perhaps even the American city California style, appropriate for the imagination of a native Californian.

The book is The Iron Heel, a painfully unreadable novel about the rise of American fascism. Published in 1908, it takes the form of a memoir/history written by eye-witness Avis Everhard, composed after the political disasters of the early twentieth century and rediscovered hundreds of years into the future. London’s dystopian story of his near future recounts how corporate capitalism seizes control of the state and presses its “Iron Heel” upon the working class. Much of the book is clunky set-piece dialogues in which labor leader Ernest Everhard (Avis’s husband) lectures the powerful about their iniquities and argues for socialist revolution, although it does end with a fast-paced description of the bloody suppression of the Chicago Commune after workers rise prematurely against the Oligarchy and are ground to dust.

What does London think that Chicago and other American cities will look like under corporate capitalism? The answer is abject poverty in the core and happily isolated suburbanites on the fringe.

The worker slaves, the people of the abyss, are confined to miserable lives in the “great ghetto” of old neighborhoods that compound the worst of lower Manhattan, East London, and immigrant Chicago. The workers live “like beasts in great squalid labour-ghettos, festering in misery and degradation.” Writing a decade before the large-scale migration of African Americans to northern cities, London was anticipating a white ghetto rather than a black ghetto, but the impacts of spatial confinement are the same.

If the surplus labor army is confined to big city ghettos, corporate prosperity now satisfies and buys off the more skilled workers. The book describes their new suburban communities in language that anticipates the great labor-management bargain of post-World War II America that created what historian Lizabeth Cohen has called the “consumer’s republic” and made possible the housing revolution that turned Ozzie and Harriet Nelson from traveling musicians to suburban householders.

Here is Jack London’s version, as channeled through Avis Everhard: “The members of the great labour castes were contented and worked on merrily. For the first time in their life they knew industrial peace. . . . They lived in more comfortable homes and in delightful cities of their own—delightful compared to the slums and ghettos in which they had formerly dwelt. They had better food to eat, less hours of labour, more holidays.”

The elite has also suburbanized in gated and protected communities. In the paroxysm of the Chicago Commune, the rebels can attack downtown office towers but “never once did they succeed in reaching the city of the oligarchs on the westside. The oligarchs had protected themselves well. No matter what destruction was wreaked in the heart of the city, they, and their womenkind and children, were to escape, unhurt. I am told [writes Avis Everhard] that their children played in the parks during those terrible days, and that their favorite game was an imitation of their elders stamping upon the proletariat.”

There are suburban new towns as well, the specialized homes of the Mercenaries, who are the enforcers when force is needed (a cross between a Praetorian guard and company goons). They live in “cities of their own which were practically self-governed, and they were granted many privileges.” Although there is luckily nothing quite like these towns today, there is an echo of both survivalist enclaves and politically independent suburbs that turn their cold shoulder to big city problems.

There will be, finally, two entirely new “wonder cities” built after the failure of proletarian revolution—Ardis, finished twenty years afterward in 1942, and Asgard, complete in 1984. These are throw-ins to the plot, so London doesn’t provide much detail, but with the timing, I’m envisioning the San Fernando Valley for Ardis and Las Vegas for Asgard—both wonder cities in my book.

A final point is London’s version of hegemony. Living in comfort, the oligarchy and their middle class minions accept the rightness of the bifurcated city. The oligarchy, “as a class, believed that they alone maintained civilization. . . . Without them anarchy would reign . . . . I cannot lay too great stress upon the high ethical righteousness of the whole oligarch class. This had been the strength of the Iron Heel.” So too, a critic might say, suburban Americans have internalized the premises that success justifies privilege and that suburban comfort is a natural manifestation of civilized order.

The Iron Heel is a political tract that is steeped in Jack London’s ardent socialism. It is not an exercise in urban theory, and the passages about the urban future are secondary to the plot. This said, their depiction of a horizontal metropolis is a homegrown vision. Contrast, for example, the sort of dual city that Fritz Lang (raised in Vienna and working in Berlin) imagined in Metropolis—vertically rather than horizontally divided. As a West Coast boy who already thought of Oakland and San Francisco as a single community. London anticipated a future metropolis with strikingly American characteristics.

From “Dallas” to “Designing Women,” from “Baywatch” to “Miami Vice” to “CSI: Crime Scene Investigation,” images of sunbelt cities have been prominent on prime time television for the past generation. With their depictions of a cities full of fast-paced, colorful, sophisticated and sometimes dangerous city people, they offer powerful correction to that other television Sunbelt inhabited by Andy Griffith and the folks of Mayberry, by the “Dukes of Hazzard,” and by “Walker: Texas Ranger.”

No matter which measure you choose, sunbelt cities now dominate urban growth in the United States. If we look at simple size, five of the twelve largest metropolitan regions in 2000 were located in the Sunbelt states of California, Texas, Georgia, and Florida.[2]

Deeper economic changes lie behind the regional rebalancing: the defense economy, globalization, the leisure economy, and industrial innovation. These are points that I develop for western cities in The Metropolitan Frontier, but they apply as well to the Southeast.

During World War II and after, the Sunbelt became the most military-dependent part of the United States. Military planners concentrated bases and training facilities in places with warm climates. Between 1940 and 1990 it contained three of the nation’s premier military cities with Honolulu, San Diego, and San Antonio.[3] Military bases and employment were a powerful presence in many smaller cities such as Corpus Christi, Texas, Pensacola, Florida, or Fayetteville, North Carolina. War production brought new workers to Los Angeles, Dallas, Atlanta, New Orleans and confirmed the importance of sunbelt cities in airframe production. Nuclear weapons production fueled the growth of Albuquerque, Las Vegas,and Denver.

A second factor has been the internationalization of the United States. Sunbelt cities have been leaders in reintroducing the United States to the world. Caribbean, Mexican, and Asian immigration soared after the Immigration Reform Act of 1965 effectively ended the national quota system that had favored immigrants from Europe. In the last two decades of the twentieth century, approximately 40 percent of documented immigrants have come from Asia and another 40 percent from Latin America. For both groups, southern and western cities have been the major points of arrival. Mexicans constitute the largest immigrant group in the cities of Texas, Arizona, Colorado, and California. Temporary workers, shoppers, visitors, legal migrants, and illegal migrants fill neighborhood after neighborhood in El Paso, San Antonio, San Diego, and Los Angeles, creating bi-lingual labor markets and downtowns.

The same cities have been in the forefront of changing patterns of foreign trade and investment. The value of American trade across the Pacific passed that of trans-Atlantic trade in the early 1980s, with impacts felt especially by the vast port complex of Los Angeles-Long Beach. Maquiladora manufacturing in northern Mexico since the 1970s has created “twin” cities divided by the U.S.-Mexico border, such as El Paso-Juarez and San Diego-Tijuana, a pattern that has been accentuated by the North American Free Trade Act of 1993. Sunbelt cities have also engaged the world economy as the sources for industrial expertise (Houston and the petroleum industry) or locations for foreign investment in production for the American market (Spartanburg, South Carolina).

Third, the impact of the American leisure economy is obvious in many sunbelt cities. Family tourism, business and fraternal conventions, and retirement all contribute. Disneyland helped to transform Orange County, California into a vast urbanized region; Walt Disney World has had a similar effect on Orlando. Good introductions to the creation of the two Disney complexes are John Findlay, Magic Lands, and Richard Foglesong, Married to the Mouse: Walt Disney World and Orlando. No developer would build a “Blizzard City” retirement town outside Buffalo and expect to compete with places such as Sun City outside Phoenix. Meanwhile, the sometime forgotten sunbelt city of Honolulu looked to Asia as well as the continental United States for business and tourism

Finally, the sunbelt has benefited from the expansion of manufacturing in two ways.[4] On the one hand, American corporations began to shift the routine production of standardized products from the expensive northeast core to alternative locations: smaller sunbelt cities, northern Mexico, and overseas. On the other hand, sunbelt cities were innovation centers for new high technology aerospace and electronics industries. The U.S. space program has been a sunbelt program centered in Melbourne-Titusville, Florida, Huntsville, Alabama, and Houston, Texas. Efforts to devise weapons control systems triggered the takeoff of the postwar electronics industry in the “Silicon Valley” between San Francisco and San Jose in the 1950s. As the industry moved on to civilian applications, advanced semiconductor and computer production diffused to new industrial complexes around Austin, Phoenix, Dallas, and Albuquerque. Because the Pentagon has been the single best customer for the aerospace, nuclear, and electronics industries since the 1940s, this final point brings us full circle to the importance of the defense budget for sunbelt cities.

The Sunbelt Catches Up

From the 1950s into the 1970s, scholars understood the growth of sunbelt cities in terms of the “catch up” thesis. That is, the West and South were viewed as regions whose development had retraced that of the Northeast, but with a time lag of a generation or more. Their rapid growth beginning with the 1940s suggested that they were finally closing the gap and catching up to the rest of the nation.

For the West and Southwest, the lag was described in economic terms. In the 1930s, writer Bernard DeVoto had called the West a “plundered province” that was little more than a colony of New York and Chicago, shipping out raw materials from mines, farms, and forests and buying them back from eastern factories. Since the 1940s, however, western cities, and especially those of California, enjoyed a steady shift of economic power. By developing local production of manufactured goods and accumulated their own sources of capital, they catching up with the industrial core.

For the South, the catching up was seen more broadly as a process of modernization. The South in 1930s had been poor and culturally different, but rapid urban growth would help the region become richer, more middle class, less isolated, more ‘American.” This interpretation stressed the ways that World War II had reduced regional differences by mixing people from all regions in the military and in war production work. The civil rights era of 1950s and 1960s, during which South dismantled racial segregation by law and thus became more “northern,” also supported the idea of convergence. So did the moderating voice of the business community in many southern cities (for example, Atlanta’s reputation as a “city too busy to hate). The interpretation helped to shape much scholarship on southern politics and society and framed some early efforts to look systematically at the history of regional urbanization (see volumes from the later 1970s and early 1980s by Jacoway and Colburn, Goldfield and Brownell, Abbott, and Bernard and Rice).

Continuity as Well as Change

In more recent years, scholars have emphasized continuity as well as transformation in the development of sunbelt cities. World War II and the postwar boom may have accelerated economic changes, for example, but the changes built on foundation from previous decades. In the South, postwar economic development efforts extended work already underway in many states and cities, as examined in James Cobb, The Selling of the South. For the Southwest, Roger Lotchin in Fortress California demonstrates that city leaders had long courted military bases, and that the militarization of a city like San Diego crowned efforts begun in the 1910s Los Angeles had similarly emerged as a major manufacturing city early in the twentieth century, creating deep roots for its postwar boom.

David Goldfield’s important summary of southern urbanization, Cottonfields and Skyscrapers, notes the continuities of southern culture and values that keep southern cities distinct from northern counterparts. He finds that southern cities have been marked by continuities of a rural life style, by the prominent role of religion, and by racial division. He shows how urban social institutions were adapted to preserve a biracial system and argues that the neglect of public services in many southern cities has reflected the influence of evangelical religion and rural values.

Students of racial and ethnic relations in cities across the Sunbelt increasingly emphasize continuities from before to after the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s. Ron Bayor, Howard Gillette, and Chris Silver and John Moeser have all shown the ways in which decisions about black-white relations made in the early twentieth century continued to shape the politics and society of southern cities until its end. Similarly, political and economic gains of Mexican Americans in Texas and California cities in recent decades have built on long years of institution-building at the community level, political organizing, For Los Angeles, for example, see George Sanchez, Becoming Mexican American and Edward Escobar, Race, Police, and the Making of an Ethnic Identity: Mexican Americans the Los Angeles Police Department.

In short, the Sunbelt did catch up, but in their own ways. Its cities have converged economically and demographically. But they remain culturally distinct. Los Angeles is not Boston, New Orleans is not Chicago, San Antonio is not Cleveland, Tampa is not Baltimore.

Special Places/Leading Edges

Several sunbelt cities stand out as representing important trends in contemporary urban growth.

Atlanta shows the classic themes of American city-building with a sunbelt twist. The power of business leadership in U.S. cities is a well-told story, but Atlanta adds the twist of a delicate balancing act between growth politics and racial politics. Its patterns of development are a model of urban sprawl–indeed, one of the most extreme in the nation. And its economy demonstrates the continuing power of transportation. If nineteenth century Atlanta was a city make by railroads (one reason it was such a prize during the Civil War), the city of the later twentieth century has prospered because it is the hub for Interstate Highways in the Southeast and because it has become a national and international air travel center. It has thus consolidated its role as the center of a fast-growing region (a sort of new Chicago) and used direct European air routes to become a headquarters center for international businesses and organizations (an alternative to New York).[5]

Across the continent, the Los Angeles city region elicits strong loyalties and excites deep antipathies. It is variously viewed as emblematic and exceptional, as the pattern for twentieth century urbanization and the model for the urban future. As featured player in scores of movies and backdrop in hundreds of others, Los Angeles takes much of its imagery from the film writers and directors who call it home. Critics who don’t like what they see in Los Angeles “prove” their point with references to the dark dystopia of Bladerunner, the violent alienation of Falling Down or Pulp Fiction, and old and new noir of The Big Sleep and Chinatown and L.A. Confidential. Those of who are taken by the metropolis find the choice a bit more strained: Speed as a parable of social cooperation, Clueless as a more appealing vision of everyday life.

For many scholars, Los Angeles has been the representative city for the twentieth century. Historian Sam Warner used it as such in The Urban Wilderness and geographer James Lemon in Liberal Dreams and Nature’s Limits. A readable but highly opinionated introduction to Los Angeles politics is Mike Davis, City of Quartz, which frames the city’s history as the work of an economic elite. Davis’s polemic can be balanced with the case studies of land development in William Fulton, The Reluctant Metropolis.

For other scholars, the city is the prototype for the twenty-first century. A “Los Angeles School” of urban analysis argues, essentially, that the vast southern California metropolis a new urban form and dynamic that is post-modern. Its cityscape, economy, and society all described as fragmented, flexible, and fluid. There is the political fragmentation, industrial flexibility, and racial variety that makes Los Angeles a laboratory for examining the complex interactions of Anglos, African Americans, Mexicans, Central Americans, Chinese, Japanese, Koreans, southeast Asians, and many others. Good introductions to these ways of thinking are the essays in Rob Kling, Spencer Olin, and Mark Poster, eds., Postsuburban California, and Allen J. Scott and Edward Soja, eds., The City.

Miami is another city that has been testing new international connections and patterns of ethnic relations since the 1960s.[6] The arrival of more than 800,000 refugees from Cuba (as well as large number of refugees from Haiti) fundamentally altered traditional patterns of black-white relations. In the three-sided tension of white, black, and Cuban, the latter group have achieved political dominance and substantial economic power, as explored in Alex Stepick and Alejandro Portes, City on the Edge. As transnational politics intrudes into daily life, Miami has become the major economic contact point between the U.S. and the Caribbean. Many Cuban Americans now argue that their presence and entrepreneurship have made Miami a global city that handles $6 billion of trade with nations to the south.

And then there is Las Vegas, fast emerging as the nation’s next supercity. Hal Rothman, Neon Metropolis: How Las Vegas Started the Twenty-First Century and Hal Rothman and Mike Davis, eds., The Grit Beneath the Glitter, trace the evolution of Las Vegas from sin city to diversified metropolis. Entertainment and real estate development for retirees and second homes have replaced gambling as the economic drive wheel; while major banks and pension funds rather than mob money finance the new fantasyland casinos. Far from a deviant sideshow, Las Vegas is increasingly a mainstream city wrestling with labor-management conflict, sprawl, and ethnic conflict. At the same time, it may be a precursor of a new pattern of urban growth in which isolated centers function together as a single dispersed metropolis (Las Vegas being in many ways a detached piece of greater Los Angeles).

Notes

[1] The figure is seven of twelve if we include San Francisco-Oakland-San Jose and Washington-Baltimore, both of which lie north of the commonly accept sunbelt boundary but which share many characteristics with other sunbelt cities. All of the statistics in this section are based on that same boundary that starts along the North Carolina-Virginia border and extends along the same latitude to Monterey Bay. A number of cities that lie north of the line share many economic and demographic patterns with sunbelt cities. Examples include Norfolk-Virginia Beach and Richmond in Virginia, Colorado Springs and Denver in Colorado, and Reno in Nevada.

[2] The total was fifteen for the two leagues, accounting for shared markets. MLB played in nine sunbelt cities.

[3] The fourth major military metropolis, Norfolk-Virginia Beach-Newport News, is contiguous to the commonly understood sunbelt boundary.

[4] Economists talk about the product cycle. A cluster of innovations creates a new set of products that stimulate a complex of new companies in a particular region, such as Detroit’s automobile complex or aircraft in Los Angeles. As new products gradually become standardized, their manufacture can be shifted to other locations for cheaper land and labor or better access to customers. In the last half century, sunbelt cities have benefitted both from the decentralization of older product manufacturing (such as automobile assembly) and the fortuitous location of new, fast-growing industries like electronics. In Texas, for example, El Paso has grown for the first reason and Austin for the second.

[5] A good source on Atlanta for classroom use is a set of eight half-hour videos made by historians Dana White and Tim Crimmins on “The Making of Modern Atlanta,” available from the Georgia Humanities Council.

[6] Comparisons between Miami and Los Angeles are pursued in a special “Orange Empires” issue of the Pacific Historical Review, 68 (May 1999), edited by William Deverell, Greg Hise, and David Sloane.

REFERENCES

Abbott, Carl. The Metropolitan Frontier: Cities in the Modern American West. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1993

_________. The New Urban America: Growth and Politics in Sunbelt Cities. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1981.

Bayor, Ronald. Race and the Shaping of Twentieth Century Atlanta. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996.

Bernard, Richard, and Rice, Bradley. Sunbelt Cities; Politics and Growth since World War II. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1983.

Cobb, James. The Selling of the South: The Southern Crusade form Industrial Development, 1936-1980. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1982.

Davis, Mike. City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles. New York: Verso, 1990.

Escobar, Edward. Race, Politics and the Making of a Political Identity: Mexican Americans and the Los Angeles Police Department, 1900-45. Berkeley: University of California Press. 1999.

Findlay, John. Magic Lands: Western Cityscapes and American Culture after 1940. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992.

Foglesong, Richard. Married to the Mouse: Walt Disney World and Orlando. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001.

Fulton, William. The Reluctant Metropolis: The Politics of Urban Growth in Los Angeles. Point Arena, CA: Solano Press Books, 1997.

Gillette, Howard, Jr. Between Justice and Beauty: Race, Planning, and the Failure of Urban Policy in Washington, D.C. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995.

Goldfield, David. Cottonfields and Skyscrapers: Southern City and Region, 1607-1980. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1982.

Goldfield, David, and Brownell, Blaine, eds. The City in Southern History. Port Washington, NY: Kennikat Press, 1977.

Jacoway, Elizabeth and Colburn, David, eds. Southern Businessmen and Desegregation. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1982.

Kling, Rob, Olin, Spencer, and Poster, Mark. Postsuburban California: The Transformation of Orange County since World War II. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991.

Lemon, James. Liberal Dreams and Nature’s Limits: Great Cities of North America since 1600. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996.

Lotchin, Roger. Fortress California, 1910-1961: From Welfare to Warfare. New York: Oxford University Press, 1992.

Lotchin, Roger, ed. The Way We Really Were: The Golden State in the Second Great War. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2000.

Rothman, Hal. Neon Metropolis: How Las Vegas Started the Twenty-First Century. New York: Routledge, 2002.

Rothman, Hal and Davis, Mike, eds. The Grit Beneath the Glitter. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002.

Sanchez, George. Becoming Mexican American: Ethnicity, Culture and Identity in Chicano Los Angeles, 1900-45. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993.

Scott, Allen, and Soja, Edward. The City: Los Angeles and Urban Theory at the End of the Twentieth Century. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996.

Silver, Christopher, and Moeser, John. The Separate City: Black Communities in the Urban South, 1940-68. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1995.

Stepick, Alex, and Portes, Alejandro. City on the Edge: The Transformation of Miami. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993.

Warner, Sam Bass, Jr. The Urban Wilderness. New York: Harper and Row, 1972.

At the turn of the twenty-first century, New London, Connecticut, was a city in trouble. Hammered by deindustrialization and the closure of military facilities, it suffered from high unemployment. Locked into its boundaries by surrounding towns, it had a high proportion of tax-exempt land despite its reliance on property taxes.

In 1998, the pharmaceutical company Pfizer began to construct its Global Research Facility adjacent to the Fort Trumbull neighborhood, a waterfront district of 90 acres with 115 residential and commercial parcels including a sewage treatment plant and junkyard. The city directed the New London Development Corporation, a development agency under city control, to develop redevelopment plans for Fort Trumbull that could capitalize on Pfizer’s investment and presence. The plans included a resort hotel and conference center, office and retail space, a new state park, and residences. The Development Corporation purchased 100 of the parcels from willing sellers, but needed to use the power of eminent domain to acquire the other 15 parcels. New London’s effort depended on $70 million in state money, and it was the state that suggested the city should acquire Fort Trumbull under legislation authorizing economic development efforts, rather than a different statute relating to removal of blight.

Homeowner Susette Kelo and several other reluctant property owners challenged the acquisition with the argument that the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments prohibited the city and its agents from forcibly acquiring property from one private owner simply to transfer it to another private owner or entity (the New London Development Corporation and any future owners who might purchase from it). The argument hinged on the proper definition of “public use” (as possibly distinct from “public purpose”). The case made its way through the Connecticut Supreme Court to the Supreme Court of the United States, which heard arguments on February 22, 2005, and issued a five-to-four decision upholding the city on June 23, 2005.

The decision unleashed a wave of criticism, since the majority sided with large impersonal institutions rather than individual property owners. The decision became an organizing point for property rights advocates. President George W. Bush in 2006 issued an executive order prohibiting federal agencies from using eminent domain “merely for the purpose of advancing the economic interests of private parties to be given ownership or use of the property taken.” Several states–including New Hampshire, Florida, and Oregon–moved quickly to prohibit such takings within state law, whether or not there was a record of abuse.

The majority decision (John Paul Stevens, Anthony Kennedy, David Souter, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen Breyer) was judicially conservative. It relied on precedent, particularly the landmark case Berman v. Parker from 1954. In that case, a small business owner in the southwest quadrant of Washington, D.C., challenged the use of eminent domain to acquire his property as part of a massive urban renewal project that turned a mixed neighborhood into middle-class housing, L’Enfant Plaza, and new federal office buildings (ironically for HUD and DOT), and made Washington a national example of the possibilities and pitfalls of large scale clearance and redevelopment projects. As Clarence Thomas noted in dissent on Kelo, the overwhelming majority of residents affected by the Berman decision were African Americans.[1]

In Berman the Court unanimously accepted an expansive view of public use. “It is within the power of the legislature,” wrote William O. Douglas, “to determine that the community should be beautiful as well as healthy, spacious as well as clean, well-balanced as well as carefully patrolled.” Fifty-one years later, a very different Supreme Court membership declined to break from the precedent and articulated the view that a carefully prepared and comprehensive redevelopment plan was strong evidence that a local jurisdiction, such as New London, had adequately defined a public purpose justifying the application of eminent domain.

Although property rights advocates attacked the majority decision as “judicial activism,” it was anything but. It was judicially conservative not only in deferring to frequently reiterated precedents, but also in its deference to the states. The Court declined to second guess the local and state policy-making process in its particulars. At the same time, the majority showed some unease with the substantive results of the New London policy by inviting states to put their own houses in order: “Nothing in our opinion precludes any State from placing further restrictions on its exercise of the takings power. Indeed, many States already impose ‘public use’ requirements that are stricter than the federal baseline.”

The minority (Sandra Day O’Connor, William Rehnquist, Antonin Scalia, and Clarence Thomas) were in this case the judicial activists. It is likely that the Court took Kelo, its first major eminent domain case since Hawaii Housing Authority v. Midkiff (1984), because some members hoped that it would an opportunity to probe behind the surface of plans and precedents to scrutinize the content of New London’s actions. In effect, they were hoping to do for property rights what Brown did for school integration by looking at the real world effects behind legal formulations.

Although they failed to shake loose a fifth vote, the minority were vigorous in mobilizing the examples of urban history. They made the argument–in a nutshell–that the use of eminent domain to promote private land development almost inevitably favors big government and big business, and victimizes poor people and minorities. Jane Jacobs offered an “amicus” brief that reiterated her belief in the problems of large-scale planning schemes. John Norquist, former mayor of Milwaukee and now executive director for the Congress for the New Urbanism, argued that subsidies to attract corporate investment into distressed cities were nearly always flawed interventions in the market. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference argued that urban renewal had a long record of burdening the poor and disrupting their lives, and that current neo-renewal efforts have the same very strong tendency. The policy debates of the 1960s lived again with citations to Martin Anderson and Herbert Gans.

The most frequently cited comparison was to Poletown, the low-income neighborhood that the city of Detroit leveled in order to create an in-city site for a new Cadillac plant for General Motors. The goal of the city, of course, was to bring living-wage jobs back to the city and to increase its tax base. The project cleared 1500 homes, sixteen churches, and 144 businesses. The long, failed resistance by the neighborhood has been well-documented in books and documentary film and has long been a staple topic in urban studies classes.[3] Dissents in the Michigan Supreme Court case upholding the action, Poletown Neighborhood Council v. City of Detroit, have been a fertile source for property rights analysis, now expanded by its use as an example by Justices O’Connor and Thomas in an additional dissenting opinion.

New London, of course, is a victim of its context. The effort to redevelop Fort Trumbull is one more example of the distorting effects of tax-base competition. Where cities rely on property taxes, they seek to replace low-value and high-cost uses (i.e., rundown neighborhoods with lots of children) with high-value, low-cost uses (i.e., offices, and condos for empty nesters). Where they depend on sales taxes, every city wants a new shopping center just inside its boundaries, where tax revenue flows to city hall but traffic crowds streets in the adjacent town.[4] In the New London case, city officials were trying to rebalance a regional development pattern that has put the growth of tax base outside the city but burdens the inside (for the education of children of low-wage service workers.)

For urban policy specialists, the Kelo case illustrates the concept of an urban regime, or alliance of elected and appointed officials with a specific set of private economic interests.[5] As Justice O’Connor recognized, in most comparable property takings, “the beneficiaries are likely to be those citizens with disproportionate influence and power in the political process, including large corporations and development firms.” The redevelopment plan clearly met Pfizer’s needs for a hotel and condos to house visitors and employees, for removing eyesores, and for “doing something” about the low-income neighborhood. In the regime context, big projects such as large new mixed-use developments or convention centers not only benefit large private interests, but also make the reputations of public professionals and give elected officials something to point to in re-election campaigns. They are like playing Earl Weaver baseball, always waiting to be saved by a home run rather than playing for singles, steals, and bunts.

Susette Kelo’s case grounded the abstractions of property rights in the everyday community life. Public officials may have expertise and information on their side, but they remain talking heads behind office desks or in front of law books. In contrast, Kelo was able to tell her story with the help of emotionally powerful language and imagery. She grew up in the neighborhood and returned to her roots in mid-life. In interviews she was able to speak from the comfortable interior of her home, which she bought and fixed up, and describe herself as a “working class person.” She has expressed a special animosity toward the president of Connecticut College, who stated a desire to make New London a hip city (meaning a place for high-income people, in Kelo’s version). Kelo had repainted her house pink as she fixed it up, bringing to mind John Mellencamp’s populist lyrics in his 1983 song “Pink Houses”:

Oh but ain’t that America for you and me
Ain’t that America somethin’ to see baby
Ain’t that American home of the free
Little pink houses for you and me.

There is much to ponder in the way that both the majority and minority on the Supreme Court understood and mobilized urban history. The majority used legal precedent, deferred to local judgment, and presumably saw a range of quality in the actual projects: they were conservative and non-activist. The minority were more fully steeped in the troubled history of urban renewal and revitalization efforts, and less willing to cut slack for one more big redevelopment project with ambitious goals to “reinvent” part of a city.[6]

Notes

[1]. Howard Gillette Jr., Between Justice and Beauty: Race, Planning, and the Failure of Urban Policy in Washington, D.C. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995).

[2]. Martin Anderson, The Federal Bulldozer: A Critical Analysis of Urban Renewal, 1949-1963 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1964); Herbert Gans, The Urban Villagers: Groups and Class in the Life of Italian Americans (New York: Free Press, 1962); and James Q. Wilson, ed., Urban Renewal: The Record and the Controversy (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1966).

[3]. Armand Cohen, Poletown, Detroit: A Case Study in “Public Use” and Reindustrialization (Cambridge, MA: Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, 1982); Poletown Lives (Detroit: Information Factory, Inc., 1992); and Jeanne Wylie, Poletown: Community Destroyed (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1990). Poletown even makes an appearance in Elmore Leonard’s crime novel Split Image (New York: Harper Torch, 2002).

[4]. William Fulton, The Reluctant Metropolis: The Politics of Growth in Los Angeles (Point Arena, CA: Solano Press Books, 1997).

[5]. Clarence Stone, Regime Politics: Governing Atlanta, 1946-1968 (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1989).

[6]. For more on Kelo from legal perspectives, see Dwight H. Merriam and Mary Massaron Ross, eds., Eminent Domain Use and Abuse: “Kelo” in Context (Chicago: American Bar Association Section of State and Government Law, 2006).

Sarah Palin knows how to hunt wolves. She can skin a moose. She lives way up there on America’s last frontier. So, we might think, here’s a national candidate who represents the “real” American West, not its Hollywood imitation.

That’s a tempting image, but it’s flat out wrong. Nancy Pelosi, fast-talking, hard-edged urbanite from San Francisco, is a much better stand-in for the real American West. So is the sister team of Loretta Sanchez and Linda Sanchez, who represent parts of Los Angeles County and Orange County in the U.S. Congress. Add to the list Washington State governor Christine Gregoire from the busy urban corridor along Puget Sound. And then there’s Arizona Governor Janet Napolitano, a New Yorker happily transplanted to Phoenix.

Many Americans like to imagine the West as a vast land of sagebrush and deserts, mountains and forests, cougars and caribou. Sure, it has plenty of landscapes to match the western movie image, but almost nobody lives in the empty West. For more than a century, the West has been the most urbanized part of the country. City people shaped its development in the nineteenth century, tilted the nation’s center of power westward in the twentieth century, and control the future of the region–and in large part the nation–in the twenty-first century.

That’s right: The West is the American region with the largest share of its population living in metropolitan areas (cities of 50,000 and the adjacent counties with close economic ties). The metropolitan percentage is higher from the Rockies westward than in the crowded Northeast or the Middle West with its constellation of aging industrial cities.

Eight of our twenty biggest metropolitan areas are located in the West. More than 80 percent of Californians, Coloradans, Arizonans, Nevadans, and even Texans live in large urban areas. In 2000, 28 percent of ALL Americans lived in the metro area of the nineteen western states.

The urban West is not new. The West was settled and developed outward from its gateway cities. In the pioneer century of the 1800s, Denver was essential to the development of Colorado. That city sent railroads, mining experts, and investment dollars into the Rockies. Its smelters and refineries processed the gold and silver ore then the railroads hauled it out of the mountains. Portland was the gateway to the great Columbia River valley of Oregon and Washington. San Francisco–remember Nancy Pelosi–guided the fate of California and Nevada. In the twentieth century, Seattle, Dallas, San Antonio, Albuquerque, and Phoenix played similar roles in their own parts of the West.

As early as 1890, the federal census recognized that “the urban element in the western division” was growing faster than rural population. That is the same census, by the way, that famously declared that there was no longer a discernable frontier line on the national map. The turning point was actually a decade earlier, when the census numbers showed that the level of urbanization of the Rocky Mountain and Pacific states had passed that of the older parts of the nation.

Even Sarah Palin’s Alaska has always been an urban frontier. Its founding city was the Russian capital at Sitka. Nome and Fairbanks served the needs of prospectors. Juneau housed territorial and state offices. By the start of the current century, almost two thirds of Alaskans lived in the metropolitan areas of Fairbanks and Anchorage, Palin’s home base as a suburban mayor. With more than 300,000 people, Anchorage is in the size range of Eugene, Oregon, Rockford, Illinois, or Tallahassee, Florida.

So don’t be fooled. Alaska is intriguing, but its center of gravity is a modern metropolis. It’s not quite as urban as California, but it’s on the way. If we want to find the real West, we need look for tree-lined streets in Austin, working class neighborhoods in Oakland, sprawling suburbs on the Colorado plains, and multi-ethnic communities in Los Angeles, perhaps ending with a latte at a Seattle Starbucks where we can power up our Windows-driven laptop to bang out an email message to an old acquaintance still living among the sagebrush and cougars.