(2004-05-19) Rae Urbanism

A couple reviews of Doug Rae's City: Urbanism and its End (ISBN:0300095775 ). (Urban Design)

• Alan Schoenfeld notes It is a great book, the happy marriage of an astute, scholarly synthesis and an accessible walking tour of the city. Rae strikes an avuncular tone throughout the book as he urges the reader, while visualizing the described surroundings, to make sense of the relationship between the details and the big picture... Rae's mission is clear: he aims to chart the rise and fall of urbanism in New Haven and to make evident the need for new strategies in the post-urbanism era. Urbanism, according to Rae, stands for "patterns of private conduct and decision-making that by and large make the successful governance of cities possible even when City Hall is a fairly weak institution."... Central to his elaboration of urbanism, its rise and decline, are two complementary concepts regarding the way cities are run. The first, Government, comprises the formal structures of elected and appointed political leadership, while the second, Governance, comprises the myriad ways in which decisions on how the city will be run are made outside the confines of City Hall. The distinction is a classic and useful one, and Rae deploys it skillfully as he outlines the contours of the city's rise to the heights of urban vigor during World War I and its decline from that perch around the time of the Vietnam War. Rae is somewhat skeptical of the powers of Government. He places little stock in formal Institution-s and their capacity to drive a city in one direction or another... Its strength and brilliance derive from Rae's meticulous demonstration of how the details of day-to-day city living corroborate or refute the tenets of Urbanist thought. He pairs well-selected observations from theorists like Jane Jacobs and John Stilgoe with meaningful anecdotes or assessments of data culled from such maverick sources as telephone books and social club rosters, translating the theories into their real life meanings... For example, a series of maps showing the location of employees and managers of city businesses accompanies Rae's discussion of "working-class Localism" and "upper-class localism." These two different "NetworksOfNetworks" complemented each other because of their spatial proximity.

• PaulBass notes By urbanism, Rae means a concentration, often on the same block, of saloons, grocery stores, apartments, hotels, and factories, and people of all economic and racial backgrounds. He means a business leadership rooted in town. He means a busy civic culture in which people are engaged, every day, in clubs, volunteer groups, athletic leagues, churches and synagogues... Most important, City shows how government planners and zoners need to learn when to keep their paws off the Organic ebbs and flows of a city's development. "When" is more often than not... He notes, "a city needs a Middle Class. Fundamentally we're having a very hard time hanging on" to a middle class because of the school system (Educating Kids). "If you end up just with schools serving kids of the proletariat, and within the proletariat to disproportionately serve those who are not too focused on education ... there's not really much you can do to make that work.".. But mostly he concludes that forces more powerful than city government--owners of companies moving out of town; retailers looking for lots of parking, easy highway access and room for larger chain superstores; the spending decisions of federal and state governments; white families seeking suburban tranquility and whiter schools--made Lee's noble goals and efforts impossible to accomplish... Another conclusion that emerges from Rae's study is the Law of UnintendedConsequences. Lee's talented administrators were sure they knew what was right; they even constructed a parallel government, dubbed the "Kremlin," that isolated them from the messy democratic oversight of other city agencies or public review. Yet their plans sometimes made problems worse.