also transformed city space as urban renewal displaced poor residents, usually without relocating them to alternate housing, and cleared downtown land for reuse as offices, retail sites, and homes for the affluent. Urban renewal resulted from the federal 1949 Housing Act, which authorized city governments to assemble large tracts of land by taking properties through eminent domain and selling them cheaply to developers. Its “goal was to revive downtown business districts by razing the slums, bringing new businesses into the core, and attracting middle-class residents back to the city.” To rehouse families displaced by urban renewal, the 1949 law authorized 810,000 units of public housing. By 1960, only 320,000 had been built. This public housing, by and large, remained confined to segregated districts and never matched existing needs. “Between 1956 and 1972,” observe Peter Dreier and his colleagues, “urban renewal and urban freeway construction displaced an estimated 3.8 million persons from their homes,” rehousing only a small fraction. Urban renewal, they continue, “certainly changed the skyline of some big cities by subsidizing the construction of large office buildings that housed corporate headquarters, law firms, and other corporate activity.” But it did so at a price, destroying far more “low-cost housing than it built,” while doing little “to stem the movement of people and businesses to the suburbs or to improve the economic and living conditions of inner-city neighborhoods. On the contrary, it destabilized many of them promoting chaotic racial transition and flight.”41
Destabilized cities marked by high concentrations of poverty and declining job opportunities for low-skilled workers proved fertile grounds for crime. By the late 1970s, the fear of collective violence aroused by the civil disturbances that began in the 1960s (discussed in Chapter 3) largely had given way to fears of murder, assault, and robbery reinforced by the outbreak of crack cocaine use in the 1980s, while within the segregated, impoverished cores of old cities, gangs fought each other, and black men like Herbert and Shorty killed each other (and, too often, innocent bystanders) in horrifying numbers. The number of violent crimes per 100,000 population, as reported by the FBI, rose from 160.9 in 1960 to 363.5 in 1970, 596.6 in 1980, and 729.6 in 1990 before reversing direction, declining to 506.5 in 2000 and 457.5 in 2008.42 Although actual crime rates declined in the 1990s, crime continued to preoccupy city residents and dominate the image of city centers. After September 11, 2001, fear of terror also stoked anxieties about urban safety. One result was a preoccupation with security that transformed urban landscapes. “Fortress L.A.” is the title of one chapter in Mike Davis’s powerful dystopian analysis of Los Angeles, City of Quartz. “Welcome to post-liberal Los Angeles,” he writes, “where the defense of luxury lifestyles is translated into a proliferation of new repressions in space and movement, undergirded by the ubiquitous ‘armed response.’ This obsession with physical security systems, and, collaterally, with the architectural policing of social boundaries, has become the zeitgeist of urban restructuring, a master narrative in the emerging built environment of the 1990s.” One “universal and ineluctable consequence of this crusade to secure the city is the destruction of accessible public space.”43
The securitization of urban space results from what geographer Stephen Graham, in Cities Under Siege, labels the new “military urbanism,” whose technologies move back and forth between “Western cities and those on colonial frontiers.” In both, “hard, military-style borders, fences, and check-points around defended enclaves and ‘security zones’ are proliferating. Jersey-barrier blast walls, identity check-points, computerized CCTV, biometric surveillance and military styles of access control and protected archipelagos of fortified social, economic, political or military centres from an outside deemed unruly, impoverished or dangerous.” In Western cities, they are emerging “around strategic financial districts, embassies, tourist and consumption spaces, airport and port complexes, sports arenas, gated communities and export processing zones.” The new military urbanism rests on a paradigm shift “that renders cities’ communal and private spaces, as well as their infrastructure—along with their civilian populations—a source of targets and threats.” Cities are “at war against drugs, against terror, against insecurity itself.” A “complex mass of security and military thinkers . . . now argue that war and political violence centre overwhelmingly on the everyday spaces and circuits of urban life.”44 The military transformation of urban space normalizes the permanence of war as a feature of city life.
Clearly, by the early twenty-first century, economic, demographic, and spatial transformations had undercut existing definitions of “urban,” “city,” and “suburb.” A variety of new urban metaphors competed to replace them.
Urban Metaphors
One set of metaphors for “urban” and “city” looks inward toward central cities; another set looks outward from them; and one urban metaphor—the “fortress city” of Mike Davis and Stephen Graham—looks in both directions at once, its new spatial organization and architectural forms designed to protect against both internal insurgencies and external threats. Urban metaphors are not mutually exclusive. Sometimes the same writers use different metaphors to capture the increasingly fractured reality of “urban” or “city.” All of them, however, try to make sense of the patterns of inequality that grew out of the economic, demographic, and spatial transformation of American cities in the second half of the twentieth century. The inward-looking metaphor that still very often comes first to mind is “inner city,” which, since the 1960s, has served as shorthand for a bundle of problems—disorder, crime, drugs, poverty, homelessness, out-of-wedlock births.45 As a metaphor, “inner city” was colored poor and black. So pervasive did the image become that it spawned a new genre of pop u lar culture, which diffused outward from inner cities to the American heartland. “Urban music,” a category that includes “funk, soul and hip hop, as well as R and B” became “the biggest selling genre in the United States.”46
“Post-industrial,” another inward-looking metaphor, focused on the loss of urban manufacturing rather than, as with “inner city,” demography and social structure. Political scientist John H. Mollenkopf identified a “profound transformation” that had “seriously eroded the nineteenth-century industrial city. For lack of a better term, it might be called ‘the postindustrial revolution.’ This second urban revolution grew out of and in many ways constituted a reaction against the first. If labor and capital concentrated into factories defined the industrial city, the postindustrial city is characterized by the geographic diffusion of production and population. The office building, not the factory, now provides the organizing institution of the central city.”47 Vivid though it was, “post-industrial’s” analytic usefulness was limited. For it defined city by what it was not rather than by what it had become, thus limiting the idea’s helpfulness in reinterpreting the emergent meaning of “urban” in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.
“Dual city,” a third inward-looking metaphor, focused on the social structure that had emerged from economic and demographic transformation abetted by governments—federal, state, and local—that remapped the distribution of classes and functions across urban space and, through funding cuts, decimated services.48 Growing class polarization, a problem everywhere in the nation (and, indeed, as Mike Davis shows, emerging in even more extreme forms around the globe), appeared most vividly in big cities.49 Increasingly bereft of their middle class, city populations divided between rich and poor, the former buoyed by jobs in finance, information, and high-end services, the latter barely sustained by low-end service jobs, the informal economy, or government assistance. Writing in the New York Times in July 2006, economist Paul Krugman observed:
The story of the New York economy isn’t entirely a happy one. The city has essentially lost all of its manufacturing, and it’s now in the process of outsourcing both routine office work and many middle-management functions to other parts of the country.
What’s left is an urban economy that offers a mix of very highly paid financial jobs and low-wage service jobs, with relatively little in the middle. Economic disparities in New York, as in the United States as a whole, are wider than they have been since the 1920’s.50
