the directional, productive, and managerial upper functions all over the planet: the control of the media; the real politics of power; and the symbolic power to create and diffuse messages.”67 In the United States, the information age also has given rise to a distinctive suburban form—what Margaret Pugh O’Mara identifies as “cities of knowledge,” residential and high-tech industrial nodes built around major research universities.68
In the early twenty-first century, these metaphors—inner city, post- industrial city, dual city, fortress city, city-region, edge city, galactic city, global city, informational city, city of knowledge—compete to answer the question “What is an American city?” All are both useful and partial. Their utility depends on the angle of interest—inward versus outward, national versus global—and the concern—inequality, environmental degradation, crime, terrorism, aesthetic value, political fragmentation, the possibility of community, for instance. They are, moreover, not entirely consistent. Examples are Garreau’s cheerful optimism about the role and future of edge cities contrasted with Hayden’s withering attack and Sassen’s emphasis on the importance of place and contiguity in global cities compared to Castells’s stress on a-geographic networks. The work of assessing and reconciling multiple metaphors for cities, and of exploring their implications, is a central and urgent task for interdisciplinary twenty-first-century urban studies. Economic, demographic, and spatial transformation have exploded old ideas of cities and suburbs, turning them into encumbrances to the reformulation of helpful public policies.
* * *
At both ends of the twentieth century, profound economic change forced redefinitions of “city.” In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the industrial city emerged as the new urban form, and a host of commentators tried to define its character. The problems they identified, and the issues on which they concentrated, are remarkably similar to those on the agenda of urbanists and public officials in the early twentyfirst century. Only now, as we have seen, the model of the old industrial city clearly is gone forever. The question, then, is how to characterize what has taken its place. What is an American city? The answer, I have tried to show, remains far from clear, with various metaphors competing for dominance.
For progressive urbanists in the early twentieth century, population density or, as they more often termed it, congestion, resulting from massive immigration posed a massive challenge to public health and morals as well as to urban infrastructure and governance.69 A century later, urbanists confronting population loss, abandoned housing, districts returned to fields of weeds, and sprawl searched for ways to turn around the city’s de-densification and fill in empty suburban spaces with clustered housing and retail. Another huge and consequential difference between the early and late twentieth century lies in the response to urban redefinition. Consider the early twentieth-century example described by Peter Dreier and his colleagues:
In the early 1900s, New York City was a cauldron of seething problems—poverty, slums, child labor, epidemics, sweatshops and ethnic conflict. Out of that turmoil, activists created a progressive movement, forging a coalition of immigrants, unionists, muckraking journalists, settlement house workers, middle-class suffragists, socialists, and upper-class philanthropists. They fought successfully for workplace, tenement, and public health reforms. Although they spoke many languages, the movement found its voice through organizers, clergy, and sympathetic politicians. Their victories provided the intellectual and policy foundations of the New Deal three decades later.70
Early twentieth-century urban reformers, struggling to define and tame industrial cities, grappled with the consequences of massive immigration by people with different cultures, the lack of affordable housing, the growth of poverty and homelessness, crises in public health and sanitation, and the impact of growing concentrations of wealth on society and politics. They worried about the role of privatization in municipal services, the heavy hand of state government, the weakness of mayoral executive authority, the corruption of machine politics, the inefficiencies and inequities of the courts, and the regressive and inadequate foundation of city finances on property taxes.71
In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, cities tried to respond to these issues with active government—what historians have labeled progressivism. Despite the persistence of corruption, widespread poverty, and racial discrimination, in these decades cities increased municipal expenditures, professionalized their administrations, and constructed buildings and infrastructures that supported the most vibrant and successful era in American urban history. In the late twentieth century, by contrast, the response was the withdrawal of active government, evident in reduced federal funds, reliance on market-based solutions to urban problems, and the need to turn to private initiatives, like special service districts, to carry out public functions such as street cleaning and security. The results are everywhere to be seen, in homelessness on city streets, poverty spreading outward to inner suburbs, uncontrolled sprawl eating up open space, crumbling infrastructure, gross inequity in spending on public education, the future of urban finance mortgaged to casino gambling, and the incapacity to prevent or respond effectively to the devastation of Hurricane Katrina in 2005 or the subprime mortgage crisis of 2008. The widely heralded comeback of American cities is thin and fragile. Move away from shiny center cities, and it is not nearly so visible. Look at city budgets, and it does not seem nearly so robust. “What is an American city?” has begun to elicit both a cacophony of definitions and an array of intelligent and promising ideas about how to respond. But these have not coalesced into a new urban progressivism. Without the will to forge an effective and coordinated political response, the future of American cities, however defined, is unlikely to be as buoyant as their past.
Chapter 2
The New African American Inequality
“It is now a commonplace,” observes historian Thomas J. Sugrue, “that the election of Barack Obama marks the opening of a new period in America’s long racial history . . . that the United States is a postracial society.”1 In 2005, the year Barack Obama took his place in the United States Senate, Shorty, born three years after Obama, high on cocaine and alcohol, died from a knife wound on the racially segregated streets of North Philadelphia. Shorty’s foreshortened life—a run-down row house on a mean street, frequent encounters with the police, work outside the regular economy as a street mechanic, violent death at the hand of another black man—screamed the stubborn salience of race in American life. “The past isn’t dead and buried. In fact, it isn’t even past,” wrote William Faulkner.2 Whose life—Obama’s or Shorty’s—more accurately represented the trajectory of African American experience in early twentieth-century America?
The question is crucial because, as Sugrue notes, “the ways that we recount the history of racial inequality and civil rights—the narratives that we construct about our past—guide our public policy priorities and, even more fundamentally, shape our national identity.”3 The narrative of racial inequality weaves together multiple threads as it recounts African Americans’ struggle for political, civic, and social citizenship, to use T. H. Marshall’s famous typology. What are the story’s outcomes? This chapter concentrates on one thread: economic equality and mobility. It asks, “Have barriers to African American economic progress crumbled or remained stubbornly resistant to fundamental change? Has the story been similar for women and men? What mechanisms have fostered or retarded change?” These questions matter not only because they cut so close to the heart of twentieth-century American history but also because they bear on important public policy choices in the present.
The history of black economic equality and mobility does not support either the optimistic or the pessimistic version of African American history. But it does not come down in an illusory middle, either. Rather, it recasts the issue by showing that after World War II the nature of black inequality altered fundamentally. inequality worked differently at the end of the twentieth century than at its start or midpoint. At the start of the twentieth century, pervasive, overt racial discrimination barred blacks
