city and region reinventing spatial community

City and Region: Reinventing Spatial CommunityAuthor(s): William SitesReviewed work(s):Source: Social Service Review, Vol. 74, No. 4 (December 2000), pp. 654-667Published by: The University of Chicago PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/516429 .Accessed: 29/09/2012 08:03

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Review Essay

City and Region: Reinventing Spatial Community

William SitesUniverity of Chicago

Theorizing the City: The New Urban Anthropology Reader. Edited by Setha M.Low. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1999. Pp 433. $59.00 (cloth);$27.00 (paper).

City Making: Building Communities without Building Walls. Gerald E. Frug.Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1999. Pp. 256. $35.00 (cloth).

To the surprise of many, the American city appears to be at the center ofthe past decades prosperity. Particularly in the last 5 years, most citieshave enjoyed strong growth, increases in downtown residence, lowercrime rates, and considerable revitalization in neighborhoods near cen-tral business districts. There is an apparent preference for urban livingamong increasing numbers of the middle and upper classes. The tradi-tional economic advantages of cities (size, density, heterogeneity, capac-ity for innovation) once again encourage certain businesses to clusternear the core.

There also seems to be a growing receptivity to the traditional virtuesof the urban environment. Nearly 40 years after Jane Jacobss critique ofmodernist planning and bulldozer renewal, the principles of new ur-banist designan emphasis on pedestrianism and street life, the mix-ing of residential and commercial activity into multiuse neighborhoods,the advantages of public transportation, the functions of public build-ings, and green space in centering local districtsare very much invogue ( Jacobs 1961; for neourbanism, see Calthorpe 1933; and Katz1994).1 Of course, if this new kind of urbanism is any cause for celebra-tion (to use a word that the Disney Corporation has taken for the nameof its own neourbanist town in Florida), not everyone may be in a partymood. More urban residents work now than several years ago, but signifi-

Social Service Review (December 2000). 2000 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved.0037-7961/2000/7404-0007$02.00


cant numbers of these residents remain in poverty; racial barriers con-tinue to separate entire categories of workers from better-paying jobs;homelessness remains an entrenched problem even as public attitudestoward it seem to harden. Nevertheless, there is some recent evidenceof expanding opportunity for the poor and a general sense that citiesare not only back from the edge but, perhaps, stumbling in the rightdirection (for certain improvements in economic conditions of poorpeople in the United States, see Center on Budget and Policy Priorities1999; for the notion that neourbansim involves the rebirth of cities, see,e.g., Gratz 1998).

Amid all of this good news, however, two additional signs of disquietare surfacing. One is a concern about sprawl. The predominant trend inurban change in the United States remains one of decentralizationthemovement of people, commercial development, and jobs to the suburbs,exurbs, and edge cities. Most central cities continued to lose residentssince 1990, while metropolitan areas expanded outward at an often as-tonishing pace. In the case of greater Chicago, for example, where popu-lation grew by 4 percent between 1970 and 1990, the metropolitan landarea is said to have expanded by over 40 percent (population figuresare from the U.S. Bureau of the Census. For statistics on land develop-ment, see Frug, p. 221; Buck 1992; Pierce 1995; and Cheshire 1999).The consequences of these trends in terms of loss of open space, airquality, commuting times, infrastructure and service costs, and dispari-ties in educational fundingare increasingly troubling. The forces be-hind this kind of centrifugal movement are many and complex, butthere is little question that in the United States governmental structuresand public policies play a very important role.2 Since the 1980s, many ofthe erstwhile decentralizing cities in Western Europe have begun to showstrong patterns of recentralization in jobs. Most central cities in theUnited States have improved their economic conditions, but the strong-est currents of growth and residential affluence continue to flow relent-lessly outward. In the process, suburban communities seem to be work-ing harder than ever to insulate themselves from other parts of themetropolis and, especially, from central cities.

In response, policy fixes based on regionalism seem to be on therise. Regionalist proposals vary in approach, from urban growth bounda-ries and smart growth incentives that encourage denser developmentto measures like metropolitan tax-base sharing, mixed-use housing, andschool-funding equity. But in general terms these approaches tend tooffer new policies designed to surmount the fragmentation of local gov-ernmental boundaries in order to shape more balanced spatial patternsof regional development. In their absence, central-city renaissance maybe short-lived or very shallow.

A second concern for cities is the nature of this renaissance itself, evenif it does last. Downtown revival, it can be claimed, no less than expan-

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sion on the urban periphery, intensifies a long-term trend toward spatialand social fragmentation. Many of the elements of central-city redevel-opment that excite downtown boosters (business-district expansion, loftconversion, hospital and university expansions, retail growth) tend toestablish settlement and development patterns that do not break downeconomic and racial segregation so much as remap it: revitalization ofinner-city areas pushes lower-income and minority residents farther out;poverty and segregation, in turn, are reconcentrated in the outer ringsof the central city as well as in the inner-ring suburbs. These develop-ment patterns raise questions about the kinds of local and urban com-munity that are being created in the city.

These two sets of issuessprawl and regionalism, on the one hand,and urban revival and community building, on the othertend to be ad-dressed separately. Or they compete for attention on the urban agenda(see, e.g., the debate between geographers Larry Bourne and Blair Bad-cock in Badcock 1993; and Bourne 1993). Yet there may be good reasonsto consider them together. For one, it is possible that both manifestationsof growth stem from common forces within the larger political economy.For another, the two sets of issues, taken as an ensemble, pose a pointedchallenge to the very notion of an urban agenda and of urban publics.Who is the public in this emerging metropolis? What is the relationshipof government to this public or to some kind of public sphere? What isthe role of spatial patterns of development and, more particularly, ofpublic spacestreets, parks, transit systems, common areas of build-ings in constructing cities and communities?

The two volumes under review hereone from anthropology, theother from lawaddress these questions from quite different angles.Central to both works, however, is the contention that place matters.And by taking seriously the social construction of places and, morebroadly, the urban spatial forms in which contemporary human relation-ships emerge, the two books suggest that the challenges of the newmetropolisas well as the tasks for social-welfare analystsgo beyondthe need to expand the opportunities and benefits of economic growth.

Theorizing the City is a collection of articles in urban anthropology fo-cusing on the relationship between spatial environs and urban culturesfrom Toronto, Atlanta, and New York to Barcelona, Sao Paulo, Vienna,and Accra (Ghana). Bringing together urban theory and fieldwork, thecontributors examine a number of tensions that play out in diverse ur-ban settings: spatial divisions by race, class, and gender; conflicts be-tween local and global functions, cities and neighborhoods, designers ofurban spaces and their users; shifting boundaries between public andprivate. While sometimes a bit forced, the use of theory helps to bringabout, in certain selections at least, some rich connections between thespatial environment and the experiential elements of city life in differentparts of the world.

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One striking development in the contemporary metropolis is the sheerproliferation of physical barriers, from wrought-iron fences, cul-de-sacstreets, and sidewalk moats to gated communities and walled suburbanbungalows. These measures of security and ordersome arrogant, somedefensivecan be seen as defensible spaces or as new forms of segre-gation (Newman 1972; for urban-design approaches to the question offear and public space, see Ellin 1996; and Davis 1998). Yet, in either case,they may not reassure. In Teresa Caldeiras study (in Theorizing the City)of fortified enclaves in Sao Paulo, Brazil, residents of private condo-minium developments live amid extraordinary security measures, all thewhile placing their children in the care of badly paid maids, entrustingthe transport of their money to badly paid office boys, and issuing gunsto large numbers of badly paid security guards. Focusing on a differentrung of the social ladder in a New York neighborhood, Steven Gregory(in Theorizing the City) examines the ambivalent but ultimately disdainfulattitudes of middle-class black homeowners toward the black poor. Asimilar pattern emerges: economic polarization breeding fear, gives riseto exclusionary approaches to community building; these approaches, inturn, not only reinforce homogeneity but also end up making separationfrom others into an emblem of community identity and status. Accord-ing to Caldeira, Sao Paulos less-exalted new buildings for the (desper-ately) aspiring middle class can afford to maintain the traditional Brazil-ian separation between social and service entrances only by placingthe two doors side by side.

This kind of pretension and prejudice can be dismissed as mere fool-ishness. But recent patterns of metropolitan development driven by ex-clusion may have acquired a certain self-reinforcing logic, particularly inthe United States. It is true that divided or segregated cities are hardlynew (for perceptive efforts to theorize the novel features of urban divi-sion today, see Marcuse 1993 and 1996). Early-modern cities had theirghettos, and twentieth-century forces made distinctive urban zonesand city-suburb divides into primary schisms in the complicated patch-work of megalopolis. Yet in recent decades, the combination of eco-nomic restructuring and governmental decentralization has made iteasier for advantaged groups to use wealth and law to isolate themselvesfrom one another and, of course, from more disadvantaged groups aswell. Thus, structural changes in the economy have had divergent im-pacts on different groupsfrom corporate elites, professionals, andmanagers to middle-class semiprofessionals, struggling workers, and thevery poor. The emergence of a significant central-city growth pole (basedon finance, business services, retail commerce, entertainment, and tour-ism) has expanded, in turn, the choices of residential location for thebeneficiaries. Meanwhile, the long-standing tendency of a federalist sys-tem to shore up local privilege has been accentuated. Retrenchment ofa direct federal role in cities encouraged mayors to cater more aggres-

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sively to the demands of businesses and affluent citizens. And as evermore metropolitan land and population lay beyond central-city jurisdic-tion, this boosted the political clout of suburbs in national elections, instatehouses, and in the use of local law to create and preserve homoge-neous communities. The result is a metropolis that is highly fragmented,in many senses. Today, in fact, the differenceseconomic, racial, gov-ernmental, and spatialbetween certain suburbs are more enormousthan the earlier gap between suburb and city.

Localities, both city and suburban, use a variety of government policytools to shape development that benefits certain groups at the expenseof others. Charles Rutheisers chapter (in Theorizing the City) examinesthe central role of publicly subsidized, privately driven development inremaking downtown Atlanta. An especially pronounced case of racial-ized sprawl, metro Atlanta demonstrates some of the ways in which theattempted curebreathing life into a moribund central citymay notbe much better than the disease. Rutheiser, whose book Imagineering At-lanta provides a fuller analysis of this process, is particularly good on theways in which Atlantas avowed interest in engineering a user-friendlydowntown often becomes a sterile exercise in remaking the city for real-estate investors and visitors (tourists, conventioners, and suburbanites)rather than residents and citizens. For Rutheiser, as for other urbanistswho have commented on the theme parking of American cities, thereis a world of difference between supporting indigenous, albeit grittyinner-city communities versus revitalization strategies that airlift-in a sani-tized downtown culture in the form of festival marketplaces (malls)and marketed festivals (entertainment events). In the process of remak-ing downtowns into cookie-cutter sites of consumption, the ascendantCity of Leisureas political scientist Larry Bennett has called italsoseeks to minimize the risk that those who have a lot of discretionary in-come might cross paths with those who do not (Bennett 2000).

The problems posed by the latter, however, are never far from theradar of local governments. In dealing with the poor, it is clear thatpublic-sector decisions do not simply shape service delivery; they also, aswith other populations, define communities. In a study by Ida Susser (inTheorizing the City), for example, New York Citys system of homeless shel-ters is seen to enforce an extraordinarily circumscribed definition offamily life. Not only are families limited to single mothers plus youngerchildren, thereby dividing men and teenage boys from women and chil-dren; the shelters, by preventing the women from performing domesticactivities (like cooking and making decisions about their childrens wel-fare), in effect prevent the mothers from mothering. In Gregorys studyof the Corona neighborhood in Queens, New York (and amplified in hisbook Black Corona), government and politics are also at the center ofcommunity redefinition (Gregory 1998). Here it has been the incorpo-ration of black movement demands into governmental social-service bu-



reaucracies (rather than the exit of the black middle class from the ur-ban ghetto) that led to the loss of black middle-class solidarity with theblack poor. Gregory uses a historically informed analysis of the politicalrestructuring of community institutions to illuminate his account of anangry meeting at which community members and public officials dis-cuss the proposed opening of a foster care facility. Reconstructing theirgroup identity around their role as homeowners, the middle-class resi-dents of Corona operate with a bifurcated consciousness: they fight bit-terly to keep out poor undesirables by claiming that, as a black com-munity, they themselves are being dumped on again. Governmentsrole here is also contradictoryfirst complicitous in constructing an ex-clusionary community, then thwarted in the effort to diversity it.

The fragmented metropolis and the role of government raise difficultquestions about the future of public spheres in the United States (for theseminal theoretical discussions of the concept of the public sphere, seeHabermas 1989; Calhoun 1992; Robbins 1993). Addressing these ques-tions in an urban spatial context gives them a particular concreteness.One issue is that even though distinctions between public and privatespaces have grown more slippery, in certain cases the complexity of thisdivision betwen public and private is more apparent than real. The ex-tremely wealthy, gated community of Hidden Hills, California, for in-stance, has two local governments whose responsibilities are intricatelyapportioned so that residents can have it both ways: they can socializethe costs of service provision while privatizing control. Thus, one formof authority is a public government that handles certain kinds of services,thereby enabling residents to write off their property taxes; the other, aprivate homeowners association in charge of common spaces and func-tions, allows the community to exclude outsiders from public eventslike its annual Fourth of July parade (Stark 1998). Other public-privatehybrids abound today. Business-improvement districts, privately run pub-lic parks, commercial bookstores and cafes whose community spacesserve as quasi-public meeting areas, outdoor city squares (like New YorksTimes Square, which now serves as a studio backdrop for a number ofTV networks) that function as visual props for corporate media in dif-ferent ways, these kinds of privatization serve to reshape the contempo-rary notion of publicness without fully defining it. It is true that our senseof the nature of public space is altered when such spaces are seen asconsumer services or commercial commodities rather than as arenas forcitizen action. But the old, sinful Times Square (which served in part asa red-light district) was hardly the village green, nurturing republicanvirtue; it was a public space long shaped by market exchanges. The prob-lem, then, is not simply that in cleaning it up authorities have more thor-oughly commercialized it but that they have also reconstructed anurban commercial public around a uniform and very narrow template ofprepackaged (and largely middle-class suburban) consumption activi-

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ties. Public spaces, it is well to remember, are not simply spaces madeavailable to an already constituted public but, rather, are the very spaceswhere publics are made. Truncated spaces create weak and constrictedpublics.

The globe-trotting format of Theorizing the City shows that certain pub-lic spaces remain more hospitable than others. Brazil offers a number ofurban laboratories. Its capital, hypermodernist Brasiliaa planned citythat simply abolished the street as a public spacepresents one ex-treme; Sao Paulo is another. Just as American urbanists have found insunbelt cities like Los Angeles and Atlanta the apotheosis of the non-place urban realm, Caldeira sees sprawling Sao Paulo as a sort of third-world caricature of the U.S. edge-city development, where all valuedpublic space is actually privately owned and patrolled.3 By contrast, SethaLow, in her own contribution to Theorizing the City, demonstrates the waysin which the design and social life of two plazas in San Jose, Costa Rica,serve to accommodate multiple groups of users. One of the plazas is asheltered, relatively neglected colonial square frequented by older pen-sioners, unemployed men, day laborers, shoeshine men, gamblers, pros-titutes, and small businessmen; many of these regulars use the park as aplace of work. The other park is a physically open (but also more inten-sively policed) modernist plaza used by young people, families, middle-class students, tourists, girl watchers, gay cruisers, and street performers.Groups make use of both public spaces in ways that defy the intentionsof architects, designers, and government agencies, and Lows study showsthat even minimally flexible spaces serve to mediate social heterogeneityin complicated ways.

In recent decades, the extraordinary green spaces in the heart of olderU.S. cities (New Yorks Central Park, Chicagos lakefront) have been res-cued from neglect and decay. Yet this regeneration of the urban core,as it spreads outward, also threatens to put ever more travel distance be-tween those spaces and the neighborhoods where poorer citizens live.The list of social groups who may find certain streets, public buildings,parks, waterfronts, or (privately owned) quasi-public spaces inaccessibleor inhospital is a long onehomeless people, elderly persons, racial andethnic groups, physically or mentally disabled people, women, poorpeople, people without cars, teenagers, protesters, artists, children, ven-dors. Of course, it is not practical for all spaces to accommodate all usesor all users. But as economic forces polarize the life circumstances andopportunities of different groups, it becomes more difficult for extremesocial differences to be mediated in common spaces. So, pressures on asmall neighborhood park to serve as a childrens playground, a teenagehangout, and a place for homeless people to sleep are routinely resolvedby restricting access and enforcing single-function uses. While this hasalways resulted in less-favored groups being left with leftover publicspaces (street corners or the nonplaces under highway ramps, under



bridges, and underground), even these spaces are now being policed toremain empty. In one sense, of course, the occupancy of space is a ques-tion of rights. But it is also a question of constructing publics. If there arefewer environments in which disparate social groups are foced to nego-tiate over their conflicting uses of space, then it is not surprising if thecompetence or disposition to recognize broader publics should atrophy.

Theorizing the City provides a number of interesting analyses of urbanspace. Yet it must be said that a focus on the uses of places, rather thanon social groups directly, tends to make people seem more powerlessand disconnected than they really are. Most people on the street and inthe park are, after all, simply passing through. It is important to takefuller measure of the role of places more generally, even fairly mun-dane and inhospitable places, in the lives of disadvantaged groups.Ethnographic studies that use a community and institutional focus, forinstance, cannot help but stumble over networks of families, friends,residential blocks, churches, social clubs, school groups, gangs, pickupbasketball or domino games, coffee clubs or drinking gatherings, baby-sitting and elder-care groupsforms of community connection that of-ten make up some kind of web of support (however frayed or fleeting)among low-income people. These social networks are not reducible toparticular places. But they do exist in relation to places, and after a mo-ments reflection it is not hard to picture certain physical environmentsthat sustain these connections better than others. Moreover, these kindsof community networks often take on a quasi-public function, as when,for instance, churches, day-care networks, and youth groups come to-gether to build a playground or community housing. One chapter inTheorizing the City, a study of Barcelona by Gary McDonogh, does touchon the relationship between spatial community and poor peoples hous-ing, but the volume might be stronger if it included analyses of recentlycreated intentional communities of the poorfrom public housing,mutual housing, and supportive housing to mixed-income devel-opments and squatter encampments.

Law professor Gerald Frugs new book, City Making, takes on a numberof difficult issues, especially community building and the construction ofurban publics in the metropolis, in a very original and stimulating way.Well-written and elegantly argued, Frugs book is nevertheless not aneasy read. Nor is it easily summarized. But City Making is striking in itsability to engage in nuanced discussion of some very broad questionsWhat is the nature of community? Of the self?as a means of develop-ing fairly concrete policy proposals for cities. Urban social workers, inparticular, should appreciate Frugs accomplishment in bridging psycho-logical and sociological domains to generate insight in the service ofpolitical change.

At heart, City Making relies on postmodern theories of the self to de-velop proposals for the radical reform of local government law. But

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perhaps the clearest place to begin is to continue with the discussion ofgovernment. Decentralization of governmental authority in the UnitedStatesespecially the powers enjoyed by localities over land use, prop-erty taxes, and servicesobviously plays more than a minor role inconstructing homogeneous, exclusionary communities as well as in theoutward press of sprawl. City Making argues that the actions of state gov-ernments, in particular, have propelled metropolitan expansion and frag-mentation even more than have federal or municipal policies. Cities, inlegal terms, are merely creatures of the states. The latter have seen fitto grant localities certain kinds of autonomythe right to incorporateas separate municipalities, immunity from annexation, the privilege ofengaging in exclusionary zoning, the ability to legislate and provide ser-vices soley in their own self-interest, and the authority to tax the realproperty located within municipal boundaries and to spend it only onlocal residents. This kind of local autonomy, and the competition be-tween localities that is spurred by it, mostly benefit new and wealthy sub-urbs at the expense of cities and older, inner-ring suburbs. These innerlocales suffer from unstable tax bases, insufficient school funding, anddisproportionate responsiblity for housing the poor even as affluent sub-urbanites enjoy access to central-city jobs and amenitiesthe museums,sports stadiums, and parks subsidized by city taxpayers.

Standard economic models contend that these outcomes result fromthe unconstrained preferences of residential consumers, who vote withtheir feet by shopping for locales in which to settle. Yet state-supportedmeasures like fiscal zoning mandate lot sizes and building structures inways that simply exclude affordable and mixed-income housing. Alongwith the subtle and not-so-subtle forms of housing-market discriminationwell documented by researchers, these legal rules restrict the presumedspatial mobility of racial minorities, working people, and the poor. Thepolitical autonomy of the U.S. central city, in relation to the larger me-tropolis, is too often the autonomy of the beggar. Frug argues, more orless persuasively, that simply to increase the powers of central citieswould probably exacerbate more problems (including metropolitan bal-kanization) than it would solve. Given the tendencies of urban re-gimes to favor elites, there is no reason to think that making big-citymayors more powerful would make them any more responsive to theneeds of their inner-city constituents than they are now.

If beefing up the sovereign powers of cities is not the best solution, thecommunity tradition within social work has often seen organizing thelocal community itself as a mechanism of progressive change. As Gregoryand Caldeira have shown, though, local ties can take troubling forms.Several of Frugs chapters also highlight the limits of this kind of local-ism. At the neighborhood level, community solidarity is often forged de-fensively and on the basis of the exclusion of others. These bonds ofsolidarity based on homogeneitywhat sociologist Richard Sennett has



called the we feeling, that central psychological fact of the voluntaryassociationare seductive. In romantic accounts of community buildingthey are celebrated, but these bonds also exacerbate the social fragmen-tation of the metropolis. In Frugs view, the hardest but most pressingtask of modern times may be to nurture, out of a richly heterogeneousbut dangerously divided array of social groupings, some kind of largerurban (or metropolitan) collective subject.

In pursuit of this, Frug presents an anticommunitarian vision of com-munity that is oriented around an acceptance of difference and strange-ness. This vision embraces a quintessentially urban (as opposed to sub-urban) tolerance for being together with strangers. Drawn from thework of Sennett and political theorist Iris Marion Young, this notionseems to me a very importantand often forgottencomponent of citylife. For promoters of the suburban ideal, city life is often seen to beharsh, disorganized, and without moral sensibility. Urban apologists liketo respond by extolling the grand institutions of civic high culture or thehidden, small-town-like virtues of the neighborhood or urban village.Frug insists that heterogeneity is actually the strongest suit of cities. It isnot just that, as his discussions of the self bring out, great opportunitiesfor learning, experimentation, and personal growth often emerge fromthe unruly collision of city subcultures. Frugs most compelling point isinstead less utopian. He reminds us of what good city life can do forpeople even on a bad day: its daily confrontations increase the kinds ofotherness found to be bearable (p. 127). This is no mean feat. And it isnot at all the same kind of tolerance as that based on acceptance or ap-proval. [There is] a reaction that is common among people who live inbig citiesand quite different from the feelings of discomfort or alarmso often experienced by suburban residentswhen the girl with greenhair and multiple piercings, the African American kids blasting hip-hopon a boom box, the gay couple holding hands, the panhandler, and thementally ill person pushing a shopping cart pass by. That reaction is:Whatever (Frug, p. 213). Whatever may seem like resignation, but itis actually a shoulder-shrugging acceptance of the downside of fortuitousassociation: when you share a world with people who are different, a cer-tain disorder comes with the (literal) territory. In this sense, whateveris a very real urban resource, a community asset that is strengthened onlyto the extent that it is tested and reaffirmed in daily encounters on publicterrain. Because of its moral minimalism, Frug seems to say, it may actu-ally register as a more realistic model for relating across the enormousspatial and social divides of the metropolisa more plausible vision ofregional community-buildingthan the we feeling.

City Making suggests that homogeneous and exclusionary communi-ties are predicated on a very limnited notion of the self. For this reason,says Frug, it is important to begin thinking about better kinds of com-munity building by engaging with fuller, more complex constructions of

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subjecthood. He considers two such psychological models: a situated self,defined by the totality of its relations with others, and a postmodernselfa plural, more fluid form of identity that is constructed seriallythrough multiple interactions with others. Each of these conceptions ofselfhood is used to articulate more expansive or inclusive forms of localgovernment lawfor example, laws mandating that local decisions con-sider interlocal impacts or laws allocating to each individual multiplevotes in multiple jurisdictions. Throughout, Frug sets for himself the taskof imagining new institutions, new forms of regional representation, andnew city services that might support more relational, heterogeneouscommunities and strengthen intrametropolitan publics. The idea is thatcreating more genuinely public cities lies at the heart of addressing socialproblems.

Frugs policy proposals are not the first to focus on new forms of re-gional governance and city services. But their rationale differs from thatof most regionalist agendas, which are supported by appealing to fair-ness or economic competitiveness. While not unconcerned about fair-ness, Frug makes the case for regionalism by suggesting that new formsof interlocal connection, mandated by law, could build better (more in-teresting, heterogeneous, and tolerant) communities than existing localarrangements tend to produce. Over time, he suggests, greater intercon-nection could create the kinds of overlapping interests that would leadto stronger publics as well as (probably) fewer inequalities, since theplace interests of the affluent would no longer be fully separable fromthose of the poor. Unlike other approaches, however, the emphasis is notdirectly on engineering new patterns of distribution or growth but oncreating new processes of community building.

Because of this focus, City Making merits a wide readership, includingmany people who have no reason to be especially interested in regionalpolicy making. Without fully taking up the books proposals, however,it is worth pointing to several potentially troubling elements in Frugsapproach. One problemand it is raised by a number of regionalistschemes is that the troubles of cities in the United States result notsimply from a fragmentation of political authority but from the concen-tration of economic power. This means that fixing bad local law may beuseful for certain ends but that it is not likely to (nor may it be the bestplace to try to) address basic economic inequalities; zoning reform, in aword, is no substitute for smaller wage gaps, fairer taxes, or a seriouseffort to end poverty (for recent evidence that these problems are stillbest addressed at the national level, see Goodin et al. 1999). A secondconcern is that Frugs emphasis on interlocal connection and integrationas the antidote to fragmentation leads to an overemphasis on barrierreduction to break down the city-suburb divide. Thus, tearing down wallsmeans, for Frug, an end not only to exclusionary zoning in the suburbsbut also to condominium-conversion laws in the city, which restrict the



possibilities for gentrification (p. 82). Yet is it really sensible to conflatethe (highly effective) exclusionary actions of privileged suburban home-owners with the defensive (and much less effective) efforts to slow downthe loss of affordable rental housing in the city? In fact, barrier-reductionstrategies, when they are not complemented by something like a metro-politan fund for the development of lower-income housing, would prob-ably displace more poor people than they would help (for a regionalistapproach that pays more attention to property-tax-base sharing andhousing subsidy, see Orfield 1997).

This kind of easy equation points, I think, to the broader challengesfacing regionalism. Curbing peripheral expansion of the metropolis maymake ecological and infrastructural sense, yet by channeling middle-class housing demand into the urban core, regional growth managementtends to bid up the already escalating price of central-city land and hous-ing. As one study by smart-growth proponents conceded, affordablehigher density housing remains an elusive smart growth goal (Daniel-son, Lang, and Fulton 1999). Moreover, growth management may ormay not even lead to greater urban densities. Under current develop-ment and lifestyle patterns, more middle-class people living in centralcities means more sports utility vehicles, more lower-density housing,and more big-box superstoresa suburbanization of the city. As part ofFrugs kind of regionalism, perhaps, the broader metropolitan commu-nity might awaken to support denser and more mixed income kinds ofresidential development. But activists and lower-income residents, not tomention champions of the American suburban ideal, may not be con-vinced that this is likely to happen anytime soon.

Clearly, then, there is more thinking to do about the relation betweensprawl and central-city development. The question of the politics of re-gionalism is in some ways the most difficult one. The handful of realinstances of regional growth management in the United States have re-lied not simply on the fact that tax-base sharing or open-space preser-vation makes economic or social sense (for a discussion of Portlandsexperience, see Leo 1998; for the Twin Cities case, see Orfield 1997,chap. 7).4 In political terms, regionalist initiatives depend on a plausiblevision of metropolitan community. Any regionalism with teeth needs tohave a strong appeal to suburbanites, who are now majority voters instate and national elections. At the same time, if inner-city communitiesare to gain benefits, they would need to be at the regional table as well.It is difficult, to put it mildly, to envision poor and working people mo-bilizing around something like smart growth. Yet, as Frug suggests, re-gional initiatives might have the capacity to bring together certain broad,overlapping constituenciesminorities, women, elderly citizens, inner-suburban residentswho are often disadvantaged by metropolitan de-velopment patterns. There are also a number of organizations, includingthe Industrial Areas Foundation, that are beginning to explore ways to

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bring together inner-city and suburban constituencies around a social-justice regionalism from below.

The two works reviewed here push us to rethink notions of communityin relation to the changing spatial forms of the metropolis. They alsoraise issues that need further exploration, and it is clear that tackling thespatial problems of urban growth in ways that do not further squeezelower-income people will take more work. But the questions posed byregional and inner-city development and of community building in thecontemporary metropolis are useful and challenging.

References

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Notes

1. Gerald Frug points out that much of the neourbanist design agenda remains illegal inU.S. localities, mostly because of zoning laws.

2. Urban economists point generally to two kinds of U.S. policy priorities that help pro-pel this drift: those that favor cars (low taxes on gasoline, weak support for public transpor-tation, etc.) and those that concentrate on the poor.

3. Rutheiser uses this phrase, from Melvin Webber, in his chapter title.4. In Portland, Oreg., e.g., the areas ecological self-image has provided an unusually

strong basis for regional unity. The regional initiatives of Minneapolis-St. Paul are consis-tent with a certain Minnesota tradition of liberal reform. (It also bears pointing out thatneither region has been burdened with the racial history of a Chicago or a Los Angeles.)

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city and region reinventing spatial community

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