491226
research-article2013
JUH40110.1177/0096144213491226
Review Essay
Journal of Urban History
2014, Vol 40(1) 194–200
Retheorizing the City Past © 2013 SAGE Publications
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Century
Jeb Brugmann (2009). Welcome to the Urban Revolution: How Cities Are Changing the World. New York:
Bloombury Press. x + 342 pp., photographs, notes, index, $27.00 (cloth).
Edward Glaeser (2011). Triumph of the City: How Our Greatest Invention Makes Us Richer, Smarter, Greener,
Healthier, and Happier. New York: Penguin Books. 352 pp., illustrations, notes, bibliography, index,
$16.00 (paper).
Dennis R. Judd and Dick Simpson, eds. (2011). The City, Revisited: Urban Theory from Chicago, Los Angeles,
and New York. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. 381 pp., illustrations, notes, index, $25.00
(paper).
Harriet B. Newburger, Eugenie L. Birch, and Susan M. Wachter (2011). Neighborhood and Life Chances:
How Place Matters in Modern America. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. xv + 368 pp.,
illustrations, notes, bibliography, index, $59.95 (cloth).
Robert J. Sampson (2012). Great American City: Chicago and the Enduring Neighborhood Effect. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press. xviii + 534 pp., illustrations, notes, bibliography, index, $27.50 (cloth).
Reviewed by: Eli Elinoff, University of California, San Diego
DOI: 10.1177/0096144213491226
One decade into the twenty-first century, the present and future of the city is a great concern for
scholars, policy makers, and citizens alike. The planet’s urban condition evokes both anxiety and
promise. Will the city of the future be an engine of deepening democracy and prosperity or
marked by stark poverty and exclusion? With over 50 percent of the earth’s population now liv-
ing in cities, returning to the question of how best to understand, manage, and reimagine urban
areas seems to be long in the making.
That the future is an urban one is not in doubt, yet understanding just what that means is hotly
contested. In an era marked mostly by what it isn’t (postneoliberal, postglobalization, etc.), the
question of the city has a grounding effect. Above all else, we now live in a resolutely urban era.
So, how and where is it best to look to understand (and perhaps improve) our contemporary city-
condition? What scale—community, city, national, global—best captures the myriad processes
related to contemporary urban growth? Who reaps the rewards of the urban revolution and who
remains excluded from it? What kinds of new politics might be entailed in the emergence of this
new urban planet? Will the city flatten or deepen inequality?
The books contained in this review each offer their own perspectives on these questions.
Although each attends to these questions from very different methodologies, vantage points, and
scales, all point to intense efforts to both retheorize the city and reposition urban concerns and
urban solutions as the central issues facing a rapidly changing planet.
Edward Glaeser’s Triumph of the City offers an entry into these debates. Glaeser’s view of the
city is buoyant. For Glaeser, well-managed cities are open to free competition, encourage density,
promote affordability, and do not restrict growth. Glaeser contends that the density, the scale, the
pooling of resources, the sharing of environmental impact, and the high concentrations of capital
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Elinoff 195
mark urban zones as more democratic, prosperous, and environmentally friendly than rural or
suburban areas. Where cities falter, Glaeser argues, it is almost inevitably the result of inept
policy makers who look at the city and see only buildings. This failure to see the city for its citi-
zens results in (and from) graft, ineptitude, and hubris. Glaeser argues that where creativity is
given space to manifest itself and human connections are fostered (through education and capital
investment in entrepreneurship and innovation), the city blossoms.
This framework drives many of the case studies. Although the book is relatively thin theoreti-
cally, its relentless attack on conventional wisdom is an invitation to debate about the roles policy
makers, capitalists, state officials, urban planners, and citizens play in improving and undermin-
ing cities. Triumph offers several compelling arguments about sprawl, urbanization and the envi-
ronment, and preservation and housing affordability. Glaeser’s claim that Katrina survivors
should have simply been cut checks and given the opportunity to return to New Orleans or move
on is one of the most interesting, even if the policy implications of the claim go unexplored.
Glaeser’s calls to rethink policies that favor sprawl and undermine affordability are his most
convincing.
Glaeser’s theoretical framework, which provokes many of his most interesting insights, is also
his biggest drawback. By regarding cities as economic units and their residents as rational actors,
making choices based solely on economic calculus, Glaeser engages the city (and its residents)
as a global phenomenon, moving briskly from Bangalore to Detroit to Kinshasa to Rio to East St.
Louis (cases some might find a bit too familiar). Yet, it often feels as though these cities (and their
residents) are merely interchangeable coordinates on a flat economic plain where colonial lega-
cies, endemic racial segregation, histories of economic inequality, and contemporary political
struggles are only important insofar as they serve as drivers for inept local officials to impede the
inevitable processes of economic flattening. Thus, when a city like Manhattan is deemed “suc-
cessful,” the racial politics of policing during the city’s revival and the peripheralization of pov-
erty and violence of the last twenty years are not addressed.
Glaeser’s lack of engagement with these issues poses theoretical questions, but more impor-
tantly it creates a kind of fog that obscures the unevenness of the economic processes that create
cities and the political processes through which inequality is addressed. For Glaeser, economic
growth, broadly measured, is synonymous with a city’s success or failure. This accounting fails
to consider the way in which growth is unevenly distributed and experienced across the city.
Where themes of inequality are taken up, for example in his chapter “What’s Good about Slums?”
the favela is represented as a relatively uncomplicated space of optimistic city dwellers, forging the
future of Brazil by making a life in the city. Absent from this telling are the violence, gangs, evic-
tions, and systematic exclusions and exploitations that mark everyday experience in the favela. More
important than attending to these everyday experiences of poverty is the absence of the decades-long
political struggles that poor communities have waged for “rights to the city” across Brazil. Indeed,
those struggles demonstrate that city may triumph but that triumph will not simply result from eco-
nomic growth, but rather from long-term political engagements—local, national, and global—that
force both a reimagining of urban space and a redistribution of access to it.1
So even while the slum is an important site of aspirations, those aspirations encounter serious
barriers and demand constant, often schismatic, social organizing. While Glaeser’s main point,
that cities diminish social inequality is provocative, he fails to acknowledge the intense political
efforts required to actualize the city’s equalizing potential. The lack of engagement with these
political questions fails to provoke the kinds of ethical probing necessary for understanding the
process through which the triumph of the city might reach all of its residents.2
Working in similarly cosmopolitan vein, Jeb Brugmann’s Welcome to the Urban Revolution
also points to the city and, in his words, its “density, scale, association, and extension” as the
reason that it should be at the center of future policy agendas. Brugmann’s central concern is to
push for greater alignment between policy makers, business interests, citizens, and urbanists in
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196 Journal of Urban History 40(1)
producing more strategic, coordinated city-building efforts. This emphasis on strategic alignment
is Brugmann’s central contribution to discussion of twenty-first century city theory. While both
he and Glaeser argue that the city will be critical to the emerging twenty-first century, they have
different senses about what role planners and policy makers should play in the process. In
Brugmann’s view, for the city of the twenty-first century to thrive, new forms of “Strategic
Cities” will need to align politics with institutions and “practices of urbanism” that “revitalize
faculties for strategic transformation . . . in the face of adversity and unanticipated global trends”
(p. 131).
Brugmann contrasts the “Strategic City” with other “city systems”—which is not an isolated
city model, but rather an effort to pay close attention to the way that the disparate, competing
urban processes of the city are brought into alignment—the City of Crisis and the Great
Opportunities City. In the City of Crisis (Mumbai and Detroit), different classes have inherited
distinct “legacies of urbanism” resulting in city living in a perpetual state of crisis. The Great
Opportunities City (Kuala Lumpur, Johannesburg, and Toronto) lack any consolidated urbanism,
growing incoherently and being unable to achieve its official plans and visions.
In his chapter “City of Crisis,” Brugmann uses Dharavi, the most famous of Mumbai’s many
tenuous urban settlements, to make the claim that in the City of Crisis, “every aspect of life is
dominated by the implicit battle between its large, competing alliances, their different strategies,
and the fallout that this competition creates” (p. 150). In Brugmann’s words, city officials are too
concerned with turning Mumbai into a “world-class city” to consider the way that ambition exac-
erbates the city’s high level of inequality. The conflicts between the visions of city planners,
private interests, and various city residents is what marks the “City of Crisis” as a space that
seems to be perpetually near collapse.
If the City of Crisis is marked by battles between residents, then the Great Opportunities
City—probably better named “the Missed Opportunities City”—is defined through its inability
to translate its strengths into spatial coherence. The chapter traces Toronto’s development path,
outlining how, in spite of the region’s high number of architects and urbanists, the city “became
a hodgepodge of unrelated buildings and uses” (p. 167).
Here (as in many of the other works under review), the role of neoliberal economic, social,
and spatial policies goes largely unmentioned. This is particularly notable in this chapter as these
policies are essential to the context in which Toronto’s city planning begins to change (the late
1970s onward). The fact that planners’ emphasized mobility and flows, for example, is perfectly
in line with the broader political economy of the era. This notion of space transformed the city
into a number of discontinuous zones that favored the interests of large capital over the produc-
tion of an integrated livable city. For scholars with a bent toward Marxist theories of the space,
this will come as no surprise. Indeed, Brugmannn concludes that “the precedent set for big-box
stores and strip malls” makes it “nearly impossible to stop the incursion of the city of flows and
its city models into Toronto’s waterfront” (p. 180). Lefebvre is clearly a huge influence here, so
it would be nice for Brugmann to use this case to grapple with the question of the relationship
between changing political economies of space and the development of city-systems. Nevertheless,
the case study provokes the question of whether a city’s growth is patterned by coherent plans
made by urbanists (or strategic alliances) or changing political economies and the philosophies
that guide those larger transformations?
The “Strategic City” stands in contrast to the previous two city systems. Marked by a stable
governing alliance willing to limit the interests of private developers, an explicit practice of
urbanism, and a set of institutions with “technical talent” and the power to develop and imple-
ment these practices, is Brugmann’s ideal city. For Brugmann, Chicago, Barcelona, and Curtiba,
Brazil, exemplify these practices by organizing competing interests “into a broadening city-
building community that achieves shared objectives through constant refinement and renewal of
its practices of urbanism [original emphasis]” (p. 213).
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Elinoff 197
The case study of Curtiba, Brazil (chapter 12), offers a view into a strategic city in the global
south. Curtiba’s development was driven by both a macro attention to urban form alongside
“extensive resources dedicated to the micro-details” like parks, building materials, sculptures,
and facilities all “co-created with that community to generate meanings and a sense of owner-
ship” (p. 327). Beyond attention to both of these scales, Brugmann’s case also demonstrates how
long-term strategic thinking results in integrated urban institutions prepared to develop strategic
planning decisions that align stakeholders in ways that create lasting urban improvements. This
case study is a welcome example in which a city from the global south offers critical insights into
the region’s emergent city-building processes. Rather than following the typical narrative of
mismanagement and enemic corruption, Curtiba’s management strategy demonstrates that north-
ern urbanists can learn a great deal from close engagement with emerging urban practices in the
global South. On the other hand, the chapter only briefly handles the politics of Curtiba’s urban
development and then only by soft-pedaling the criticisms of the lack of participation in the plan-
ning process.
The chapter on Chicago, “The Entrepreneurial City,” offers another window on the kinds of
strategy promoted by Brugmann. For Brugmann, Chicago’s ability to turn itself around under
Mayor Richard M. Daley was rooted in a massive political transformation that saw the old “party
patronage system” replaced by a “broad-based, inclusive, reform-oriented regime that is no less
powerful” (p. 268). By replacing the old regime with a new one composed mostly of community
organizations, Daley successfully built an electoral coalition and a new network of activists ready
to redevelop neglected parts of the city. The key here, according to Brugmann, is the cultivation of
strategic relationships among city users and urbanists prepared to focus on both a macro, citywide
level and a micro, community level. Daley’s efforts are impressive and yet, again, there is also the
feeling that much ongoing contestation has been elided in this telling of the Chicago turnaround.
Attention to these kinds of politics (in both the Curtiba and the Chicago examples) would have
given a better sense of the kinds of opposition these kinds of strategic partnerships encounter,
demonstrating both their promise and pitfalls inherent in urban improvement. This is a weakness
in both Brugmann’s and Glaeser’s projects. Both seek to understand the promise of the city with-
out deepening our understanding of the kinds of contested politics that are essential in its
production.
Robert Sampson’s impressive study of Chicago’s neighborhoods offers an alternative analyti-
cal approach to telling the story of the twenty-first century city. By blending historical, qualita-
tive, and quantitative accounts, Sampson offers a portrait of Chicago that is pixilated by
neighborhoods offering varying opportunities and barriers to their residents. This isn’t so much a
study of the triumph of the city in the twenty-first century but a rich exploration of the varying
fates of different parts of the city and how scholars might begin understanding this variation. For
Sampson, the effects of Chicago’s growth are dispersed differentially, so gauging the city’s suc-
cess depends greatly on the vantage point from where the question is asked. In this account, the
city may have successfully created a strategy to manage urban growth, even as the distribution of
that success varies widely across the city.
To be fair, neither Glaeser nor Brugmann is attempting to engage the same questions that
Sampson does. They are also not trying to produce studies of the same methodological and theo-
retical richness. However, read in contrast with these works, Sampson’s efforts demonstrate the
ways in which cities—even relatively successful cities—spread their successes unevenly, implor-
ing scholars of the twenty-first-century city to pay close attention to differences within cities and
not just between them. Sampson’s case study demonstrates how monolithic visions of “the city”
are misleading by showing how Chicago is not one but, actually, many cities that hang together
through complex webs of uneven interdependencies. So, even as Sampson offers ample evidence
for the highly localized effects of place, he also demonstrates how the interrelationship between
places is also critical to understanding the relationships between neighborhoods in Chicago.
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198 Journal of Urban History 40(1)
Sampson’s book is far reaching. Among his most important insights is that the “neighborhood
is a consequence and a cause, outcome and producer” (p. 358) and what that means for our under-
standing of the city in the twenty-first century. For Sampson, the best way to understand the
processes of contemporary Chicago, indeed the contemporary city, is by using the neighborhood
to navigate between what he calls the “bottom up approach,” which overemphasizes individual
choices, and the “top down approach,” which emphasizes “big processes” obscuring both indi-
vidual and neighborhood level choices (p. 365).
Sampson’s argument demonstrates that by focusing on the neighborhood and the relationships
between neighborhoods, a new picture of the city comes into focus. By looking closely at the
experiences and opportunities of residents within cities, paying attention to “neighborhood
effects,” and thinking through the complex ways that a variety of city residents interact, it is pos-
sible to see how cities grow and thrive even as some residents are left out of that growth and
“success.”
The results of this level of analysis offer a different picture of the city from that presented by
either Brugmann or Glaeser. Sampson argues, for example, that while cities are constantly chang-
ing “poverty and its correlates are stubbornly and simultaneously persistent” (p. 364). His study
demonstrates how even amid decades of gentrification and growth during the 1990s processes of
stratification remained relatively stable, suggesting what Sampson calls “spatial continuity.”
Sampson argues that one of the key indicators of well-being in a community is “collective
efficacy,” which emphasizes shared expectations for social control, trust, and “felt cohesion.”
Sampson’s theory of “collective efficacy” emphasizes that neighborhoods (and cities), whether
poor or rich, fare better based on their local ties, commitment to one another, and their abilities to
exert control over their own situations. In this sense, poverty and, more importantly from
Sampson’s perspective, powerlessness undermines collective efficacy, thus weakening all kinds of
community indicators. The insights—substantive, methodological, and analytical—presented in
Sampson’s book demonstrate the importance of breaking apart cities and seeing them as internally
uneven spaces that produce (and maintain) inequality even as they produce prosperity. In this way,
Sampson’s book offers productive insights into the twenty-first century city and has much to offer
seasoned scholars, especially those interested in new methods for studying the city at large.
The edited volume Neighborhood and Life Chances, though not as methodologically ambi-
tious or far reaching in its analysis as Sampson’s work, offers a number of studies that both
highlight the promise and problems with studies of neighborhood effects. The range of studies
presented in the volume opens up questions about neighborhood effects by probing the issues
surrounding poverty, segregation, health, education, and opportunity.
The book’s first section deals explicitly with the relationship between place and health and
education. Janet Currie’s chapter “Health and Residential Location” offers a nice overview of the
ways that location affects a variety of health outcomes. In short, her research confirms that low
health outcomes are related to location, even suggesting that the “Moving to Opportunity” (MTO)
policy (a topic addressed throughout the volume and in great detail in Part III) had positive effects
on health “independent of any effects on income and employment.” Demonstrating the relation-
ship between poverty and health is not new, but this place-based approach is thought provoking.
The second section, “Geographies of Opportunity,” examines changes in distributions of
opportunity in a wide variety of urban settings. For example, Ingrid Gould Ellen and Katherine
O’Regan’s study of the fate of low-income communities in the 1990s echoes Glaeser’s insight
that decreasing (?) urban poverty (at least during the 1990s) was correlated with improving eco-
nomic opportunities, demonstrating a general urban renewal that occurred during that decade.
Another chapter by Mark L. Joseph (“Reinventing Older Communities”) argues that mixed-
income development created in Chicago through the MTO policy was received enthusiastically,
even as the long-term effects of the policy are still unknown. His study of these developments
emphasizes the need for cooperation and strategic partnership (recalling Brugmann) between
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Elinoff 199
developers and governments to make sure that such projects are successful in their attempts to
actually reach out to communities and long-term attention by scholars to know whether or not
such policies actually work.
The rest of the studies cover a range of issues including violence, MTO, teens, education, and
segregation. All might offer productive points of engagement for scholars engaged in those spe-
cific areas or for people specifically interested in neighborhood effects, the MTO program, or the
fate of poor communities in the United States during the 1990s. For a reader interested in the city
more broadly, however, the volume lacks tight cohesion and fails to offer enough coherent, broad
theorization to warrant a deep engagement with the collection.
This extensive probing of the neighborhood recalls the question of the city itself. Where do
neighborhoods end and cities begin? Indeed, where does one city end and another begin? To what
degree can insights generated from one city be transported to another? The authors represented
in The City Revisited take up this very question. This collection returns to New York, Los Angeles,
and Chicago to rethink the various schools of urbanism that came to dominate Urban Studies in
the United States during the twentieth century. By and large, the authors feel that the era of spe-
cific schools of urbanism has run its course and that it is now critical to generate a broader under-
standing of the processes of city building and urbanization globally in order to understand the
urban twenty-first century.
The first section of the book contains three very nice essays that introduce and question the
projects’ founding premises. The first piece, “Theorizing the City,” by Dennis Judd, gives an
excellent overview of these three schools of urban theory. It is a nice introduction to twentieth-
century U.S. urban theory because it offers both the necessary contextualization and a clear
description of each school’s perspective on the city. Janet Abu-Lughod’s “Grounded Theory” is
a searching essay that seeks to destabilize the distinctions between the three schools by proposing
that “there is theory (or rather theories) and the objects that must be dissected, in order to under-
stand or explain them, and there are even different techniques for dissection that are more or less
appropriate for each city” (p. 23). Her insight offers a nice point of departure for the rest of the
volume, which is both indebted to and wary of the schools around which the volume is con-
ceived. Abu-Lughod’s piece sets the pace for this questioning by highlighting the way these
schools (in particular the Chicago school) paved the way for urban analysis even as their contin-
ued relevance as coherent schools of thought demands critical deconstruction.
This questioning proceeds throughout the next three sections allowing theorists from each
school (though many might reject that label) to return to question the stability, utility, and coher-
ence of these approaches to the city. The first section looks at the noir postmodern urbanism of
Los Angeles highlighting the way that the Los Angeles theorists emphasized the emerging domi-
nance of development capital over politics in the making of that city’s dispersed urban landscape.
Michael Dear and Nicholas Dhamann’s piece “Urban Politics and the Los Angeles School of
Urbanism” explores these themes by showing how Los Angeles’s postmodern sprawl gave way
to a new notion of politics occurring in multiple, disparate sites throughout the city. They contrast
this with the Chicago model, which situated politics at the center. Another article in the section
reconsiders the “noir narrative” (Amy Bridges) through the lens of the Janitors for Justice move-
ment, showing how the success of this social movement gives a different picture of a Los Angeles
that is often imagined as a depoliticized, “fortress city.”
The third section takes on New York; however, most of the chapters here reject the idea of a
New York school, centering instead on deconstructing the very notion and utility of distinct urban
schools. The scholars in this section favor a grounded approach to the city with attention to local
political and economic processes. The fourth section takes on the legacy of the Chicago school,
which, among the three schools of urban thought, still seems to be the most under its own sway.
Larry Bennet’s chapter “The Mayor and His Peers” offers a nice complement to Brugmann’s
rendering of Chicago, showing both the successes and contestation behind Chicago’s revival.
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200 Journal of Urban History 40(1)
Even as Dick Simpson and Tom Kelly’s chapter proposes to “go beyond schoolism,” it also sug-
gests eight points for a new Chicago school. The others in this section are more empirical offer-
ing further examples of the lingering centrality of Chicago as both a site of study and a producer
of theories of both the city and itself.
Robert Beauregard’s chapter, “Radical Uniqueness and the Flight from Urban Theory,” also
deconstructs the “schools,” arguing that “the whole approach divides cities and theorists into
those who live and write about ‘significant’ places and those who do not” (p. 199). Indeed, the
point seems to resonate across the volume, with the last section basically following his lead in
questioning the productiveness of the legacy of these three urban schools for thinking about cities
in the twenty-first century. Fajcisco Sabatini and Rodrigo Salcedo’s piece takes this task the most
seriously by comparing the key insights from each of these urban schools to Santiago Chile. They
argue that while there are productive insights to be gained from these schools, understanding
urban complexity requires attention to “structural factors, human agency, and the indeterminacy
and contingency of urban processes” (p. 348). While the authors suggest that important insights
can be gained from these schools, these insights should direct analysis towards city processes
instead of attempts to create a unified “school” of theory. The volume is useful both for scholars
interested in the specific histories (and futures) of these schools and for those scholars interested
in thinking about the future of urban theory in general.
The books under review here reflect the intense energy devoted to the task of gaining a new
understanding of the city in the twenty-first century. While there are wide analytical differences
among them, the authors share a core concern over the fate of the urban, echoing Dick Simpson
and Tom Kelly’s point in their conclusion to The City Revisited that “we study to advance the
goal of a livable, just, and democratic city” (p. 365). Indeed, these five works point to the fact that
understanding what a “just city” might look like and operate is a central concern for contempo-
rary urban theorists. What justice means, however, is up for debate: Is justice achieved through
economic liberalization or state programs of redistribution? What roles will planners, entrepre-
neurs, government officials, and citizens play in making just cities? What kinds of politics are
entailed and produced by different visions of just urbanism? These questions emphasize the
contested nature of both the city and theories of the city past the edge of the twenty-first century.
Yet, the answers to these questions wlll play a key role in determining whether the urban trans-
formation is just or not.
Notes
1. Better representations of the experiences and politics of urban poverty can be found in ethnogra-
phies such as the following: James Holston, Insurgent Citizenship: Disjunctions of Democracy and
Modernity in Brazil (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008); Teresa Caldeira, City of Walls:
Crime, Segregation, and Citizenship in Sao Paulo (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000);
Donna Goldstein, Laughter Out of Place: Race, Class, Violence, and Sexuality in a Rio Shantytown
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003).
2. Sobering accounts on slums can be found in UN-Habit, Challenge of the Slums: Global Report on
Human Settlements 2003 (Earthscan: London, 2003); Mike Davis, Planet of Slums (New York: Verso,
2006).
Author Biography
Eli Elinoff received his PhD from the Department of Anthropology at the University of California, San
Diego. His dissertation is entitled Architectures of Citizenship: Democracy, Development, and the Politics
of Participation in Thailand’s Railway Communities. It is an ethnographic study of democratization, “rights
to the city,” and new forms of participatory urbanism in a growing provincial city in Northeastern Thailand.
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