Book Review: The Metropolitan Revolution: How Cities and Metros are Fixing our Broken Politics and Fragile Economy (original) (raw)
This article provides a critical overview of contemporary debates on metropolitan govern-ance and region-wide cooperation in US city-regions. Many commentators have interpreted the recent proliferation of metropolitan reform experiments in US city-regions as evidence that a new " regional coalition " is being consolidated or as the expression of a singular, unified and internally coherent political agenda. In contrast to such assumptions, it is argued that contemporary metropolitan regionalist projects in the USA are extremely heterogeneous , both institutionally and politically, and are permeated by significant internal conflicts and contradictions. Contemporary metropolitan regionalist projects are interpreted here as place-specific political responses to the new forms of sociospatial polarization and uneven geographical development that have been crystallizing in US city-regions under conditions of postfordist urban restructuring and neoliberal (national and local) state retrench-ment. From this perspective, the current explosion of debates on metropolitan cooperation represents not a movement towards a putative " new regionalism " but rather a " new politics of scale " in which local, state-level and federal institutions and actors, as well as local social movements, are struggling to adjust to diverse restructuring processes that are unsettling inherited patterns of territorial and scalar organization within major US city-regions. A concluding section suggests that such metropolitan rescaling projects are redefining the geo-graphies of urban governance throughout the advanced capitalist world.
IJURR, 2009
Urban America: Growth, Crisis and Rebirth begins with an account of population distribution, jobs and the main economic indicators in urban America in 1950, when the US was separated into three regions (North-East, South and West), each showing distinct cultural and economic characteristics. In 1950, the NorthEast was the region with the majority of urban centers (including Chicago, then the second largest city) and home to 58% of the nation's population. The South was home to 44 million people, but had no urban centers of more than 1 million; it was also home to 63% of the nation's black population. The West, in 1950, was sparsely populated, accounting for 13% of the nation's population. The two largest urban centers were in California-Los Angeles and the Bay Area (San Francisco-Oakland). The infrastructure, good weather and oil gave way to rapid population growth in Californian cities, with many migrants moving to the state in the hope of a better future. McDonald then tackles the period 1950-70, an era characterized by urban growth and prosperity in the country as a whole. This was a period of great changes for the US, one of the most significant being, of course, the increasing labor force due to the participation of women. Another was the Great Migration of African Americans to the NorthEast. Suburbanization (triggered, in part, by racial tensions in central cities) is the most significant trend of the second half of the twentieth century. The population growth of the suburbs was equal to 28.7 million people, which accounts for 55% of the nation's population growth. The outcome of these changes was a very different labor force from the one that had existed up to then, with urban centers being most affected. The rapid growth of the West was another significant change of this era. Cities such as St Louis, Boston, Pittsburgh and Buffalo experienced a population decline of more than 20%, while, at the same time, the metropolitan areas of those same cities grew. During these two decades, the population of the South increased by 31.6%. Atlanta became the economic capital of the SouthEast , with the population growing by 131%. The population of Los Angeles doubled in 20 years, from approximately 5 million to 10 million, and the city became the second largest city in the US. The next section of the book is devoted to the years of urban crisis, which started in the 1970s. Racial riots expanded to many cities, including Cleveland, Detroit, Newark and Washington. The average population growth of the 17 NorthEastern metropolitan areas was 5.6% in 1970-90, compared to 40% in 1950-70. The population of cities such as New York, Detroit, Pittsburgh, Cleveland and Buffalo shrank. The median family income, which increased by 89% from 1949-69, increased by only 7.6% from 1969 to 1998, with the average income actually declining in Detroit. The decline of most metropolitan centers was evident in the collapsing central cities of New York, Chicago, Philadelphia and Detroit. Another change that took place during this era was the change in the racial composition of the cities. The black population of the above cities skyrocketed, especially in Detroit (the city that suffered the worst urban riot of the 1960s in terms of lives lost), where the population of the central city was largely black and the suburbs almost exclusively white. Cities that suffered the least from the urban crisis of this era were those that were away from the industrial area of the NorthEast (Baltimore, Kansas City and Minneapolis). The urban crisis was less evident in the Sunbelt (South and West) but still had an effect on various cities. Atlanta was able to establish itself further as the economic center of the 'Old South', but was not able to avoid inner-city problems. Metropolitan Miami boomed in the 1970s and 1980s, but had its own share of
The 21st-Century Metropolis - University of Pennsylvania
Regional Studies, 2009
Roy A. The 21st-century metropolis: new geographies of theory, Regional Studies. This paper calls for 'new geographies' of imagination and epistemology in the production of urban and regional theory. It argues that the dominant theorizations of global city-regions are rooted in the ...