May 15, 2008
New York Sun book reviewers on the urban environment
On April 9, I recommended the New York Sun's book-review section, and today the paper publishes two reviews of great interest to me. One, part of its weekly "Reconsiderations" series, discusses Edward Banfield's 1970 book The Unheavenly City (the link is to the 1990 revised edition); the other analyzes a new, multiauthor volume from the Urban Age Project that uses Saskia Sassen's theoretical work to survey similarities and differences between New York, Shanghai, London, Mexico City, Johannesburg, and Berlin.
From the "reconsideration":
Banfield understood that cities exist in a remarkably fluid urban system. Cities are filled with poor people, not because cities are bad for poor people, but because “the city attracts the poor” by “offering better conditions of life.” When government policies make cities better places for the poor, then more poor people will come to cities. This argument does not imply that spending on urban poverty is a mistake, but that the impact of anti-poverty spending may be to increase, rather than decrease, urban poverty.
The most hotly debated part of “The Unheavenly City” was Banfield’s sociological depiction of urban poverty and his link between social class and time horizons. According to Banfield, upper-class people think of their historic legacy, and middle-class people plan for retirement, but lower-class people live for the moment. Impatience, not impecuniousness, is the key characteristic of the lower classes.
And from the review of The Endless City:
As you’d expect from a book produced by more than 30 contributors — among them lawyers, activists, architects, politicians, planners, sociologists, and historians — “The Endless City” runs the gamut from the dazzlingly insightful to the depressingly hackneyed. At its heart is a close look at six global cities: New York, Shanghai, London, Mexico City, Johannesburg, and Berlin. Perhaps the most entertaining aspect of the book is its use of clever metrics to show how similar and, more often, how different these cities really are — by comparing, for example, the amount of green space in New York (14%) and Berlin (35.6%), or the daily commute in London (1 hour and 24 minutes) and Mexico City (2 hours and 30 minutes).
So if these cities are so different, one has to wonder: What can they possibly have in common? Drawing on the work of Saskia Sassen, one of the book’s contributors, “The Endless City” defines a global city as a major metropolis that dominates what you might call the key command functions of the global economy. Yes, globalization means that capital and even labor are hyper-mobile, but face-to-face interaction still counts. The leadership class has to actually live somewhere, and they tend to cluster with others like themselves. Armies of hangers-on and aspiring somebodies follow, whether we’re talking about gentrifying Brooklyn or the slums of Soweto.