Class News
Howard Gillette ’64 is writing a new book about the urban crisis
Note from Tony Lavely, ’64 Class Secretary: Howard Gillette sent me the abstract for a new book he is writing. Since Howard is our “Class Historian,” I thought classmates would be interested in an advance look.
The Paradox of Urban Revitalization: Progress and Poverty in America’s Post-Industrial Era
by Howard Gillette
March 3, 2020
Intimately associated with the urban crisis of the 1960s, post-industrial cities, stripped of the engines that once assured their growth and burdened with high social costs, struggled into the twenty-first century only to enter into a period widely proclaimed as an urban renaissance. From Detroit to Camden to Oakland and elsewhere commentators saw cities rising, and yet success, it seemed, was generating yet a second urban crisis witnessed by growing inequality and civil unrest. Clearly the dynamics playing out in gentrifying neighborhoods and centers of concentrated poverty had changed over time, as had the perceptions of their nature. And yet, none of these conditions emerged free of the legacy of the beliefs and actions of the earlier era. American cities in the twenty-first century might be reviving, but the condition of those who drew the attention of the U.S. Commission on Civil Disorders half a century ago—the nation’s inner-city black minority--remained very much at disadvantage.
A rich body of scholarship exists examining the structures, attitudes, and actions that have kept the modern metropolis divided over time. Whether presented in the form of historical narrative or more focused critical analysis, a consistent picture emerges of a particular people disadvantaged by the cumulative effect of market-driven effects, especially as government policy has fallen increasingly under the thrall often referred as neoliberalism, the shift of political power from public to private entities. Most often specialized in its focus, such scholarship has concentrated on discreet elements of metropolitan political economies. For the last half of the twentieth century, it focused on divisions between cities and the suburbs that thrived at their expense. With the return of capital investment, population, and additional resources, attention shifted to divisions internal to cities. Tipped to the advantage of investors, public programs, frequently laced with public subsidies, have nonetheless been sold as essential to lifting the prospects of those left behind. And yet, the stark divide remains: between thriving downtowns and devastated neighborhoods, between areas of affluence and those of poverty.
Much of the scholarship on urban places treats its subject discreetly, looking at a singular period or phenomenon, albeit within larger structures within which they are embedded. For the purposes of this study, I focus on the process of development and redevelopment, not simply as an agent of change but as a central window into what Jenna Lloyd and Anne Bonds have called racialized capitalism through which uneven development, and its consequent effects, can be seen as one produced by singular structural and discursive processes. In their words, “uneven geographies of wealth, poverty, employment, school spending, and health, etc. are viewed as the result of historical events and past racial thinking.”
In order to evaluate the nature of the newest urban crisis, I choose to profile nine mid-size cities, each claiming a measure of revitalization in the twenty-first century. While they share similar trajectories, the outcomes of their revitalization process differ critically as a product of past experience: of local organizing, the formation of political coalitions or regimes, and the like. Asserting the agency of historical actors, competing narratives defy the assumption of a single hegemonic power dictating further inequality, revealing instead an evolving dynamic where political actors form and reform relationships to produce results. Not intended to mechanically describe the same elements in each story, the chapters nonetheless are aimed at building upon one another in order to offer enough common themes to construct a more comprehensive analysis in the conclusion.
This project grows out of some fifty years of scholarship and personal experience in beleaguered cities, but it is also informed and stirred by two recent years of teaching urban studies at the University of Pennsylvania. Forced to accommodate a largely unfamiliar body of literature in the field, I became acutely aware of the gap existing between the great historical work done over the past generation and the equally provocative yet largely unconnected work of sociologists, political scientists, and other social scientists. Matthew Desmond’s brilliant Evicted stands as but one prime example of a study that might well have been written in a dozen different cities, without illuminating what actually happened in Milwaukee to leave people in such desperate straits despite the city’s long history as a center of municipal socialism and civil rights activism. My choice of cities is admittedly arbitrary but sufficiently broad to accommodate the contrasts and continuities I want to bring attention to. To date drafts cover eight cities: Washington and Camden (about which I have written deeply myself), Detroit, Baltimore, Milwaukee, New Haven, Pittsburgh, and Oakland. At the moment, I am drafting a chapter for Newark to round out the assessment. Purposefully omitted are those globalized cities whose revitalization processes have advanced almost to the point of no contest: New York, Boston, Seattle, and San Francisco. While there are a number of other collections of essays on discreet cities undergoing redevelopment, the best model I have, and one I intend to build upon is Norman and Susan Fainstein’s, Restructuring the City. Susan Fainstein’s subsequent work on the just city further informs the study.
The ultimate thrust of the book is suggested in the subtitle. Following Henry George, I argue that poverty does not merely accompany progress in the capitalist city, but their relationship forms the central challenge of the modern economy. In George’s words, “The association of poverty with progress is the great enigma of our time. It is the central fact from which spring industrial, social and political difficulties that perplex the world, and with which statesmanship and philanthropy and education grapple in vain.”