Post a comment or email me if you'd like a copy. Here are a few choice bits for you urbanists:
"...local politics became a vital field of study after World War II when it gave up its preoccupations with administrative efficiency and reform and began to consider questions “central to political science as a whole. Who had power? In what sense were cities democratic? Howcould the public interest be secured? What were the political relationships among social classes? Whatwas the significance of ethnic politics? Could race conflict be managed more peacefully in this century than in the last?”
"But soon, in Peterson’s view, urban scholarship turned away from such momentous questions...by abandoning the timeless questions of political philosophy, urban scholarship had become irrelevant to policymakers and dominated by “feudal barons” with narrow specialties in transportation, housing, and other policy fields, expertise in suburbia, the central city, or other restricted urban geographies, or specialties in minority politics of every stripe. The upshot was, “We no longer have students of urban politics” (Peterson 1981, ix-x)."
"Indeed, the reform impulse may be regarded as only one variant of an understanding, long shared among students of the city, that the city is always going to hell, that the changes under way (whatever they may be) are making everything worse, and that things will become truly dire if something is not done now or at least soon."
"The new turn in national policy was surely motivated by the political calculations of the Republican Party. But it is important to realize that the abandonment of the cities also was rooted in a coherent intellectual argument, one put forth in 1980 by a presidential commission appointed by a Democrat, Jimmy Carter:
“It may be in the best interest of the nation to commit itself to the promotion of locationally neutral economic and social policies rather than spatially sensitive urban policies that either explicitly or inadvertently seek to preserve cities in their historical roles” (President’s Commission 1980, 66).The report of the President’s Commission was the opening salvo of what grew into a political and intellectual assault upon the most hallowed assumption underpinning urban scholarship: that federal aid to the cities was essential to the economic, social, and cultural well-being of the nation."
"Old habits die hard. It is still common practice for books and articles in the field to call for a resumption of federal aid to the cities (I will provide no examples here, lest I be accused of singling someone out). But as Bill Barnes (2005) recently observed, “The era of federal urban policy is, like,way over.”Even in a resurgent Democratic Party—perhaps especially in a resurgent Democratic Party—urban policy is not going to become any significant part of the political agenda."
"The narrative power of the Chicago school can be traced to its foreboding mood of fecundity, decay, and violence: As Hans Christian Andersen’s fables reveal, children, like their elders, are attracted to the tension introduced by these elements. In our own time, a similarly riveting narrative has emerged about urban life in the twenty-first century. Like the Chicago school of the 1920s, the L.A. school’s storyline derives its power from its sweeping and often dramatically bleak interpretation of urban life. (“Dramatically dismal”:
In MikeDavis’s writings, balls of rattlesnakeswash up on the beaches of Los Angeles; there are “pentecostal earthquakes,” “dead cities,” and the question, “who killed L.A.?”; Davis 2002)."
(and my favorite part): "These kinds of rhetorical indulgences may explain why a student in one of my recent seminars began a paper with the observation that 'hyperbole may have become the principal methodology of today’s urban scholarship.' Amen."
image by Zack K.
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