UNC history professor Peter Coclanis reviews for the News & Observer Joel Kotkin‘s recent book challenging popular assumptions about urban dwelling.
At first blush, it seems difficult to get a good read on American cities today. We hear a lot about blighted neighborhoods, gang violence, horrible schools, job losses, decaying infrastructure and dreadful finances. But we are also regaled by stories featuring apartments with “awesome” views, “amazing” high-end restaurants, incredible cultural happenings, and cool, hipster districts, brimming with retro coffee houses and high-concept cocktail bars. Can anyone spell Brooklyn?
In the view of the iconoclastic urbanist Joel Kotkin, both of these characterizations contain a good deal of truth. It all depends on who you are and where you look. Ironically, such characterizations may matter more today to urban planners than to “urban” dwellers themselves, a strong majority of whom quit the center cities for the suburbs years ago. According to Kotkin, in most cases they did so for good reason. Simply put, cities stopped meeting their needs. Did I mention that this book was controversial?
Kotkin’s central argument is relatively simple to lay out. He believes that changes in the economies of many U.S. cities since World War II have worked to create strong demand for people with high skill levels and high levels of education, but weak demand for working-class and middle-class job seekers and people with lesser skill/education levels.
Most of the jobs for which the latter groups were suited migrated to suburban areas, and over time, working-class and middle-class populations did too. Their exodus left the central cities increasingly to other groups: the wealthy and the educated, who give the tone to these areas but constitute a small minority; larger numbers of low-skill and unskilled service workers who can’t command high wages, but provide for the needs, comforts, and extravagances of the wealthy and educated; and a large block of residents whose relationship to formal labor markets is marginal at best.
