In no particular order, the pieces from The Atlantic archives featured during The Future of the City report.
Divided
We Sprawl
by Bruce Katz and Jennifer Bradley
Cities and their suburbs make up "a single social and economic
reality," argue the authors of this December 1999 essay. "People
work in one municipality, live in another, go to church or the doctor's
office or the movies in yet another, and all these different places
are somehow interdependent."
Dubbing this attitude "Metropolitanism," the authors advocate
reforms meant to combat an enemy of cities and suburbs alike: sprawl.
Instead of "cookie-cutter projects" that are "easy to
finance, easy to build, and easy to manage," they recommend a new
emphasis on development within existing urban areas, spending on mass
transit rather than new highways, and cooperation among local officials
in metropolitan areas. "Academics, architects, and bohemians may
decry the soullessness of sprawl, but people seem to like it,"
they acknowledge. "Why put up such a fight to save dying places,
whether they are called cities or older suburbs or metropolitan cores?"
Their answer is here.
* * *
The
Mall of America
by Ian Frazier
On visiting the nation's largest mall, the author reflects on how modern
shopping environments turn the American scene into a place more limited
than ever before. "Buildings that differed from the Mall of America
only in size spread across the landscape all around," he writes,
"close enough to one another that a person wearing half-league
boots could jump from one roof to the next for mile after mile--from
the Mall of America to the vast Sportsmart store to Office Depot to
Old Navy to Toys 'R Us to Target, pausing finally at yet another local
mall, the Southdale Shopping Center, the world's first enclosed shopping
mall, built in 1956 by a Minneapolis department-store owner in order
to provide comfortable indoor shopping during the cold Minnesota winters."
The existential meaning of malls is his larger subject, and it has never
been so entertainingly explored.
* * *
Boston
Hymn
by Ralph Waldo Emerson
In order to hail Abraham Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation, leading
abolitionists met in Boston Music Hall early in 1863 for a celebration.
The author, who late in his life championed the abolitionist cause,
read this poem on the occasion.
* * *
The
Mad Strangler of Boston
by Erle Stanley Gardner
In 1964, residents of Boston were terrified by a serial killer believed
responsible for eleven murders at the time this article was published.
Its author, a distinguished criminologist, is best known for creating
one of the most widely read fictional characters in the English language,
Perry Mason. The Atlantic Monthly invited him to the Boston area,
then home to the magazine, asking that he shed light on the murders.
One of the most arresting details in the resulting article is the description
of women so fearful that some left the city and others saw their health
suffer from stress.
"What do you do about the door when you enter?" one of the
women said. "You look in the closets, under the bed, and in the
bathroom. If a man is in there you want to be able to run out, screaming
for help. Therefore, you should leave the door open. But if you leave
the door open while you are making a search, what is to prevent the
Strangler from following you in and standing between you and your means
of escape when you first see him?"
* * *
The
Not-So-Second City
by Benjamin Schwarz
Chicago is the finest architectural city in the United States, the author
writes -- and as if to celebrate it, he surveys a number of books that
chronicle its skyline, reviewing titles aimed at specialists and others
better suited for general audiences. The story includes a rueful note.
"Despite Chicago's abundance of talented young architects, including
Jeanne Gang, 'Chicago' architecture is no longer a living tradition,"
Mr. Schwarz says. "But there's nothing to be done. The forces of
globalism, or cosmopolitanism, as Marx both lamented and cheered long
ago, are unstoppable."
* * *
The
Tiki Wars
by Wayne Curtis
How do we distinguish the historic
from the sentimental?
The author visits the Kahiki Supper Club, in Columbus, Ohio, where thatched
dining huts and an eighty-foot-high tiki goddess spur him to ponder
what kinds of buildings deserve preservation for posterity. "I
hate it when drugstore chains raze cool old buildings and replace them
with boxy, harshly lit stores selling eyeliner and blister packs of
batteries," he writes. "But I found myself mustering a bit
of sympathy for Walgreens in this fight."
The outcome is here.
* * *
A
Tale of Two Town Houses
by Virginia Postrel
In a comparison of housing prices in Los Angeles and Dallas, the author
finds that Angelenos pay a premium for the right to build on their land
-- that is to say, on "bureaucratic delays, density restrictions,
fees, political contributions." The result: houses that cost roughly
$300,000 more than their equivalent in Texas. "The unintended consequence
of these land-use policies is that Americans are sorting themselves
geographically by income and lifestyle--not across neighborhoods, as
they used to, but across regions," Ms. Postrel writes. "People
are more likely to live surrounded by others like themselves, creating
a more-polarized cultural map." In this way, real estate may be
as important as religion in explaining the infamous gap between red
and blue states.
* * *
Scaling
Alaska's Heights
by Charles Thompson
The author recommends travel "to this most naturally scenic of
all U.S. capital cities," explaining that Juneau boasts five mountains
that even novice hikers can conquer in a single day: it is "one
of the few places where the casual hiker can gain entry into the mountaineer's
mystical world without the climber's skills and trappings, and may better
understand the mountaineer's love of high places and his urge to journey
into otherwise unreachable wilderness."
Descending from the mountain, the hiker
can walk all the way back to his or her downtown hotel in plenty of
time to shower for the cocktail hour. But cleaning up isn't strictly
necessary: it is, after all, a frontier city.
* * *
The
Empty Arena
By Bruce Schoenfeld
Kansas City earmarked $222 million for an 18,000 seat hockey and basketball
arena that opened in October 2007. But as yet, the city hasn't found
a professional sports franchise to play there. "Now that I've inherited
it," says Mayor Mark Funkhouser, "I tell people it's a shotgun
wedding, but I have to make the marriage work."
If you build it, will they come?
* * *
Back
to the Future
By Wayne Curtis
Why aren't there monorails in numerous American cities? The author explores
that question by visiting Las Vegas in 2005, shortly after Sin City
opened its single-track effort at mass transit -- a project he gives
mixed reviews. "Those of us who came of age making pilgrimages
to Disney's Tomorrowland know that monorails produce a complicated nostalgia
for the future," he writes, concluding that "the monorail
was twenty years ahead of its time, and it has been mired there ever
since."
* * *
Road
Trip: Part II
by Bernard-Henri Levy
Los Angeles is an anti-city, the author argues, "the prototype
of a city with a poorly developed language, the prototype of unintelligible,
illegible discourse." In his estimation, Southern California's
sprawling metropolis lacks a center, a recognizable border, a vantage
point where it can be "embraced in a single glance," and a
heart, or historic neighborhood "whose historicity continues to
shape, engender, inspire, the rest of the urban space." He closes
by predicting "with some certainty" that LA is going to die.
* * *
American
Murder Mystery
By Hanna Rosin
In an effort to fight poverty, officials in Memphis and many other American
cities demolished big public housing projects, assuming that residents
given vouchers to live elsewhere would excel in more diverse environments.
But rather than reducing crime and dysfunction, dispersing poor residents
has simply spread these ills around municipalities. Formerly safe areas
are now crime-ridden. Can criminologists persuade policymakers that
their former actions are at the root of the crisis?
* * *
Houses of the Future
By Wayne Curtis
After Hurricane Katrina, a handful of small, independent developers began building houses that blend New Orleans' history, modern design, and an innovative focus on environmental sustainability. "As with jazz, gumbo, and some remarkable cocktails, this style illustrates the city's talent for crafting extraordinary things from the ordinary stuff it has at hand," the author writes. In surveying these efforts, particular attention is paid to five new houses, the architects who built them, and their contribution to "an entire country that needs to rethink the way it designs its cities and homes."
* * *
New
York After Paris
by Alvan F. Sanborn
The year is 1906. New York is easily the most impressive city in the
New World. But how does it compare to Paris? The author answers that
question with what is arguably the most astute assessment of New York
City ever offered -- its sweep is as big as the city itself, and the
strengths and weaknesses of the metropolis are set forth in language
that can only intrigue and delight the contemporary reader.
A description of a city offered more than 100 years ago is enjoyable
partly because one can marvel at our changed perspective. At one point,
for example, the author laments that "Fifth Avenue below the Park
has lost its restful, if sombre, brown-stone unity by its unconditional
surrender to retail trade." On the whole, however, this antique
article is striking for its prescience in seeing what New York City
has become.
* * *
Are
Cities Dead?
by Robert Moses
The author, an urban planner and lifelong New York City bureaucrat,
is among the most polarizing men in the history of his field, and counted
more than 75,000 employees under his command at the height of his power.
Supporters of Mr. Moses argue that he is responsible for bringing to
New York City infrastructure required for its growth in the post World
War II era, whereas his critics especially detest his preference for
cars rather than public transit -- his example influenced planners across
the United States to build their cities around the automobile. In this
piece, Mr. Moses launches an attack on his critics, especially Lewis
Mumford, a staunch critic of urban sprawl.
* * *
The
Genesis of the Gang
By Jacob Riis
The author is one of the most famed
muckraking journalists in American history. A Danish immigrant to the
United States, he spent years as a serially destitute carpenter and
salesman before earning renown for his work documenting living conditions
in New York City tenements, most memorably in his book "How the
Other Half Lives." In this 1899 piece, he reports on the lives
led by impoverished urban youth, and how their material and social surroundings
push them toward lives of crime.
* * *
Broken
Windows
by James Q. Wilson and George L. Kelling
Any history of influential articles published by The Atlantic must
include "Broken
Windows," a 1982 cover
story by James Q. Wilson and George Kelling about the relationship between
police and neighborhood safety. The theory it proposed is credited by
many (though not
all) with reversing the
lengthy crime epidemic that plagued New York City and other urban centers.
Former NYPD Commissioner James Bratton called Mr. Wilson "my intellectual
mentor." A head of the Justice Department's research arm once said
that the piece "has had a greater impact than any other article
on serious policing."
* * *
by Elijah Anderson
Among inner-city youth, the "code of the streets" determines what is worth fighting for, how one dresses, the treatment of women, even grave judgments about the worth of life itself, the author argues. Turning a sociologist's eye to this world, he describes the difference between families that embrace the street's code and "decent families," who inhabit the same neighborhoods but reject violence. In its most powerful passages, this piece explains the logic that leads street kids to behave in ways that are ruinous to their futures and dangerous to the communities they inhabit. "This violence serves to confirm the negative feelings many whites and some middle-class blacks harbor toward the ghetto poor," the author writes, "further legitimating the oppositional culture and the code of the streets in the eyes of many poor young blacks."
* * *
How
Portland Does It
By Philip Langdon
On a 1992 trip to Portland, Oregon, the author tries to discover how
the "courteous, well-kept city of 453,000" became "a
paragon of healthy urban development," especially successful at
maintaining a vibrant downtown core. He left impressed by "the
sense of common purpose, the easy communication among the area's leaders,
and the longstanding conviction that Oregonians should conserve the
good life, even at the sacrifice of some self-interest."
* * *
Lofty
Ambitions
by Virginia Postrel
"Lofts were never supposed to be homes," the author writes.
"They were vacant old factories and warehouses, taken over by artists
looking for cheap space and good light." In this piece, she traces
the rise of this trendy approach to urban living -- "phony and
pricey, and that's just fine."
* * *
Reversing
White Flight
by Jonathan Rauch
Even if school vouchers didn't improve public education, the author
argues, implementing them would almost certainly improve poor neighborhoods. "Quite a few parents stretch their budgets
to live in communities with good public schools," he writes. "Make
vouchers available, and many of these parents will find that they can
get more house for less money by moving into an undesirable public-school
district and sending their children to a private school." In doing so, these voucher recipients would
increase the tax base, property values, and the presence of middle class
mores in poor neighborhoods. Thus
the conclusion: "Vouchers are
possibly the best desegregation and urban-renewal program that the United
States has hardly ever tried."
* * *
by Bernard Henri Levi
On the bicentennial of the birth of Alexis de Tocqueville, America's keenest interpreter, The Atlantic asked another Frenchman, the author, to travel the United States and report on what he found. What follows are his reflections on Seattle, a city he loved, and San Francisco, whose famed island prison troubled his soul.
