Abstract
The revival of urban cores in the United States over the past few decades has coincided with the emergence of literature that celebrates the city as a “triumph”—in the words of urban economist Ed Glaeser (2011)—as scholars emphasize the ways that cities foster collaboration, innovation, and imagination. In acclaiming the urban, they seek to reverse old anxieties around urbanization that depict cities as places of conflict and alienation. In this new meditation on the city and its place in contemporary society, veteran urbanist and planning scholar Robert Beauregard attempts to strike a balance between these two narratives. He builds a case for interpreting the city as neither a feat of human ingenuity nor a cauldron of human despair but rather as a “crucible” of contradictions (x).
Beauregard organizes his argument along four axes, each one a set of conflicting tendencies that characterize cities: wealth and poverty, environmental destruction and sustainability, oligarchy and democracy, and intolerance and tolerance. Each of these themes serves as the subject of a chapter. To demonstrate its key points, the book makes extensive use of examples drawn from a diversity of U.S. cities.
According to Beauregard, the economic dimension of cities is characterized by their unique ability to generate and concentrate wealth through forces of agglomeration. At the same time, he claims, the density of wealth generates a parallel concentration of poverty. High earners create demand in a range of service sectors where workers are poorly compensated. Speculative real-estate markets incentivize wealthy households to use their surplus income in ways that increase land and housing costs, further marginalizing those with lower incomes. On top of these factors, Beauregard argues, inequality has spatial manifestations that exacerbate its impact; the rich cluster in neighborhoods with good schools, high-quality services, and access to powerful social networks—locking the poor out of these benefits.
Environmentally, Beauregard explains that “cities are greedy” (57). For one, cities transform the land on which they are constructed—sometimes harmoniously but more often destructively. Beyond this, the rapacious appetite of urban consumers is linked to an ecological footprint that extends far beyond the physical limits of the city; as Beauregard points out, 80 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions come from cities. Nevertheless, the density of cities enables less carbon-intensive lifestyles and the deployment of energy-saving technologies. Moreover, Beauregard argues that cities are generally on the leading edge of sustainability efforts.
The political contradiction the author outlines is one of oligarchy and democracy. On one hand, the urban environment—given its density and the incentives it creates to share resources—seems predisposed to collective, decentralized forms of decision-making. On the other hand, cities are also notorious for cultivating political machines that maintain a strong grip on power through coalitions of government, business, and civil society actors. Beauregard skillfully navigates these contradictions by describing the historical evolution of the civic realm in American cities. He explains how institutions like labor unions, religious groups, grassroots organizations, and residents’ associations contribute to the democratic vitality of a city—acting as representatives of diverse interests—while also forging alliances that develop oligarchic tendencies.
The final urban paradox that Beauregard outlines is the city’s dual capacity for tolerance and intolerance. As cities draw together people of diverse racial and ethnic backgrounds, political and religious beliefs, and sexual orientations and gender identities, they can engender a cosmopolitanism that tolerates or even celebrates difference. However, for the very same reason—that is, because cities are where we encounter “the Other”—they are sites of conflict. Beauregard claims that big-city indifference toward strangers has a “Janus-like quality” (135); it can result in live-and-let-live tolerance as well as apathy toward discrimination. He also discusses the more visible aspects of exclusion and marginalization in cities, from gentrification to police violence against African Americans.
Beauregard concludes the book with a discussion of how citizens might navigate the complex moral landscape of the city. He emphasizes the responsibility that urban dwellers must bear to “resist the structural injustices emanating from the city’s contradictions” through both everyday individual decisions and broader collective action (163). Ultimately, however, Beauregard cautions that “we cannot erase the city’s contradictions” (171).
By arbitrating a debate between the city’s apologists and its detractors, this book represents a valuable contribution to urban studies. Beauregard introduces a “third way”—the city as neither triumph nor tragedy but rather contradiction. While he presents his position as an alternative to a dominant narrative, I imagine that most urban scholars will find themselves in agreement with his foundational contention. Beauregard’s interdisciplinary approach—he commands knowledge of the economic, environmental, political, and social dimensions of cities—gives the book broad intellectual appeal.
One of my only concerns with the book is its neglect of cities beyond the United States. To be fair, Beauregard acknowledges his geographic focus as a limitation. However, what makes our era “the urban age” is the rapid urbanization currently unfolding in the Global South, where estimates indicate over 90 percent of urban population growth is occurring (United Nations 2018). It becomes increasingly important for books like this one, which describe “the city,” to draw their evidence from across the globe. This is not to suggest that Beauregard’s argument has no relevance beyond the United States; the theoretical framework of contradiction could be fruitfully applied in many cities around the world.
In a related sense, this book would have also benefited from a deeper analysis of the multi-scalar ways in which the four contradictions are expressed. Beauregard’s claim is that these contradictions are not limited to the city, but that “cities are the mechanism by which they are concentrated and given presence” (152). However, his examples make clear that wealth inequality and environmental injustice play out between cities as much as within them (he compares prosperous coastal cities to rust belt towns on these parameters). Thus, is the city really the most relevant scale at which to analyze these contradictions? Does globalization alter the scale at which these contradictions operate? And if some cities host more extreme contradictions than others, is this the result of local citizen activism—as Beauregard’s concluding argument would imply—or at least partly a function of structural forces operating at larger scales? At the heart of these questions is the issue of how the city’s contradictions are reshaped and rescaled over time.
Despite these limitations, I view this book as a durable contribution by a leading urban scholar. I believe its approach will appeal to a broad range of urbanists—from planners to sociologists, political scientists, and geographers. In particular, the book would be a valuable instructional text for undergraduate courses in urban studies, given that it introduces many of the key debates that animate urban social science. Perhaps future research by Beauregard and others might enrich the book’s theoretical framework by exploring its implications across additional historical and geographic contexts.