Abstract
The City Revisited is a concise, readable analysis of the contemporary U.S. city focusing on three urban environments: Chicago, Los Angeles (LA), and New York. Its mission is to deepen the theorizing of the city using these three historic exemplars. Judd and Simpson posit that three urban schools have dominated the debate about city dynamics—the L.A. School, the Chicago School, and the New York School—and have generated a base of fundamental understandings that need updating, nuance, and modification. Such urban theory, to the authors, is understandably contested terrain, and any single story line will have limitations. In theme, cities are complex, theory-resistant objects, but times change, societies change, cities change. Thus, they contend, the search to understand the U.S. city must proceed ahead, and these schools must be cracked open to generate new insights into this ever-evolving city.
The book’s order is tidy and coherent. Part I, titled “Revisiting Urban Theory,” tackles the reality of academics creating schools as heuristic assertions and impositions onto complex cities. Contributions are from Dennis Judd, Janet Abu-Lughod, and Daphne Spain. Part II, titled “View from Los Angeles,” rehearses the content of the L.A. School in all its generalizations and nuances. Contributions are from Michael Dear, Nicholas Dahmann, Amy Bridges, Steven Erie, and Scott McKenzie. Part III, introducing the “View from New York,” has chapters by David Hall and Andrew Beveridge, John Mollenkopf, and Robert Beauregard. The New York School, like the others, becomes situated as one more important and viable urban tradition whose insights and omissions need careful clarification and interrogation.
Part IV, titled “View from Chicago,” takes readers to the timeless Chicago ecological tradition and possibilities for a recently formed new Chicago School. Chapters by Dick Simpson and Tom Kelly, Terry Nichols Clark, Larry Bennett, and Costas Spirou are most animated when the Chicago School is being treated as going through a second wave of theorizing beyond its initial formative base. Finally, Part V, titled “Utility of U.S. Urban Theory,” centers the act of theorizing this object as a contentious, problematic process. Chapters by Frank Gaffikin, David Perry, and Eratoola Kundu; Francisco Sabatini and Rodrigo Salcedo; and Dick Simpson and Tom Kelly focus on the pitfalls of theorizing this city in an era of immense urban, regional and societal complexity, pervasive global influence, and frenetic transnational realities.
I have mixed feelings about this book. On the positive side, there is much to applaud. The book provides a nice review and appraisal of one slice of urban theory that has dominated urban studies for decades. This book seizes this terrain and does more than simply rehash now established debates that have worn thin (i.e., “Is there a quintessential city that reflects contemporary urban America?” and “What school most closely captures the current ever-evolving U.S. city?”). In this setting, chapters query some important questions: the degree to which prevailing academic times influence this model building, what problems arise from the search for an all-encompassing theory of the city, and the essence of interplay between the urban and its encompassing region, nation, and globe. In this context, a healthy skepticism about the act of theorizing this city assumes a nice prominence in the book. Here, there is a nice acknowledgment by many contributors that these schools are akin to totalizing, expedient narratives, constructions of academics that always vie to fit comfortably in the “gestalt of the time” (p. 5).
Yet, this book also feels old and narrow to me. Thus, standard binaries that many urban analysts have now sought to overcome (e.g., unique vs. generalizable, global vs. local, and city vs. suburb) populate the book to define many central questions. Set against this, urban politics and urban policy are not deeply theorized in many chapters. In this vein, a book touting itself as engaging urban theory would do well to at least mention recent developments like actor network theory, spatiality theory, and cultural economy theory. But most unsettling is the feeling that the book represents a very truncated foray into urban theory. Taken on is the traditional “ecological-morphological question” that has been central to mainstream urban studies for a long time. What is ultimately peripheralized or erased is massive, for example, debates around understanding the politics of constructing semiotic cities and spaces, the fabricating of urban policies out of traveling knowledges, the role of “ordinary cities” in our contemporary urban realities, and the reality of a current materialist crisis in this city (e.g., the stark growth of racialized poverty and wealth disparities). Lost in the book’s focus is any serious sense of a hermeneutic city, the importance of “knowledge politics” in this city, a current city in fiscal and material turbulence, and the relevance of nonmajor cities to understanding the contemporary urban.
This said, I recommend this book for those who want a strong grounding in the standard debates about U.S. urban morphological content. This book nicely moves this focus along in interesting ways. However, for more current, expansive debates about the reality and plight of these cities, I would suggest you look elsewhere.