Cities Without Suburbs (Woodrow Wilson Center Special Studies)

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Summary: Must-read for city policy-makers and social activists
Review: David Rusk, former mayor of Albuquerque, NM, puts his experience and research to work in this compelling report. In it, he connects the economic and practical success of America's urban centers with the degree of socioeconomic and racial segregation present in each. The result is a blueprint that local, state and federal officials can use to reverse the troubling trends in our cities. Specifically, he calls for metro-wide planning councils, city-county consolidation, aggressive annexation by older central cities, and changes to state and federal laws to create unified cities without suburbs. The text also includes numerous interesting case studies that demonstrate what, when practiced, his ideas are capable of. Easy-to-read, fascinating, and enlightening. David Rusk is talking. Are America's city officials listening?

Rating:
Summary: Good conclusions despite bad methods of arriving at them
Review: Rusk comes to some good conclusions, such as the necessity of reducing needless tiers of government, the need to consolidate city/county/regional management, and so on, but he arrives at some of these conclusions using flawed logic.

He invests a lot of time and space in the book to go over the theory of "city elasticity", by which he means the city's ability to expand its boundaries by annexing unincorporated areas or smaller municipalities. Instead of citing the work of others who use this theory, he instead has decided to omit a necessary component for supporting or debunking the theory -- a bibliography.

In effect, the city elasticity theory can be in most cases nothing more than the "Polish blanket trick" -- sawing off part of a city and sewing it onto another. Gobbling up ineffectively designed or managed municipalities is a net loss for a city, yet this is not reflected adequately in his findings. Worse, he fails to come to terms with the inequities of city/suburban design, instead taking the moral low road by accepting the inevitability of suburban design. In addition, he fails to arrive at any useful conclusions about how to solve the problems of urban blight except through the city elasticity theory and engages in a sort of governmental political correctness by failing to address root causes.

Ray Suarez's book "The Old Neighborhood" addresses many of the root causes of urban blight better than Rusk's work, while "Suburban Nation" by DPZ and Speck covers many of the flaws related to the inefficiency of suburban design. Finally, Jane Jacobs' "The Economy of Cities" does much to debunk some of the assumptions made in the city elasticity theory, based on economic models and history. There are other works to be cited to support or refute the basic thesis, essentially making this shortcoming inexcusable.

Despite the flaws, including how some of the effects of the data points are in fact mere echoes of the causes, he comes up with a coherent set of points about reasserting the role of government in an environment that accepts sprawl growth as an inevitable path. It's just that the lack of a sizeable bibliography and the waving of hands over certain topics detracts greatly from the inevitable right answers.

"Cities Without Suburbs" promises to create cities from suburbs, simply by pulling them into the city's framework. It's at best a last-resort solution for a situation where you're unwilling to admit you've lost control of events. It doesn't hold much promise for being useful in cases where the essential city fabric is more or less solid.