Modern American City Research Articles

God in Gotham: The Miracle of Religion in Modern Manhattan by Jon Butler

Reviewed by: God in Gotham: The Miracle of Religion in Modern Manhattan by Jon Butler Mark Granquist God in Gotham: The Miracle of Religion in Modern Manhattan. By Jon Butler. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2020. 308 pp. It is a sign of a very good book that it delivers more than it promises, and this is a very good book. It describes the religious life of New York City, specifically the borough of Manhattan, between [End Page 113] 1880 and 1960. It is a deeply researched volume with a wealth of detail and description. But the book is really about much more than this. It is a case study about religious life in a modern American city, perhaps the modern American city, and an examination of the common assumptions and theories about religious life in the modern urban West. Despite the oft-repeated claims of secularization theorists (and many church leaders) that such modern cities are deeply secular and irreligious places, Butler convincingly demonstrates that, in the case of Manhattan, such claims are simply wrong. Butler lays out a rich narrative of the vibrancy, multiplicity, and ingenuity of religious life in Manhattan. Far from being irreligious, Manhattan was awash with both traditional and new religious organizations and was a leader in American religious life in the period when it was the leading city in the United States and one of the leading cities in the world. European secularization theorists at the beginning of the twentieth century saw the migration of people into the cities as the engine of modernism and the beginning of the end for traditional theism. In an unlikely pairing, they were joined in this assessment by conservative Protestant groups who saw cities like New York as hotbeds of irreligiosity. But as religious sociologists Roger Finke and Rodney Stark have demonstrated, this view of urban irreligion in America is really a myth, and rates of religious adherence in America have been higher in urban areas than in rural territories. Cities like New York give inhabitants far more choices of religious groups; in cities, conventional religion was in hot competition with newly developed groups. Butler vividly demonstrates this phenomenon in Manhattan, where mainline Protestants contended with all sorts of New Thought and self-empowerment groups, established Black churches vied with self-anointed store-front preachers, and a whole range of Jewish groups sought to define that community. Perhaps in that competitive market were the roots of a great degree of religious adherence. The first chapter deals with the sources of the idea of urban irreligiosity within American religion, primarily from mainline Protestant leaders who felt that growing religious pluralism threated their hegemony. In the second chapter these same groups are seen [End Page 114] aggressively organizing to bring traditional religion to Manhattan, not only by building scores of impressive churches but also by adapting themselves to the new challenges and opportunities of urban America. In this they were joined by Roman Catholics and Jews, whose ranks were swelled by millions of new immigrants who came to America before the First World War. The third chapter demonstrates how these religious leaders, besides establishing new congregations and synagogues, also set out to sacralize the fabric of Manhattan and put their stamp on urban culture. The fourth chapter examines how these same dynamics were at play in Manhattan's swelling African American communities; though they were greatly constrained by urban discrimination and segregation, they paralleled the other religious groups in energy and approach. A fifth chapter looks at Manhattan as the seedbed of theological thought in the twentieth-century United States, due to the presence of prominent religious leaders such as Reinhold Niebuhr, Paul Tillich, Jacques Maritain, Abraham Joshua Heschel, Joseph Dov Solveitchik, and Dorothy Day, among others. Perhaps most intriguing is the conclusion, in which Butler examines religious life and organizations in the suburbs of New York City that mushroomed after 1945. Rather than viewing suburban religious life as an antithesis to or escape from urban religion (or irreligiosity), Butler claims that these suburban religious organizations were actually an extension of the religious life of urban Manhattan. This fruitful line of inquiry begs for further investigation. No book can do...

Newsprint Metropolis: City Papers and the Making of Modern AmericansBuilding Natures: Modern American Poetry, Landscape Architecture, and City PlanningThe Sociable City: An American Intellectual Tradition

Book Review| March 01 2021 Newsprint Metropolis: City Papers and the Making of Modern AmericansBuilding Natures: Modern American Poetry, Landscape Architecture, and City PlanningThe Sociable City: An American Intellectual Tradition Newsprint Metropolis: City Papers and the Making of Modern Americans. By Guarneri, Julia. Chicago, IL: Univ. of Chicago Press. 2017. 330 pp. Cloth, $45.00; paper, $30.00; e-book available.Building Natures: Modern American Poetry, Landscape Architecture, and City Planning. By Daniel, Julia E.Charlottesville: Univ. of Virginia Press. 2017. ix, 200 pp. Cloth, $55.00; paper, $27.50; e-book, $55.00.The Sociable City: An American Intellectual Tradition. By Rowan, Jamin Creed. Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press. 2017. 195 pp. Cloth, $47.50; e-book available. Barbara Eckstein Barbara Eckstein Barbara Eckstein has pursued matters urban and environmental in the books Sustaining New Orleans (2006) and Story and Sustainability (coedited with James Throgmorton, 2003) and in other publications and actions. She recently retired from the English department at the University of Iowa where she taught courses in environmental humanities; built, with students, faculty and public partners, peoplesweathermap.org; and was a member of the Center for Global and Regional Environmental Research. Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google American Literature (2021) 93 (1): 148–150. https://doi.org/10.1215/00029831-8878566 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter Email Permissions Search Site Citation Barbara Eckstein; Newsprint Metropolis: City Papers and the Making of Modern AmericansBuilding Natures: Modern American Poetry, Landscape Architecture, and City PlanningThe Sociable City: An American Intellectual Tradition. American Literature 1 March 2021; 93 (1): 148–150. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/00029831-8878566 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search nav search search input Search input auto suggest search filter Books & JournalsAll JournalsAmerican Literature Search Advanced Search The result of meticulous historical scholarship, Newsprint Metropolis provides a cleanly written account of the role played by major US metropolitan newspapers in the making of cities and their inhabitants from 1880 to 1930. For her case studies Julia Guarneri chooses Philadelphia, New York, Chicago, and Milwaukee. The interest of Guarneri’s book, uninterrupted by any urban theorizing, lies in the explication of how this making occurred and in the numerous illustrations enhancing that explication. Both the decades and the cities at the center of the argument prove well chosen. Although the book’s introduction, which provides a less than fulsome account of the diversity of Americans, their news, and newspaper options, raises some questions about how they might fare in its pages, the chapters do tell a story increasingly attuned to exactly which readers are being made as Americans by major metropolitan newspapers,... Copyright © 2021 by Duke University Press2021 Issue Section: Book Reviews You do not currently have access to this content.

Automated data extraction from historical city directories: The rise and fall of mid-century gas stations in Providence, RI.

The location of defunct environmentally hazardous businesses like gas stations has many implications for modern American cities. To track down these locations, we present the directoreadr code (github.com/brown-ccv/directoreadr). Using scans of Polk city directories from Providence, RI, directoreadr extracts and parses business location data with a high degree of accuracy. The image processing pipeline ran without any human input for 94.4% of the pages we examined. For the remaining 5.6%, we processed them with some human input. Through hand-checking a sample of three years, we estimate that ~94.6% of historical gas stations are correctly identified and located, with historical street changes and non-standard address formats being the main drivers of errors. As an example use, we look at gas stations, finding that gas stations were most common early in the study period in 1936, beginning a sharp and steady decline around 1950. We are making the dataset produced by directoreadr publicly available. We hope it will be used to explore a range of important questions about socioeconomic patterns in Providence and cities like it during the transformations of the mid-1900s.

Class, Culture, and Coming of Age in Alice Browning’s Chicago Girl

Among the many contributors to Chicago’s Black Renaissance, a creative movement which reached its height during the 1930s and ’40s, was Alice Browning, an African American educator, publisher, and writer. Best known as the coeditor of Negro Story, a short-lived but influential Black literary magazine, Browning was also a frustrated novelist who worked on an unpublished manuscript titled Chicago Girl for much of her adult life. A flawed but fascinating examination of race, sex, and class in the modern American city, Chicago Girl helps to deepen our understanding of Chicago’s Black Renaissance and the often unrealized ambitions of aspiring Black writers.

Building Natures: Modern American Poetry, Landscape Architecture, and City Planning by Julia E. Daniel, and: The New Poetics of Climate Change: Modernist Aesthetics for a Warming World by Matthew Griffiths

Building Natures: Modern American Poetry, Landscape Architecture, and City Planning by Julia E. Daniel, and: The New Poetics of Climate Change: Modernist Aesthetics for a Warming World by Matthew Griffiths

Playing the (International) Movie: Intermediality and the Appropriation of Symbolic Capital in Final Fight and the Beat ’em up Genre

Final Fight (Capcom 1989) is a famous example of a video game genre generally known as “beat ’em up” or “brawler,” a type of action game where the player character must fight a large number of enemies in unarmed combat or with melee weapons. The side-scrolling beat ’em up genre reached the peak of its global popularity in the late 1980s and early 1990s, a period sometimes referred to as the genre’s “golden age.” Set in a contemporary, urban setting, Final Fight has a storyline that revolves around three playable heroes who attempt to rescue a young woman from the clutches of a criminal gang. Although likely the most influential and among the best games in this genre, Final Fight did not found the beat ’em up genre by itself: it was produced within the context of a specific, albeit recent, textual tradition and canon. This canon consisted of texts produced within the same medium (i.e. other video games, mostly of Japanese production) but also drew from an intermedial corpus. In its design and narrative tropes, Final Fight inherited and incorporated a number of elements from Hollywood action cinema that had been translated into the newer digital medium of video game. To trace a history of the beat ’em up genre from its origins to Final Fight, I address in this paper questions on three levels. On the intertextual level, what are the textual antecedents of Final Fight? What were the formal and stylistic conditions of possibility for this game within the history of the genre and the medium? What are the game’s intermedial connections, especially with films? To answer these questions, I trace a tentative genealogy, focusing on the narrative and representational elements of the game. Specifically, I examine storylines, characters and settings and their relationship with the structural properties of beat ’em up gameplay. On the “(v)ideological” (Gottschalk 1995) level, what value systems are put into play in a classic beat ’em up game? In what ways are the player’s choices axiologised? What conduct is rewarded or sanctioned? Which actions can the player’s avatar perform, and for which purposes? In what contemporary discursive formations did Final Fight participate as a textual device for the actualisation of ideologically non-neutral fictional conduct? I attempt to map the value system inscribed in this video game genre that, in turn, articulates it as a game (i.e. as a system of stakes, rules, sanctions, and rewards). On the historical level, what were the industrial and commercial conditions entailed in the production of a game such as Final Fight? To the (actual or virtual) satisfaction of what demands, both material and symbolic, was it designed? Answering these questions calls for an analysis of the so-called “context,” which I consider to be a historical and social meta-narrative. In this respect, my research mostly focuses geographically and historically on the Japanese video game market of the 1980s and its transnational connections. Starting with the (mainly cinematic) dissemination of transnational imaginaries of “street violence” and “vigilantism” against the background of large, modern American cities during the 1970s and 1980s, I attempt to show that Final Fight is an instance of the incorporation of these imaginaries into video games. More generally, I argue that, with various degrees of success, the classic beat ’em up games produced in Japan carried out a function of symbolic appropriation and redistribution at a local level as they remediated a cinematic textual canon (which was, for a significant part, of foreign origin) into the video game medium. As video games, these texts shifted the focus of this appropriation from spectatorship to the forms of active agency prescribed in gameplay. The player thus appropriated control not only on a character in a game but also of an entire cinematic canon which, in the Japanese context, appeared rich in symbolic capital and marked by “American-ness.” The movies that inspired the classic beat ’em up came from Hollywood, one of the “Greenwich Meridians” (Casanova 2004) in the global cultural industry during the 1970s and 1980s, likely the last decades of what some scholars have called “the era of high Americanization” (Iwabuchi 2002). Video games were, in other words, the means by which a portion of the Japanese cultural industry could so successfully appropriate the symbolic capital of Hollywood products that these Japanese games transcended the borders of the Japanese national market and became big hits in the “West.”

Building Natures Modern American Poetry, Landscape Architecture, and City Planning by Julia E. Daniel

Reviewed by: Building Natures Modern American Poetry, Landscape Architecture, and City Planning by Julia E. Daniel Mika Kennedy Building Natures Modern American Poetry, Landscape Architecture, and City Planning. By Julia E. Daniel. University of Virginia Press, 2017. 214 pp. Building Natures enters what is by now a familiar conundrum about the nature of nature: while often mourned as something lost in the face of human industrialization, most environmental humanists now operate from the assumption that nature has included anthropogenic activity since there were anthropoi to include. This turn, however, is not exclusive to the rise of ecocriticism in the late twentieth and twenty-first centuries. In Building Natures, Daniel traces the debate about the nature of nature across the landscape of Modernist poetry. Pairing extended close readings of the works of Carl Sandburg, Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams, and Marianne Moore with readings of the authors' personal archives and the architectural plans that shaped the parks they walked, Daniel brings literary study into conversation with the fields of landscape architecture and city planning. By reading architectural planning documents as cultural texts, Daniel grounds debates about the nature of nature that might otherwise risk endless equivocation; thus grounded, Daniel explores how early planners' and architects'civic goals evinced themselves in the formal qualities of the parks they built and how those formal qualities are ultimately interrogated in Modernist poetry. While Modernism is often understood as an aesthetic turn away from nature and the idealized Romantic preoccupation with nature, Daniel's thick descriptions of her primary sources demonstrate Modernist poetry's [End Page 225] continuing investments in it. Daniel argues that the nature Modernist poets concerned themselves with was "emphatically modern and American," such as city parks; conventionally natural spaces transformed by industrial development; and even the purported last frontiers of the United States, its national parks. As distinct from traditional pastoral visions of nature, Daniel claims that nature in Modernist poetics "always carries about with it a set of implied scare quotes" (9). Nature in Modernist poetics is bound up in the dark side of the United States' pastoral and frontier myths—a dark side that recognizes that the United States' seemingly untouchable, mythic wilderness or benevolent pastoral scenes were critically shaped by human activity—often resulting in the aggravation of societal inequalities that were themselves meant to appear natural. Ultimately, Building Natures studies the role of artifice in Modernist poetry, arguing that focus on artifice draws attention to the artificer and, therefore, to the societal motivations and strategies that shape our environments. The first chapter of Building Natures concerns itself with the burgeoning city of Chicago, and architect Daniel Burnham's "developing understanding of postfrontier nature as an architectural and deeply human artifice that must be built into American cityscapes" (23). Burnham's Plan of Chicago (1909) frames green spaces as integral to and consciously a part of the American city. By placing Burnham in conversation with Carl Sandburg's poetry, Daniel argues that the metaphors that built Chicago—the poet's and the architect's both—articulate tensions between separating nature and the city and integrating the two. In complicating easy binaries between city and nature, or man and nature, however, Daniel notes that Sandburg also expresses a tendency to nativize the process of building, eliding the difference between Native land claims and claims of white settlers. In Sandburg's poetry, white settlers are made native to Chicago by participating in the city's creation, from its buildings to its green spaces. Through this process, they become part of the environment of the city, and the city becomes a part of them. While this focus on the process of urban creation inscribes new ways of understanding the city as a space of comingling between man and nature, it also erases the dispossession and forced assimilation that undergirds industrial growth. It posits a narrative that privileges creation—in that Chicago's inhabitants become native by virtue of making their own place—without acknowledging that this place first had to be taken from those already Native. [End Page 226] Though readings of the poetry of Wallace Stevens often presume Stevens to view nature in its pastoral mode, in chapter 2 Daniel...

Land Use Zoning in America: The Case for Inclusionary Policy

Residential zoning code has been one of the most powerful forces in shaping the growth of modern American cities. By regulating which types of buildings can go where, zoning code has led to the creation of suburbs as we know them, with row after row of detached single-family homes. Indeed, the American city would look drastically different if it were not for the creation of zoning codes. But how did the institution that is American zoning come to exist? This essay will attempt to answer that question by exploring the early history of zoning, starting in the 1910s. It will also look at the impact of zoning on America’s poorest residents. Has the division of residential zones into mostly large lots with minimum home sizes excluded the poor from the suburbs? The correlation between zoning and economic exclusion has been studied, and a strong connection discovered. Given this, what can be done to remedy the problem? An alternative to current law, inclusionary zoning, has been explored and shows promise for fixing some of the problems that current zoning creates.

A City for Children: Women, Architecture, and the Charitable Landscapes of Oakland, 1850–1950 by Marta Gutman (review)

Reviewed by: A City for Children: Women, Architecture, and the Charitable Landscapes of Oakland, 1850–1950 by Marta Gutman Margaret Garb A City for Children: Women, Architecture, and the Charitable Landscapes of Oakland, 1850–1950. By Marta Gutman. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014. 454pp. Cloth $45. In June 1872, thirty women—mostly wealthy, white, Protestant, and married—signed on to the newly incorporated Ladies Relief Society in Oakland, California. The women, most of whose husbands had arrived in the west during the Gold Rush, determined to build a “new asylum” to care for the city’s impoverished women and children, a building that would “marry splendid design with feminized civic purpose” (79). Though linked by marriage to some of the wealthiest men in the city, the women were hobbled by their gender. They quickly realized they could not raise enough money to erect a building and so rented a farmhouse on the edge of the city. They renamed the building and repurposed it, transforming the neo-Georgian house into an orphanage designed to “socialize inmates” through a process called “home training” (85). In practice, this meant work in gardens, orchards, and kitchens for much of the day with just two hours each day for lessons and religious training. At age twelve, the children were expelled, expected to fend for themselves in the ruthless labor market of the fast-growing western city. For the scores of children who were crowded fifteen per room into dormitory-style bedrooms, the Children’s Home was a cold and uncomfortable place. But for the women who managed it, the house was “an emancipatory site,” a place that provided an entry to the masculine public sphere for women whose lives were “confined by gendered social conventions.” Charity work gave wealthy white women a sense of civic purpose, a collective identity that bridged the male world of politics and women’s domestic sphere, and that cemented bonds of class, race, and religious communities. The Children’s Home was just one of many edifices built or renovated by charity reformers in late nineteenth-and early twentieth-century Oakland. It was a “node” in what Gutman calls a new “charitable landscape for children” (87). A City for Children is a history of children’s charities told through the lens of architecture and the built environment. Gutman powerfully demonstrates that elite women and their voluntary organizations were crucial to the construction of the modern American city; the asylums, orphanages, hospitals, and old age homes built and managed by women’s charities proved visible markers of civic [End Page 176] culture on the urban landscape. These organizations, as Gutman adeptly demonstrates, also helped to produce and reinforce social divisions between immigrant and native-born, African American and white, Catholic and Protestant children, and to create racially segregated urban spaces. Charity work may have trained children to work; it also educated them in anti-Asian bigotry and the racial and class hierarchies that dominated American society. Some elite Oakland women sought to use charitable institutions to overcome racial divisions. A settlement house opened in the 1890s and, just as the Supreme Court declared racial segregation constitutional in their 1896 decision Plessy v. Ferguson, a small group of Oakland women sought to integrate west Oakland children. The effort divided the elite philanthropic women, forcing the integrationists to establish a separate organization, the New Century Club, which campaigned for parks and playgrounds in Oakland Point and sponsored educational programs for black and white neighborhood children “in a feminized, home-like setting—and run by exemplary women” (209). But, as Gutman emphasizes, integration only went so far. No women’s club, not even New Century, welcomed Asian immigrants, except as servants. Still, the New Century Club, meeting in the New Century Recreational Center in West Oakland, remained a visible form in the charitable landscape for more than half a century. The building was bulldozed in 1960 under a federal urban renewal program, erasing from the landscape—but not from community memory—a monument to the cross-class work of elite white women and to the increasingly organized, multiethnic community. Gutman is an architect and a historian, and her book has all the strengths—and...

In the Driver's Seat: Chicago's Bus Drivers and Labor Insurgency in the Era of Black Power

During the summer of 1968, hundreds of black bus drivers initiated two wildcat strikes in Chicago. These actions crippled the city's bus routes and left hundreds of thousands of people without service. The strike was unusual because the drivers demanded more of their union than of the company. These Chicago Transit Authority employees protested the antidemocratic structure of the Amalgamated Transport Union, which they believed favored white employees and retirees despite a majority black workforce. As the strike made headlines and worried Mayor Richard J. Daley (and his plans for the Democratic convention), drivers formed alliances with community groups. Fusing the cause of economic justice with that of the Black Power movement, these drivers and their allies formed the Concerned Transit Workers (CTW) as a vehicle for their demands. In this article Erik Gellman addresses the following questions: How did Black Power advocates address economic injustice at work? And how does this case study change previous understandings of black and labor protests during the late 1960s? Historians have only begun to account for the late 1960s stream of black activism by focusing on affirmative action's history from the local level, and Chicago is a vital case study for this approach because it has come to symbolize how whites in the urban North stymied southern civil rights activists when they tried to apply their nonviolent activism above the Mason-Dixon line. Many of these activists saw transit as a key urban space and sought to reverse deindustrialization and persistent job discrimination through black working-class nationalism, which provides a more complex and more contested vision of working-class Black Power as a potential remedy to the growing urban crisis in modern American cities.

Narrating the Early Modern American City

Narrating the Early Modern American City

Do You Know what it means to miss New Orleans? Ficción, polifonía y la ciudad en la serie Treme de HBO

The dividing lines between social sciences, arts and popular culture are not as clear as it is commonly believed. Actually, some theoretical approaches reveal a constant overlapping of transgressions and influences between these fields of knowledge. Treme is a television production that recreates in great detail the complex social flows and tensions of the modern American city through its particular style and narrative structure. Drawing on Bakhtin and Latour’s work, this article focuses on the first episode of the series and its narrative, in order to illustrate the mechanisms that allow this work of fiction to provide a certain sociological view of the world. https://doi.org/10.22380/2539472X64

Civil Society and Sustainable Cities

In the modern American city, who determines environmental policy? Cities have undergone fundamental change in both their economies and populations. In terms of political forces, our expectation is that across a range of cities, where nonprofit environmental groups have been included or incorporated into the local policymaking process, there is greater commitment to environmental protection, and more extensive adoption and implementation of local policies and programs designed to protect the environment. To test this idea, we draw on our own research that combines two original data sets. First, we have collected information on what programs and policies are in place in America’s large cities. Second, for 50 large American cities, we have also surveyed top city administrators. We find that inclusion of environmental groups in city policymaking is strongly linked to city administrators’ perceptions of city commitment to environmental protection. The number of local environmental protection policies and programs also demonstrates a strong relationship to inclusion of environmental groups in city policymaking.

Return to the City of Quartz: Excavating the Future 20 Years On

This paper revisits Mike Davis’ seminal City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles twenty years after it was originally published. It argues that the book continues to provide an indispensable model for left, politically engaged forms of urban research. The paper criticizes the apocalyptic readings of City of Quartz that have multiplied over time and instead suggests that Davis be read for his emphasis on an urban dialectic—the constant and ongoing struggles over urban form, politics and culture that shape the geographies of Los Angeles to this day. To this end, the paper looks to the city's more recent history, especially current battles being fought over the future of downtown L.A., to illustrate how we might continue to use Davis’ framework for critical analyses of urban power. At the same time, the paper addresses inadequacies of what has been called the “L.A. School” and its singularly postmodern approach to urban questions that fail to provide coherent understanding of the material realities of modern American cities. It argues that something like an L.A. School can be more properly grounded in the historical-materialist, even socialist, forms of writing and thinking developed in works like City of Quartz and much of the critical urban geography that came in its footsteps. Ultimately the paper is a call for scholarship on Los Angeles to be deeply engaged with both the concrete and abstract dimensions of a place, not for the sake of theory alone, but to further radical praxis in Los Angeles and all American cities.

“Way Down in the Hole”: Systemic Urban Inequality and The Wire

The Wire is set in a modern American city shaped by economic restructuring and fundamental demographic change that led to widespread job loss and the depopulation of inner-city neighborhoods.1 While the series can be viewed as an account of the systemic failure of political, economic, and social institutions in Baltimore in particular, the fundamental principles depicted in The Wire certainly parallel changing conditions in other cities, especially older industrial cities in the Northeast and Midwest. Indeed, it is for this reason that The Wire captures the attention of social scientists concerned with a comprehensive understanding of urban inequality, poverty, and race in American cities. In providing a sophisticated depiction of systemic urban inequality, The Wire investigates how key aspects of inequality are interrelated. It offers an in-depth examination of the decline of urban labor markets, crime and incarceration, the failure of the education system in low-income communities, and the inability of political institutions to serve the interests of the urban poor. A central theme of The Wire and a fundamental principle of scholarship on urban inequality is that political, social, and economic factors reinforce each other to produce profound disadvantage for the urban poor. By highlighting these connections, The Wire sheds light on the per-

A Note on Rail Transit Cost-Benefit Analysis: Do Nonuser Benefits Make a Difference?

Rail transit systems in modern American cities typically underperform. In light of high costs and low ridership, the cost-benefit results have been poor. But advocates often suggest that external (non-rider) benefits could soften these conclusions. In this paper we include recently published estimates of such non-rider benefits in the cost-benefit analysis. Adding these to recently published data for costs and ridership, we examine 34 post-World War II U.S. rail transit systems (8 commuter rail, 6 heavy rail and 20 light rail). The inclusion of the non-rider benefits does not change the negative assessment. In fact, sensitivity analyses that double the estimated non-rider benefits and/or double transit ridership also leave us with poor performance readings. Advocates who suggest that there are still other benefits that we have not included (always a possibility) have a high hurdle to clear.

Where do Bunnys come from? From Hamsterdam to hubris

The Wire has not only been identified as one of the greatest television studies of the destitution of the modern American city through the genre of the police procedural, but it has also been hailed as a modern work of tragedy. The strength and depth of its characters confer upon them the tragic status of brave and courageous individuals battling the vagaries of fate. For Simon and Burns, the contemporary gods are, however, the faceless forces of modern capitalism. While acknowledging the necessity for such a cultural reading of the dramaturgy and genuinely tragic pathos achieved by the collaborative writing and creative vision led by David Simon and Ed Burns, this paper challenges this reading since it risks reducing African Americans to passive, albeit tragic victims of all‐powerful forces. It also inhibits the possibility of imagining agency and action. Tracking one character, Colonel Howard ‘Bunny’ Colvin, who has not been fêted or celebrated in the subsequent popular and academic debates about The Wire, the authors argue that Colvin represents a figure of exception in the overall scheme. In several key spheres—creative policing, the drug trade and in education—he is a figure of action. Thus the paper reads this character through the prism of the political theory of Judith Shklar who denounces ‘passive injustice’ and indifference to misfortune, calling for informal relations of everyday democracy and active citizenship in line with a series of diverse critics of contemporary American urban social relations (Lasch, Sennett). The question of action as itself a form of diagnosis and responsibility leads back to Gramscian concepts of the organic intellectual and to Hannah Arendt. Without losing sight of the fact that The Wire is a fictional drama, the paper argues that narratological analysis of one character can contribute imaginatively to the field of social and political theory while using its affective capacity to situate the viewer/reader in the dilemmas of social practice that the crisis portrayed in The Wire so forcefully represents.

The Allure of Urban Technology and Green Spaces: Dewey, Leopold and Car-less Suburbs

Modern American cities were designed to accommodate the demands of commerce and technology. The proliferation of fast and easy transportation, especially private automobiles, creates the conditions for the emergence of suburbs. People sprawl outwards in search of more pedestrian-friendly, greener, more family-oriented and remoter places to live, while commuting to the city center to work. Some suburbs have suffered the same fate as urban centers. With traffic congestion, rising crime and signs of urban decay, residents flee in increasing numbers from suburbs to exurbs. Though gentrification projects have in some cases successfully slowed sprawl, I argue that two changes are required if built environments - whether urban centers or suburbs - are to become more livable environments: (i) the creation of more city/suburban gardens and (ii) the removal of automobile traffic from city centers and suburbs. My argument draws on three sources: one, the reasons behind John Dewey’s project to create school gardens at the University of Chicago Laboratory School; two, an extension of the lessons of Aldo Leopold’s land ethic from the preservation of natural environments to the management of built environments; and, finally, the example of Vauban and Quarry Village, two experimental suburbs designed for people enjoy the experience of living in green spaces without cars.

<i>The Horse in the City: Living Machines in the Nineteenth Century</i> (review)

Reviewed by: The Horse in the City: Living Machines in the Nineteenth Century Bruce Laurie The Horse in the City: Living Machines in the Nineteenth Century. By Clay McShane and Joel A. Tarr (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007. xi plus 242). This collaboration of two urban historians promises to provide a wide-angle perspective on the role of the horse in the development of the nineteenth-century [End Page 819] city. It delivers on its promise for the most part. Clay McShane and Joel Tarr take the reader from the market for horses to efforts to regulate their care and use through the rise of the street railway (a main source of horse usage) and then to such topics as stable location, horse nutrition, and equine health. The authors press the two related themes of the treatment of the horse as a "living machine" (p. x) and the horse-drawn street railway as the force that "shaped the nineteen-century city, " just as "motor vehicles created the twentieth-century city" (p. 179). The Horse in the City has inspired moments. The section on breeding, a surprising aspect of the history of the horse as beast of burden (if not as race horse) is interesting and engaging, as are the descriptions of changing spatial relations in the city. Urban historians will doubtless appreciate the informed discussion of the displacement of the omnibus by the horse-drawn streetcar, as well as the sophisticated analysis of economic interchange between country and city anchored by supply and demand in each locale, which together produced a wide range of innovations and spin-off enterprise in each place, including greater crop specialization and facilities for the upkeep and feeding of horses. On a related note, the authors demonstrate how the movement for better treatment of horses, sponsored by the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, had the unintended effect of serving the interests of larger owners more effectively than the animals. Horses further suffered when cost-conscious owners substituted cornmeal for oats and hay, which increased "nutritionally related disease" (p. 147). Horse ailments of various kinds, in turn, stimulated veterinary science, which came up with cures for the most threatening diseases at a time when the horse was giving way to the motor car. The horse simply couldn't win and didn't. Two shortcomings detract from an otherwise useful book. The first is a tendency to slide into presenting evidence of questionable value. Do we really need to know that in 1870 New York's "38, 272 horses produced an estimated 1,146 cartloads of manure daily?" (p. 124). Is it really surprising or important to learn that conditions in "small, private stables . . . owned by individuals . . . could vary greatly?" (p. 115). Do we really need tables and other graphics showing "Feeding Practices of Urban Stables" (p.128) or the "location of Boston stables in 1885, reflecting changes since 1867?" (p. 106). Such trivia leave the impression of quantification for its own sake and makes for a distracting read. Better editing from the authors or the press would have reduced the anecdotes and made for a more compact and stronger book. If portions of The Horse in the City are burdened by excessive detail, its central thesis would have benefited from more detail. Thus, the authors claim that horse-drawn street railway "stimulated the evolution of the modern American city . . . characterized by a central business district, specialized residential neighborhoods, and peripheral suburbs" (p. 57). This otherwise plausible hypothesis needs evidence that would have rounded out the picture. Spatial relations in the pre-streetcar era, which may well have anticipated modern urban patterns, are not fully or properly discussed, leaving the impression that the new transport system created modernity afresh. Moreover, the lineup of interests that brought about modernity seems incomplete. It is restricted to the street railway entrepreneurs with a hint of realtors in play despite the likelihood that they were allied with building construction interests and possibly insurance companies. [End Page 820] There seems little doubt that the department store entrepreneurs were on board as well. They may have been in the lead, but Filene and Wanamaker are not mentioned, while Macy...

Teaching & Learning Guide for: Literature, Social Science, and the Development of American Migration Narratives in the Twentieth Century

Teaching & Learning Guide for: Literature, Social Science, and the Development of American Migration Narratives in the Twentieth Century