Rethinking the American City: An International Dialogue ed. by Miles Orvell and Klaus Benesch (review)

Popular interest in the “the city” is greater today than at any point since the baby boomers left the family fold for more convivial, often urban, living arrangements in the 1960s and 1970s. Since the millennium—thanks largely to generation Y “echo boomers”—chic downtown living has emerged in places like Kansas City and Sacramento, gentrification has surged in coastal cities and Chicago, and the commune has been resuscitated in places like San Francisco, albeit more as a high-tech incubator than a critique of bourgeois mores. The specific social (and sexual) needs of unattached young adults and the stronger-than-ever preference for central locations in the post–urban riot era (today, such disturbances seem more likely to happen in lower-density peripheral districts like Ferguson, Missouri) have also contributed to a revival in the discourse on cities and, in particular, the virtues of higher-density living.

There have been many signs of this resurgence in thinking about cities. As early as 1998 the London School of Economics launched its sexy new LSE Cities research center funded by Deutsche Bank and also initiated its Cities Programme master’s degree, heralding the demise everywhere of “urban affairs” programs dating from the renewal-and-riot era. In 2003 a group of twentysomethings launched The Next American City, a quarterly magazine now titled Next City and supported by the Ford, Rockefeller, and MacArthur foundations. In 2011 cultural-class booster Richard Florida helped launch the Atlantic magazine’s Cities website, now sponsored by the Aspen Institute and Bloomberg Philanthropies. In 2014 the Guardian followed with its own Guardian Cities site. Book publishers, too, have been capitalizing on this wave of enthusiasm, especially as the self-congratulatory impulses of young-adult culture dovetail with growing anxieties about urbanization in the Global South, the relationship between climate change and automobility, and consumption and the body—particularly in the context of food and obesity. Penguin Books published the conservative economist Edward Glaeser’s paean to deregulation, Triumph of the City: How Our Greatest Invention Makes Us Richer, Smarter, Greener, Healthier, and Happier, to great acclaim in 2011; a year later, it followed with the breezy Going Solo: The Extraordinary Rise and Surprising Appeal of Living Alone by sociologist Eric Klinenberg.

University presses have followed suit. In 2001 the University of Pennsylvania Press launched its Metropolitan Portraits series of small books offering brief sketches by accomplished historians, geographers, and urban planners that attempt to “explain” cities and regions from Portland, Oregon (Carl Abbott), to San Diego (Larry Ford) to Miami (Jan Nijman) to the North Carolina Research Triangle (William Rohe). Now, the University of Pennsylvania Press brings us Rethinking the American City. Although part of the separate new series Architecture/Technology/Culture, edited by Klaus Benesch, Jeffrey L. Meikle, David E. Nye, and Miles Orvell, this volume displays many of the same weaknesses as Metropolitan Portraits. It often reads as a product of cursory effort, developed at minimal expense to be marketed to pursue the consumer dollars of a generation reared on Sesame Street and Jane Jacobs.

The book itself is a lightly edited transcript of a conference on the topic of “rethinking architecture” that was convened and paid for by Germany’s Ludwig Maximilian University Munich, where Benesch, one of the volume’s editors, is a professor of English and American studies. Benesch and coeditor Orvell believe that “cities have become both the nemesis and laboratory of human life in the new millennium” and are a “critical social and architectural space … central … to any consideration of the future” (xi–xii). They invited Meikle, Nye, and six “internationally renowned cultural studies scholars, urban historians, and architects” (xiv)—Andrew Ross, Mabel O. Wilson, David M. Lubin, Albena Yaneva, Malcolm McCullough, and Margaret Crawford—to convene for two days in June 2011. Each...