All Roads Lead to the American City

1. All Roads Lead from the American City? The Land of the Urban Frontier

C H A P T E R 1
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Ê," / , 0RISCILLA 2OBERTS In Europe, picaresque accounts of travel, adventure, and self-discovery are nothing new, their models dating back to Miguel Cervantes’s Don Quixote and the tales of Henry Fielding and Tobias Smollett, if not to The Canterbury Tales or The Odyssey. But in the popular imagination it is the United States that is the urban nation par excellence. According to received wisdom, it is a country of huge and impersonal concrete jungle cities, tower blocks and housing projects, linked by a network of highways along which Americans, propelled by cheap gasoline, career in huge, gas-guzzling automobiles. In the twentieth century, the United States created not just its own brand of the road narrative, but also that distinctive genre, the road movie. Its destination was sometimes violent death, sometimes disillusionment, and occasionally a new life in the big cities that had become the great American cultural centers. Yet it may not be too far-fetched to suggest that the archetypal Hollywood seeker is Dorothy, following the yellow brick road to the Emerald City of the Land of Oz. There she learns that the feared and fabled wizard is merely an ordinary man whose tricks rely on smoke and mirrors, and there is no place like home, back on a Kansas farm with her family, while her odd assortment of companions find within themselves the qualities they once believed they lacked. Ambivalence toward the city and its opportunities, a constant throughout American history, is implicit in much twentieth-century thinking and in demographic patterns. This was demonstrated perhaps most spectacularly in the presidential elections of 2000 and 2004, when the country found itself near evenly divided between blue (or “metro”) and red (or “retro”) America. The former was made out of predominantly urban states on the east and west coasts, heavily stratified by class and dominated by cosmopolitan liberal professionals, plus the country’s embattled working poor. The “retro America” comprised the largely  Priscilla Roberts suburban or small-town areas of the South and West, heartland of the conservative middle class. In voting twice for George W. Bush, many Americans had, it seemed, rejected big-city sophistication and embraced evangelical religion and small-town, backward-looking values. Michael Lind, political commentator and biographer of George W. Bush, even argued recently that many Americans had never found the city attractive. This iconoclastic academic, who broke with conventional wisdom by defending the Vietnam War, contended: “The American dream is a big backyard, individual bedrooms for the kids and a couple of cars—not a tiny urban apartment and a subway fare.” Lind further suggested that many Americans had effectively bypassed the urban experience since outside the metropolitan northeast, “most American families have moved directly to suburbs from farms, ranches and small towns, without ever going through an urban phase.” Accordingly, many recent immigrants have replicated this journey, as “Latinos and Asians go from farms and small towns abroad directly to semi-rural suburbs in the US without stopping for a generation or two in big cities.”1 Lind’s analysis suggests that patterns of immigration in the United States have changed dramatically from those a century earlier, when the big cities were the destination of choice of many immigrants, whether from overseas or internal migrants. Have they, perhaps, returned to older norms, and is the United States leading the world on the pioneering pathway to a post-urban future? Or is the American experience, as the longstanding exceptionalist tradition contends, sui generis?
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“LˆÛ>i˜Vi Conflicting emotions toward the attractive but dangerous opportunities urban life potentially offered have been a virtual constant in North American history. The original colonies of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were, like the rest of the world at that time, predominantly rural. Their cities were primarily ports, through which people and manufactured goods could enter the continent, and administrative and political centers. At the time of the revolution the population of New York, the largest American city, was probably less than 22,000, while only one individual in twenty lived in a town or city of more than 2,500 people.2 The United States lagged behind Europe in terms of urbanization. In early nineteenthcentury Europe, 13 percent of the population resided in cities with 5,000 or more inhabitants, whereas only 3.4 percent of those living in the United States did so.3 The Puritan...