The Metropolitan Revolution: The Rise of Post-Urban America (review)

Although there are several books that survey the history of twentieth century US cities, most give short shrift to the constellation of changes that have beset metropolitan America in the last three decades. The urban crisis of the late 1960s and 1970s has typically made a convenient bookend for the century-long story of the rise and fall of urban-industrial America, with only brief glimpses of gentrification, immigration, edge cities, and other recent urban trends looming on the horizon. In The Metropolitan Revolution, Jon Teaford breaks this barrier and offers a sweeping synthesis of urbanization and suburbanization from 1945 to 2000, placing the momentous changes of the past quarter century in a larger interpretive context. The result is a useful and important work that moves beyond single-city studies to provide a broad national view of metropolitan development.

The book begins with an overview of the state of urban America in 1945. Teaford describes US urban areas on the eve of World War II as well-defined entities with a single, dominant downtown center and a civic identity defined by the latter. While some Americans had settled in the suburban periphery, the center of gravity remained in the central cities where a socially and racially mixed population shared public space downtown and on mass transit and lived under a common municipal government. By the end of the century, however, the author shows how this unified, centralized city and its bedroom suburbs gave way to an “amorphous sprawl of population without a unifying hub or culture” (3). In this new “edgeless” city-sprawl, the old downtowns became increasingly irrelevant to many residents as they lived, worked, shopped, and retired in various types of suburban settings. In the process, metropolitan America became more spatially and socially fragmented, with less public space and fewer opportunities for the type of social mixing that had occurred in the old downtowns. At the same time, the black–white dichotomy, which had characterized most US cities in 1945, became less significant as millions of new immigrants flocked to urban areas, making them more socially heterogeneous and politically complex.

None of this is particularly new. What Teaford contributes to this discussion is a more detailed and historicized treatment of this transformation over time. He begins by surveying the familiar ground of postwar suburban development and urban decline, describing how retail businesses, industrial plants, corporate office parks, and retirement communities followed white workers and consumers into the suburban periphery. Meanwhile, deindustrialization and disinvestment took a predictably heavy toll on the increasingly poor and non-white cities, as one after another erupted in racial rebellion and violence in the 1960s. The social turmoil and fiscal debacle of the nation’s cities only accelerated the exodus of white and middle-class residents in the seventies and eighties. Teaford examines the rise of “edge cities” in this period, places like Tyson’s Corner, Virginia, that grew up around outlying shopping malls and highway interchanges. The urban crisis also marked the beginning of a successful renaissance in the central city as social and demographic changes of the 1970s fueled a rising tide of gentrification, gay enclaves, and festival marketplaces. New immigrants added to the vitality by starting small businesses and reviving decaying neighborhoods. More importantly, they helped diversify the cities and the suburbs and began to break down the black–white binary that had characterized metropolitan America in the postwar era.

Although Teaford does a good job describing this transformation, he tends to see these developments as an inevitable outcome of a free-market world where Americans eagerly voted with their feet (or their cars) for new lifestyles. This new America, he argues, is “rich in diversity, a historical accretion of settlement patterns and lifestyles that reflected the felt needs of millions of Americans. . .” (240). After describing themyriad racial and class inequalities of this emerging order, this is a strange...