cover image The Crisis of America's Cities

The Crisis of America's Cities

Randall K. Bartlett. M.E. Sharpe, $85.95 (304pp) ISBN 978-0-7656-0301-2

""How has a nation that began with few cities, small in scale but noted for their wealth and power... become one characterized by so many large cities, filled with so much poverty and despair,"" asks Bartlett, who directs the urban studies program at Smith College, in this thoughtful exercise in American urban history. Presenting a colorful overview of the spatial organization of major U.S. metropolitan areas spanning the past 200 years, Bartlett predicts that cities will continue to lose jobs, population and economic activity to suburbs and to ""edge cities"" on their periphery, creating multinodal metropolitan webs that will be increasingly dependent on automobiles. Rejecting fashionable solutions to today's urban crisis, he argues that ""urban enterprise zones"" are based on an illusory belief that we can bring back to ""central cities"" large numbers of low-skill, high-wage jobs. Central cities, Bartlett argues, will never again be the economic hubs they once were. He also maintains that retrofitted rail systems (San Francisco's BART; Washington, D.C.'s Metro)--heavily subsidized and expensive to operate--are not a sound solution to urban sprawl. Bartlett's blueprint for reversing urban decline is sketchy. He calls for equalizing school expenditures across the entire metropolitan web, providing educational opportunities so that inner-city youth will acquire marketable skills and dispersing the poor into the larger community via affordable low-income housing. His lucid prose, and his ability to lay out, in basic terms, the intricate problems facing U.S. cities, make this not only a useful overview, but one whose prognosis for the fate of urban America is largely convincing. (Sept.)