The New Urban Crisis: Putting an End to Winner- Takes-All Urbanism
TODAY’S URBAN CRISIS is not the first we have faced, but it bears little resemblance to its predecessor. The crisis of the 1960s and 70s was defined by the economic abandonment of U.S. cities. Shaped by deindustrialization and ‘white flight’, many cities lost their core industries and became sites of growing and persistent poverty. Housing decayed; crime and violence increased; and social problems escalated — many of which remain with us to this day.
What I see as ‘the New Urban Crisis’ is more all-encompassing. Although two of its core features — mounting inequality and rising housing prices — are most often discussed in relation to urban centres such as New York, London and Toronto, the crisis also hits hard at small and mid-sized cities, and its other core features — economic and racial segregation, spatial inequality, entrenched poverty — are becoming as common in the suburbs as they are in the cities.
Seen in this light, the New Urban Crisis is a crisis of urbanization itself, and of contemporary capitalism writ large. For the past six years, I have married my long-held interest in urban eco nomic development with the insights of urban sociologists on the corrosive effects of concentrated poverty, mapping the deep new divides that isolate the classes and tracing the growth of economic disadvantage in the suburbs. In this excerpt from my latest book, I will present a few of my key findings.
Five Dimensions of the Crisis
As my colleagues and I have come to understand it, the New Urban Crisis encompasses five key dimensions:
GROWING GAPS CREATED BY SUPERSTAR CITIES. The first is the deep and growing economic gap between a small number of superstar cities, such as New York, London, Hong Kong, Los Angeles and Toronto, along with leading technology and knowledge hubs, such as the San Francisco Bay Area, Washington DC, Boston, Seattle, and other cities around the world. These superstar locations have wildly disproportionate shares of the world’s leading high-value industries, high-tech innovation, startups and top talent.
The 50New and better urbanism is indeed possible, but it will not create itself. Do we want the divides and contradictions of winner-take-all urbanism, or the promise of a fuller and fairer urbanism for all? This is the defining issue — and struggle — of our time.---
