In Pursuit of the More Perfect City
Since 1630, when John Winthrop first exhorted his fellow Puritans to “be as a city upon a hill,” America has preoccupied itself with serving as an exemplar. Indeed, perhaps no belief plays a more important role in the American psyche than the concept of national perfectibility. Speaking of a “more perfect union,” the U.S. Constitution’s preamble imagines a country in which the aims of justice, peace, welfare, and liberty are every day better met. American political rhetoric adopts this outlook on both sides of the aisle, debating goals and priorities but never asserting that any condition could be impervious to improvement. To claim so would be to circumscribe the limits of American possibility and thereby commit an unpardonable political sin.
Yet when it comes to America’s cities, vibrant homes to the majority of the country’s inhabitants, a more fatalistic attitude towards urban problems can undercut our optimistic national creed. Many Americans have come to consider certain disadvantages as intrinsic to urban life. We accept that homeless people (p. 6) and gangs (p. 12) are part of urban street life. We expect urban schools, with rare exceptions, to perform poorly (p. 7). The housing projects seem to us to demonstrate the futility of efforts to provide large-scale urban affordable housing (p. 10), and fears of ‘gentrification’ seem to poison any attempt at urban renewal (p. 15). As public transportation and road construction lag behind increases in urban density, traffic congestion appears destined to worsen our commutes (p. 11). We find urban politics as corrupt and obtuse as ever (p. 14), and we fear that urban economies remain reliant on manufacturing and thus highly vulnerable to the global recession (p. 9).
These assertions are articles of received wisdom about urban areas, ideas legitimized mostly by frequent repetition. Yet cities across America contradict these common assumptions, demonstrating the possibility of making major progress by tackling urban problems head-on. Some issues simply require a new innovative approach, such as congestion pricing for traffic, while other problems, such as gang-violence and affordable housing, demand renewed commitment to multifaceted solutions. In still other cases, as with homelessness, the public attitude itself is a critical stumbling block to overcome; ever since urban officials began to perceive homelessness as an ill society could end, for example, new tactics aimed at housing people have proven remarkably successful. Such efforts belie the assumption that urban problems have no remedy.
Close analysis of America’s cities reveals that urban reform is alive and well. This reform is also ripe for replication, as nearly every urban challenge has been addressed by an innovative new policy somewhere in the United States. It is never too soon to begin expanding success, as real people’s lives are shaped in the meantime by the education, housing, and opportunities of their urban environment. The work is not easy, but nor is it hopeless. In the great self-perfecting project of America, cities have a central role to play.