Reinventing America’s Cities: The Time Is Now

The country has fallen on hard times, but those of us who love cities know we have been living in the dark ages for a while now. We know that turning things around will take more than just pouring money into shovel-ready projects, regardless of how they might boost the economy. Windmills won’t do it either. We long for a bold urban vision.

With their crowded neighborhoods and web of public services, cities are not only invaluable cultural incubators; they are also vastly more efficient than suburbs. But for years they have been neglected, and in many cases forcibly harmed, by policies that favored sprawl over density and conformity over difference.

Such policies have caused many of our urban centers to devolve into generic theme parks and others, like Detroit, to decay into ghost towns. They have also sparked the rise of ecologically unsustainable gated communities and reinforced economic disparities by building walls between racial, ethnic and class groups.

Correcting this imbalance will require a radical adjustment in how we think of cities and government’s role in them. At times it will mean destruction rather than repair. And it demands listening to people who have spent the last decade imagining and in many cases planning for more sustainable, livable and socially just cities.

The changes needed may seem extravagant, but they are not impossible. Many of those who see the current economic crisis as a chance to rebuild the country’s infrastructure have pointed to previous major government public works projects, like Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Works Projects Administration in the 1930s and 1940s and Dwight D. Eisenhower’s 1956 National Interstate and Defense Highways Act, as a reminder of what this country was once capable of.

Although the W.P.A. is mostly associated with rural dams and roadways, there’s hardly a city in America where it didn’t leave its mark, from riverfront parks to schools and housing projects.

Eisenhower’s investment in highways was equally audacious, but its effect on cities has not always been positive; in many ways the Highways Act set the stage for decades during which suburban interests trumped urban ones.

Inspired by the German autobahn, which Eisenhower saw firsthand during World War II, the program was an attempt to retool the country’s immense military-industrial complex for a peacetime economy. Creating thousands of miles of intercity highways, the program fueled America’s postwar car culture and suburban sprawl, in addition to changing permanently the way towns and cities have evolved.

Most notably it accelerated certain seismic cultural shifts born of the cold war and the civil rights era by creating the means by which middle-class families would flee perceived urban threats — racial friction, potential Soviet bombs — for the supposed security of the suburbs. In many cities intracity highways became dividing lines between white and black.

In New Orleans, for example, the 10 Freeway bulldozed through one of the city’s most vibrant African-American communities, becoming a psychological barrier between the black middle-class Treme neighborhood and the tourist-infested French Quarter. The Santa Monica Freeway, built around the same time, walled off poor African-American areas like Crenshaw and South Central from the rest of the city to the north.

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