Anti-Urban America

Steven Conn (Americans Against the City) thinks there’s a contradiction at the center of America’s attitude toward cities. Cities play a huge role in our economy and culture, because of their density of population and the possibilities this opens for public institutions and cultural spaces.

Conn examines “two kinds of landscapes that characterize America in the early decades of the twenty-first century. The first is physical, and the second is political. The former is the essentially suburbanized landscape of much of metropolitan America; the latter is the deeply suspicious fear of government and the role it should play in our lives that shapes much of our political discourse.” 

Despite the prominence of cities, we don’t like to think of ourselves as an urban people, and for the past century and a half there have been persistent efforts to de-densify the city and to revive alternative forms of community in America. “Ours did become an urban civilization,” Conn writes, “but even as it did, many Americans continued to dream anti-urban dreams and tried to make those dreams real.”

During the interwar years, for instance, some Americans “rejected the density of urban spaces and the public nature of urban life. Some who objected to density did so because they genuinely believed that the crowded, often unsanitary conditions of industrial neighborhoods were inhumane. Others simply could not abide the ethnic and racial diversity that came to define American cities, first as emigrants from southern and Eastern Europe poured into them, and then as African American and Hispanic Americans altered the colors of the city yet again.” They wanted to “decentralize the city, and they offered various proposals and plans to achieve that goal.”

But this exposed a paradox in American attitudes toward the city. American regard collective action with suspicion, but for anti-urban programs to work, governments have to take action. He uses Roanoke County, Virginia to illustrate the paradox: “On the one hand, many of the sizable majority of Americans who live in the decentralized, suburbanized landscape of metropolitan America find it to be profoundly dissatisfying. They complain about all the time wasted in traffic, and they lament the ugly sameness of it all. Most of all, they report that these places leave them feeling alienated and alone. They mourn the loss of some sense of community that these sterile physical and social environments have failed to give them. On the other hand, many of them reject the idea that any collective, public action can or should be taken to address these problems. They are thus left feeling powerless to do much about them.”

Conn argues that “anti-urbanism adds up to an unwillingness to acknowledge the urban—and metropolitan—nature of American society, and a refusal to embrace the essentially collective, rather than individual, nature of urban life.”

We can see where this is going. Americans need to embrace collective action and give up our small-government, small-town dreams. Here, Conn’s analysis misses some important distinctions – though perhaps the subjects of his study do too. 

There is collective action and there is collective action. I’m sure some Americans are hostile even to local collective action, but mostly they object to the concentration of political power in distant places. 

There is urban life that is stultifying and isolating; there is urban life that is rich and enhancing. It appears to me that two of the movements he characterizes as “anti-urban,” communitarianism and New Urbanism, are less anti-urban than anti-urban-as-presently-designed. And surely the New Urbanists are aware that their goals for American cities require collective political will.