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A nation composed almost entirely of immigrants and their descendents, we are "distrustful of concentrated authority," notes novelist and city lover Jonathan Franzen, and so we harbor a "New World ideal of house-as-kingdom, with its implications that what you earn and what you buy matters far more than where you do it."
What does this mean for the rise and fall of urbanism? Was urbanism good medicine for an overly libertine population? Or was it an incongruous European ideal awkwardly imposed on the wilderness of the New World? More pointedly, did urbanism ever have a chance, even before the Federal-Aid Highway Act and Federal Housing Authority literally paved the way to the suburbs?
As it stands, Rae's book implicitly presents industrial-era cities as the Eden from which suburbanized America has fallen. But was not sprawl, for all its environmental calamity, social inequality, and aesthetic monotony, nonetheless a natural development for a nation wired to pursue verdant isolation? New Haven's name is idyllic itself, in the family of bland suburban appellations next to "Forest Hills" or "Glenview"; no -polis or -ton suffix here to suggest interdependence. Rae starts by suggesting the answer to this crucial question is yes, as he voices Marx's arguments about capitalism's inherent "creative destruction," but the rest of the book is a more narrowly focused elegy.
And whither Yale? Toward the end of the last chapter, Rae finally brings the school into the picture, examining its relationship with city government as the school unsuccessfully lobbied to build a dorm on an under-utilized block in town. In the last paragraph of the book Rae reveals that while New Haven's story is mostly "representative of older American cities," its relationship with Yale is unique. "That new tale is, alas, the subject of another book." Given the plodding momentum of his text up to this point, Rae risks prompting his readers to regret that they aren't reading that book instead.
Nathan Bierma is an editorial assistant at Books & Culture.
Copyright © 2003 Christianity Today. Click for reprint information.
Related Elsewhere:City is available from Amazon.com and other book retailers.
Related Books of the Week: Why There Will Be Sidewalks In Heaven
Related Reviews Elsewhere: How Cities Work: Suburbs, Sprawl, and the Roads Not Taken and Building Suburbia: Green Fields and Urban Growth, 1820-2000
Books & Culture Corner appears every Monday. Earlier editions of Books & Culture Corner and Book of the Week include:
Cool Drink of Water | A poet's voice in the evangelical wilderness.
Faith, Hope, and Charity in North Carolina | New novels by Michael Morris—whose first novel, A Place Called Wiregrass, was a word-of-mouth hit— and Jan Karon, who continues her beloved Mitford saga. (Nov. 17, 2003)
Remember Afghanistan? | Two inside reports. (Nov. 10, 2003)
The Troubled Conscience of a Founding Father | An Imperfect God examines George Washington and slavery. (Oct. 27, 2003)
The Year of the Fish | The 2003 baseball season concludes with a bang—and 2004 is just around the corner. (Oct. 27, 2003)
I Shop, Therefore I Am | Critics of "consumer culture" are all wet, Virginia Postrel says. The riot of choices available to us resonates with our deepest aesthetic instincts (Oct. 20, 2003)
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