Urban Contradictions

Cities in a Race with Time, by Jean R. Lowe. Random House, $10 The disparity between the American dream and the American reality is most humiliatingly revealed in big cities. Hubert Humphrey won’t admit it, but the American dream has severe democratic limitations. Give us your tired and your poor, we might say, but for God’s sake send them reasonably able to stand on their own two feet. Few politicians say that overtly; their public posture is reflected in Jean R. Lowe’s title, Cities in a Race with Time, which rings with that “onward and upward at any cost” tone. Cities in a race with time, however, may well lose the race. For decent city life is not a contest against simply time and numbers, but a contest of values between the American dream’s traditional promises and the country’s current methods of trying to make good the promises. If it’s not a Great Society, then a Good one, or a Good but Complex one, or one that’s preferable to Russia’s or China’s, at least. If you don’t swing with Stokely, that is.

From titan builder Robert Moses to patrician planner Edmund Bacon, from tycoon William Zeckendorf to billionaire Richard Mellon, Miss Lowe (a journalist and former urban consultant to the Ford Foundation) sprinkles cameos of national urban movers and shakers among her comprehensive study of major big city problems and programs. The only trouble with her stoutly documented history is that she rarely questions the basic ideological underpinnings which have prevailed in the handling of urban ills for decades. Her premise is the same old foregone liberal conclusion: the poor and needy pile in and cry out for aid; we must sprint to stay in place; reach for Title One and hope to profit from past mistakes. Rarely does she admit the city structure’s glaring limitations. Never does she question the concept of urban “democracy” as a glaringly fallible social service industry. The welfare state is it. Period. We may piously lament riots; lustily confess momentary inadequacies (We will be better tomorrow, Lord—if the subsidy comes through), but never must the cherished ham-strings of the democratic dream and its liberal interpretations be challenged. Vigorously, Miss Lowe deplores the middle-class exodus from the central city, but never does she suggest staunching the flood of rural poor into the ever-widening slums. She may go along with a subsidy for farm workers, but a residency requirement for welfare recipients?

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Christopher Nichols

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Cities in a Race with Time, by Jean R. Lowe. Random House, $10 The disparity between the American dream and the American reality is most humiliatingly revealed in big cities. Hubert Humphrey won’t admit it, but the American dream has severe democratic limitations. Give us your tired and your poor, we might say, but for God’s sake send them reasonably able to stand on their own two feet. Few politicians say that overtly; their public posture is reflected in Jean R. Lowe’s title, Cities in a Race with Time, which rings with that “onward and upward at any cost” tone. Cities in a race with time, however, may well lose the race. For decent city life is not a contest against simply time and numbers, but a contest of values between the American dream’s traditional promises and the country’s current methods of trying to make good the promises. If it’s not a Great Society, then a Good one, or a Good but Complex one, or one that’s preferable to Russia’s or China’s, at least. If you don’t swing with Stokely, that is.

From titan builder Robert Moses to patrician planner Edmund Bacon, from tycoon William Zeckendorf to billionaire Richard Mellon, Miss Lowe (a journalist and former urban consultant to the Ford Foundation) sprinkles cameos of national urban movers and shakers among her comprehensive study of major big city problems and programs. The only trouble with her stoutly documented history is that she rarely questions the basic ideological underpinnings which have prevailed in the handling of urban ills for decades. Her premise is the same old foregone liberal conclusion: the poor and needy pile in and cry out for aid; we must sprint to stay in place; reach for Title One and hope to profit from past mistakes. Rarely does she admit the city structure’s glaring limitations. Never does she question the concept of urban “democracy” as a glaringly fallible social service industry. The welfare state is it. Period. We may piously lament riots; lustily confess momentary inadequacies (We will be better tomorrow, Lord—if the subsidy comes through), but never must the cherished ham-strings of the democratic dream and its liberal interpretations be challenged. Vigorously, Miss Lowe deplores the middle-class exodus from the central city, but never does she suggest staunching the flood of rural poor into the ever-widening slums. She may go along with a subsidy for farm workers, but a residency requirement for welfare recipients?