Chapter 3Recentralization: The Forces Shaping Twenty-First-Century Urbanism
In her seminal book The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Jane Jacobs took issue with “a widespread belief that Americans hate cities.” The issue, she argued, wasn’t that Americans naturally prefer suburbs, but rather that “Americans hate city failure.” Beginning in the mid-1990s, events began to prove Jacobs was right.
A modern-day Rip Van Winkle who went to sleep in the early 1990s and awoke today would have difficulty grasping how radically the popular perception of cities has changed. Twenty years ago, a late-1980s downtown office boom that spread postmodern reinterpretations of early-twentieth-century Manhattan across cities like Boston, San Francisco, Chicago (and New York itself) had ended, and corporations began shifting back-office operations to cheaper space in the suburbs. And office buildings lost tenants as telecommuting professionals retreated to their suburban homes to work.
Most Americans still associated urban neighborhoods with crime and decay. In a presentation at a national urban design conference, Pulitzer Prize–winning architecture critic Robert Campbell showed a series of newspaper headlines to demonstrate the negative connotations of the word urban. In every example, the headline writer had paired urban with ...
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