The Future Once Happened Here
New York, D.C., L.A., and the Fate of America's Big Cities
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- 7,99 €
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- 7,99 €
Descrizione dell’editore
"In The Future Once Happened Here, Fred Siegel tells an incredible story about the fate of America’s most influential cities: New York, Washington, D.C., and Los Angeles. Standing as metaphors for America’s urban life because of their stature as nerve centers of the nation, these three cities—once celebrated for their excitement and creativity as well as their ability to incorporate immigrants and solve the nation’s problems—were all caught up in the social policies born in the ’60s and ’70s and, as a consequence, faltered badly in dealing with the politics of race and the quality of their residents’ lives in the ’80s and ’90s.
Each of Siegel’s three urban portraits shows the desperate remedies undertaken by cities searching for a lifeline back to the future whose promise they once seemed to embody. In a narrative that acknowledges the large historical forces that have remade the face of America over the last three decades, but insists that social policies are not merely foregone conclusions waiting to happen, Siegel holds up a mirror to our urban naure and tells us much about the way we live now."
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
As a resident of Brooklyn, Siegel knows his city; as an author (Urban Society) and urban policy analyst, a professor of history at Cooper Union and a key figure in the 1993 election campaign of Rudolph Giuliani, he knows his cities--and the fruit of his knowledge, personal and professional, is on display in this perceptive and lively consideration of where our cities have gone, how they got there and where they might yet go. Considering New York, Washington, D.C., and Los Angeles as prime shapers of the "national agenda," Siegel situates the recent (i.e., past quarter century) decline in urban life squarely on the shoulders of "sixties liberalism." According to Siegel it was the liberal response to the urban riots of the early to mid-1960s, particularly to the Watts riot of 1965, that set each city on its downward course, as the violence created a "riot ideology" that found moral and practical justification in the mayhem and, in effect, rewarded it with massive government grants, a form of "riot insurance." Siegel's discussion of what happened in New York focuses on the wild expansion of welfare and the attempt to decentralize schools during the period; for Washington, he concentrates on the effects of black nationalism in power, with Marion Barry at the helm; in L.A., he sees a city spinning apart from multicultural pressures. Siegel makes his points in trim prose, rooting them not in ideology but in the facts of the matter, enlivening them with telling anecdotes. This is urban analysis undertaken with a sharp, experienced eye, and with optimism as well, as Siegel finds signs of hope, particularly in Giuliani's reinvigoration of New York, that the American city has a future not only worth predicting, but worth waiting for.
