The Urban Crisis: Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow
Are America’s major cities dying? The answer is yes, no and maybe depending on the city and where one looks within it.
Many or our large cities are places where the infrastructure is decaying, neighborhoods are deteriorating and hopes are dimming for a large number of citizens. Many of them are also places where each one tells a tale of two cities — for the wealthy few it is the best of times, for those of lesser means it is the worst of times.
The urban crisis has been a term used frequently in the United States since 1961, when Jane Jacobs wrote The Death and Life of Great American Cities. In her seminal book, Jacobs decried the decline of cities which she attributed to urban planning that benefited the central business districts (CBDs) at the benefit of local neighborhoods and communities.
From then through the remaining decades of the 20th century, the fates and futures of urban areas fluctuated, but they still got a fair amount of public and political attention. In this 21st century, that situation reversed for a variety of reasons, including the fact that the central business districts of those cities and the affluent living in or near the CBDs in those cities were doing very well.
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