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CIAO DATE: 3/5/2007
The State of American Cities
Bruce Katz, Alan Berube
November 2006
Abstract
Americans concerned about the future of cities surely look upon their English counterparts with envy. Most people in England live in cities and their immediate environs, while the US is by any measure a suburban nation. Federal and state governments in the US give only occasional attention to the important issues confronted by the nation’s major cities, even as the UK government holds biennial summits dedicated to fostering an ‘urban renaissance’. As England develops more and more of its new housing in and around existing communities, the US population heads farther and farther into the exurban hinterland to escape not just cities, but increasingly older suburbs as well.
Yet common cultural and economic threads run through both countries’ urban histories. Many of the first city-dwellers in the US were, of course, English. Cities in both nations rose to prominence during the Industrial Revolution, before suffering massive population and job losses in the wake of de-industrialisation and expanded global trade. Suburbanisation of housing and employment has characterised development in both the US and UK since World War II. Today, both countries exhibit a North/South divide on city growth, and a city/suburban divide on the incidence and depth of poverty and social exclusion.
