Advocating for Urbanism

There is a certain vogue gathering around urban issues. No — not inner-city poverty, crime, or joblessness — but, rather, those issues that might broadly be described as ones of “human geography.” Where do people live, where do they work, and how should they travel between the two? How can resources, ranging from good schools to public transit to clean air, be more fairly allocated within regions?

Such questions have long been the provenance of a small group of left planning theorists such as James Howard Kunstler and Jane Jacobs. Their calls for denser, urban development were motivated as much by aesthetic concerns as by economic and environmental ones. And while it’s certainly true that strip malls and parking lots are eyesores, and that old buildings are often prettier than new ones, critics weren’t totally off the mark when they accused these thinkers of snobbishness; of a certain lack of compassion for the typical postwar middle-class family, lured by cheap real estate and good schools into a vastly expanding suburbia.


But with the global mortgage and climate crises making sprawl less and less sustainable, planning issues can no longer be consigned to the fringes of progressive politics. Barack Obama seems to realize this and promised during his campaign that if elected, he would establish a White House Office of Urban Policy. At a meeting of African American columnists last week, Obama senior adviser Valerie Jarrett confirmed such an office would exist but didn’t give more details.

Considering the vast array of problems an urban policy czar could conceivably tackle, and the many departments and agencies already devoted to these issues (Health and Human Services, Agriculture, Transportation, Housing and Urban Development, the EPA), some observers, including the Prospect’s own Ezra Klein, voiced skepticism toward the idea. “[I]t’s fairly unclear what the office’s charge will be, what its jurisdiction will look like, and what funding or regulatory authority (if any) it’ll have,” Klein wrote, warning that “turf wars can be ugly things.”

Indeed. But what Washington needs is less a day-to-day manager of urban programs than an outspoken advocate on behalf of urbanism. In an October op-ed for The Washington Post, Alec MacGillis wrote that Obama would be the nation’s first “metropolitan president,” meaning not just a denizen of cities but an intellectual up-to-date on the latest thinking in urban planning: overcoming the cultural and political divisions between cities, suburbs, and exurbs, and committing to regional energy and transit strategies.

The American Prospect