Place Matters : Metropolitics for the Twenty-First Century

by Dreier, Peter; Mollenkopf, John; Swanstrom, Todd

• ISBN13: 9780700611355
• ISBN10: 0700611355
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2001-09-01
• Publisher: Univ Pr of Kansas

Summary

Three distinguished scholars challenge us to put the urban crisis back on the national agenda, both as a moral challenge to our conscience and an economic challenge to America's prosperity and our families' pocketbooks. Focusing on the growing concentration of poverty in our cities and older suburbs and the mounting costs of suburban sprawl, they argue that these problems have political origins and can thus be resolved through political means -- but only if we fully understand the power of place.

Despite modern telecommunications -- faxes, linked computers, etc. -- where we live shapes our lives and fortunes as much as ever. Place affects our access to jobs and public services (especially education), our access to shopping and culture, our level of personal security, the availability of medical services, and even the air we breathe. Economic segregation is increasing in American metropolitan areas -- the rich and poor continue to move apart from one another. This has devastating effects on those who are forced to live in areas of concentrated poverty. But it

Author Biography

Peter Dreier, Dr. E. P. Clapp Distinguished Professor of Politics and director of the Urban and Environmental Policy Program at Occidental College John Mollenkopf is professor of political science and sociology and director of the Center for Urban Research at CUNY Graduate Center Todd Swanstrom is professor of public policy at Saint Louis University

Table of Contents

List of Tables and Illustrations	ix
Preface	xi
Place Still Matters	1	(29)
The Facts of Economic Segregation and Sprawl	30	(26)
The Costs of Economic Segregation and Sprawl	56	(36)
The Roads Not Taken: How Federal Policy Promoted Economic Segregation and Suburban Sprawl	92	(41)
What Cities Can and Cannot Do to Address Poverty	133	(40)
Regionalisms Old and New	173	(28)
Metropolicies for the Twenty-first Century	201	(29)
Crossing the City Line: A Metropolitics for the Twenty-first Century	230	(31)
Notes	261	(74)
Index	335