“The chief function of the city is to convert power into form, energy into culture, dead matter into living symbols of art, biological reproduction into social creativity”, Lewis Mumford famously wrote.  Power, in its many forms, is what makes a city a city, most of us would probably agree.  Even a small core city in a small region exudes energy unmatched by neighboring municipalities.

Power is transmitted many ways in a city, perhaps none more conspicuously than through the mass media and through architecture.  And so the relationship between architecture and the media is worth trying to unravel.

An independent media is a necessity for a democratic society, for truth can both extend and challenge power.  The coarseness and tenacity of media discourse in America may verge on prurience, but, then, flowers grow best out of manure, not beach sand.  The more enlightened media outlets strive to report objective truths.  The less high-minded convey their particular slants, which, presumably, people can cobble together to get an approximation of the truth.  Democracy is messy, conflicted, and negotiated, and the mass media offer proof of that.

Architecture is an obvious symbol of power, from the cathedral to the mansion house to the skyscraper office.  Along with the media, architecture helps create a community’s identity, meaning, and structure.  In this sense, power creates truth.

At one level is the image of a city.  The media can expound about job availability, cost of living, educational opportunities, cultural amenities, public health, and all the other reasons people are attracted to cities, but architecture provides the most enduring consensus.  Truth, in theory, may depend on perspective — we know how wonderful our children are, despite what the teacher says — but the most powerful image of a city is conveyed by the quality of the buildings we see and the details of the streetscapes we traverse.

Social scientists tell us many things: image is fleeting and space is fungible;   identities are created and re-created; meaning derives from the reality we perceive; the city in which we live is but a single node in a multi-nodal, multi-level, ad hoc, world wide web of power; and — the bottom line — the big economic, environmental, and social problems of today cannot be solved in the traditional manner.

This makes sense to us because of the destabilizing influence of financial capital, which can move globally beyond the reach of traditional regulators, particularly governments.  At bottom, our world and our living spaces are unstable, not because of nuclear weapons or climate change, but because work is unstable.

How do American media react to economic and social instability?  By elevating job creation to the ultimate civic virtue, with the attendant glorification of corporate executives, sanction of demeaning work, and consent for public subsidies for private enterprise.

How does architecture react to instability?  By turning homes into cocoons full of indoor and outdoor entertainment devices, by trying to recreate the intimacy of pre-automobile communities, and by avoiding discussions of how to make workplaces more humane.

But perhaps it’s unfair to point a critical finger at the mass media and architecture.  If it is true that power is a web of relationships controlled primarily by those who can transplant large sums of financial capital, then it is also true that all individuals have access to parts of the web, and, therefore, have at least some power.  And, since everyone has power, there is, in the words of Michel Foucault, “no soul of revolt, no source of all rebellion”.  There is, in other words, no cataclysmic change in advanced capitalist societies; rather, there is quiet, persistent “resistance” from all sides.

It is through such small-scale resistance that individuals and groups try to establish an identity and find meaning in their lives, as evidenced by the explosive growth of private blogs, social media, and, in the mainstream media, citizen journalism.  The common denominator is a focus on particular contexts and specific local conditions and differences, and, at the same time, handwringing about proper spaces for free expression and privacy.

In such spaces, which prioritize individual judgments, the subject is all important.  The thoughts and desires of the individual-as-subject are never represented as innate or neutral or universal.  Not surprisingly, by far the majority of mass media coverage in the United States tracks local events, personalities, and opinions: honor students; glamour queens; hospital admissions; local foods and foodies; rodeos and demolition derbies; high school sports; the girl next door who met the president; the boy who beat the odds; grunge bands and gay bars; murders and embezzlements; bling and bullocks; local elections; dance marathons and house fires; the big businessman; the big local philanthropist (usually the big businessman); woman of the year; inner city crime; good schools and bad schools; how we rank compared to other communities; how to cook like a chef, meet other singles, dance like a pro, get a job; the missed opportunity; the second chance; store openings; interview with a new store owner; interview with shoppers; and, throughout, invitations to “tell us what you think, send us your story”.

The contemporary American media draw their power from contingency: viewpoints offering a partial glimpse are strung together and a logic emerges, a sense of truth, about a person or a place.  It is a logic that is by now a cultural truth in America: success or failure is decided by constant adaptation to unforeseen circumstances, by openness to opportunity, by fearlessness in the face of chance.  This is how we appreciate, judge, and engage the world through the media.

Curiously, it’s the antithesis of the cause-and-effect, outcome-oriented logic used to develop the comprehensive plans and policy goals which American urban planners and policymakers expect will result in positive, predictable, and manageable change in cities.  Is planning, therefore, misguided, or out-of-step with the logic that drives American culture?  Perhaps the mass media have a lesson for planners and policymakers; namely, that human control is overrated.

There is nothing abstract in the media’s portrayal of the world.  It is life in the raw, concrete in the extreme.

Ironically, architecture, with its rootedness and apparent permanence, is really the more abstract (or, at least, less concrete) human achievement compared with the mass media.  Architecture can provide a counterpoint to the hard particularities of the mass media worldview.  Buildings designed to the measure of man link us to something bigger, something universal.  The media may employ architecture critics, but, really, architecture critiques us.   Think of architecture that goes beyond a single building and is concerned with the environment that supports it and the community that maintains it.  Resistance to capitalist expansion is seldom more subtle, nor sustainability more poignant.  Sustainability makes no sense except in terms of how the built environment meets the natural world.  Think of human-scale, built spaces that offer chances to mix work, religion, politics, art, and science, and thus offer promising moments of cultural dialogue and participatory democracy.

Human life is private and social, sensual and ideal, transitory and immortal.  Tradition and social life, in other words, are forms of the ideal worthy to endure.  At its best, architecture, singular among human endeavors, accepts each principle, one seemingly opposed to the other, and endows the material world with an idealism while acknowledging the limitations of nature.

The affinity between great architecture and an independent media goes beyond the groundbreaking or ribbon cutting ceremony.  Without the universalities of the best architecture and the particularities of the mass media, American culture could not perform its essential function, that is, the creation and transmission of a social heritage.

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The Roman consul and philosopher Cicero declared that God was the “architect” of the world.  Before God raised his divine hand of design, the world was a chaotic realm of “great confusion and disturbance”.  This sense and expectation that architects will provide order to our cities and our lives is quite reasonably still with us.  When we require a space to produce a good, treat a disease, or simply enjoy life, we turn to architects.

Despite the forlornness of much of America’s built environment, Americans set a high bar for architecture.  For the past three centuries, a goal of our capitalist economy was to utilize technology to defeat nature.  Now, we live in a money- and technology-frenzied age that promotes sustainability as a way of coupling technology with nature.  Architecture is expected to be a cushion between our economy and the ecosystem.  The beauty of structure of architectural glass and steel is expected to mesh with the underlying structure of beauty of the natural world.  Local materials are preferred to build the offices of global corporations.  Small environmental impacts are expected to aggregate to a big economic impact.  A group of buildings must not turn out to be a group of individual buildings, but a “place”.  A building may be monumental, but a place must be human-scale.  An individual building may be designed to speed up human activity (or, rather, productivity) but a successful place slows down the pace so we can connect with others and with our surroundings.  Architects must sort out the spatial contradictions.  They have little room for error because their creations will frame our behavior for decades.

It’s convenient to reduce relationships to arrangements of power.  Does architecture represent a productive investment in society or a codification of dominant class and economic interests?  Raymond Williams posed this question in his 1973 book, The Country and the City.  Post World War II baby boomers, who came of age during the 1960s and 1970s, might be forgiven for questioning the ability of architecture and design to make life better for people.  The modernist architecture of those years is frequently described as blocky, ponderous, inelegant, uninviting, and demeaning.  Modernist buildings may contain ice rinks, sunken gardens, art galleries, restaurants, and enclosed walkways to protect people from the elements, yet they remain unloved.  Rather than inspire, they suggest the corporate co-opting of design; in fact, the corporate co-opting of the entire post-war American built environment.  These were building boom years in America, and many cities have a large number of modernist buildings.  Is it an office or an art gallery or a university or a jail?  You often can’t tell from the exterior.  But knowing the answer rarely makes a modernist building more inspiring.

Times change, needs change, and tastes change.  We now ask architects to do more to strengthen our relationships to place.  In addition to the usual reasons people in a capitalist economy build buildings — business, education, tax, security, and investment — we now add “lifestyle”.  What we are really asking architects to do in the United States is to again make humans the measure of all things.

The spaces in which we style our lives are demarcated by laws, codes, and regulations, yet there is no clear test of how to organize them to result in a particular lifestyle.  And so we have begun to express our zoning in terms of ranges of performance rather than the traditional fixed standards which too often become expressions of established order and power.

There is the typical American self-belief in all this: the optimism that we can in fact design a sense of place, that we can design communities capable of withstanding the destabilizing effects of capitalism, that productivity and leisure can coexist in mixed-use places, and that spaces can be reprogrammed when their lifespans begin to outlive our lifestyles.

Optimism, however, is hollow without memory.  The modernist architecture of the 1960s and 1970s was subversive, breaking with all that came before it, as architects refused to put their feet on the shoulders of the architects who came before them.  Or perhaps it was a part of a broader countercultural moment, a willful forgetting of the norms that led to a world war and Willy Loman as a symbol for the common man.  Regardless, when memory falters, imagination fails.

Imagination is always a projection, and for the past several decades in the United States our built environment reflected the material culture before our eyes with its emphasis on consumption and marketability.  Moreover, a capitalist economy is based on disruption: jobs can go and people must follow.  The individual home has become a self-contained antidote to economic instability.  But it takes more than a bunch of individual houses to make a community.  The more people feel insecure at work, the more they may seek refuge in their homes, and the less likely they are to insert themselves fully into life beyond the home.   Why should a family get too attached to a community, knowing it may have to leave for a job elsewhere?  On the other hand, filling a home with entertainment and recreational devices can increase its value and marketability, another incentive to seek gratification in individual rather than community pursuits.    How does design get past these inherently disruptive forces?

The human impulse for stability, for community, for planting roots and watching them grow is powerful.  Sustainability, in essence, asks to imagine that the world is not only stable but sacred; if we continue to treat it as an object, we lose it.

Sustainability thus places a disproportionate burden on architects.  Yes, it offers creative minds the attraction of molding new materials or finding new uses for old materials.  But architects are expected to use their creativity to design factories and offices that are humane, to provide mobility without vulnerability, to avoid sacrificing freedom for security, to create environments which nurture people’s emotional lives — in essence, to make space less a weapon and more a shield.

Architects are only one part of a development team of contractors, financiers, engineers, tenants, property owners, and realtors.  But architecture provides the raison d’être on which everything else hangs, and thus informs everything we see or do spatially.  The development team will be forgotten, except the architect.

The point of departure for today’s architects in America is the recognition that certain forms and ratios — the measure of man — are related and interconnected.  It is a language of coherence and wholeness that all can grasp, from the average person to the specialized professional.  It is a language based on optimism, memory, and imagination that offers hope for sustainability: optimism about American’s capacity to learn and adapt; memory of times before the automobiles were dominant; and imagination to avoid applying forms and ratios too rigidly.

Any serious conception of a sustainable America must have design as its heart and soul.  Architectural design offers the best hope for inclusive built environments with deeply-held senses of feeling — without which sustainability is hollow and shallow, if not impossible.

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Values are about people, not things.  We need individual fulfillment, but we also need other people.  How deeply that self-fulfillment is tied to the welfare and dignity of others depends on values, the standards we set for ourselves and others.  In other words, values are critical to the ways we interpret and order the space around us.  Appreciating the nature of values may be essential to solving some of the thorniest urban problems.

The United Nations, Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, European Union, and World Bank all have announced their intention to join the growing number of localities and entities that are developing “quality of life” indicators.  These indicators match subjective perceptions of well-being and satisfaction, such as the look and feel of a city, with more objective data like growth rates and tax base shifts.  When viewed collectively, quality of life indicators may present a broad panorama of a city or region.  The broader perspective, in turn, may help policymakers frame issues more accurately and create standards capable of elevating both a community and its members — and this gets us to values.

Values, of course, are products of time, place, and circumstance.  Child labor, once considered a necessity, is now judged abhorrent.  Some regions want rapid growth; others try to slow growth.  We like to think that values change and facts remain constant, but it’s not that simple.

Values and facts are inextricably intertwined.  It’s difficult to make the case that there are morally-neutral facts and methods because values profoundly influence how we recognize reality.  For instance, are we really deprived if we don’t feel deprived?  Americans living in the immediate aftermath of the Great Depression were satisfied with a modest but stable livelihood, conditions that today we might categorize as a poverty-level existence.  Just as there are no facts without values based in history and geography, so too there are no values without facts.  As values orient a person to his or her own view of reality, the empirical world of facts exerts an influence on a person’s attitudes.  For example, the fact of air conditioning made the formally-repellent Deep South attractive to Northerners in the United States.  More profoundly, the knowledge that apes are related to humans and whites are not genetically superior to people of color changed mainstream Americans’ views of the environment and society.

Values, in actuality, are defined by this complex interplay and reciprocity with facts.  Consequently, values are not mere additions to reality, but form its essential reality.  This is why the quality of life indicators now gaining traction throughout much of the world hold so much promise.  Values are similar to scientific hypotheses in that they are subject to verification and justification, not however through the experimentation of specially-trained scientists, but through the daily experiences and dialogue of all citizens.  Indeed, the formation and transformation of values forms the highest expression of democracy.

The implications of the widespread acceptance of quality of life indicators for policymaking are thus profound, as it represents a move away from American-style privitism and self-interest.  The sustainability industry can build structures of recycled materials, but, as William McDonough and Michael Braungart wrote in their book Cradle to Cradle, “In order for a building to survive, you need to build a viable community that will take care of it.”  Quality of life indicators could allow citizens to pursue their own interests according to the facts on the ground but also commit themselves to the larger functional values necessary for creating and maintaining a viable community, where people are more than individuals to be left alone, where helping others means more than putting them in a position to live as they too please.

Viable communities in the modern world, like values and facts, may be rigorous — commitment requires effort — but are never rigid.  Viability assumes heterogeneity, as debate over ideas and ethics leads to the acceptance of community standards.   Difference and democracy, then, are inseparable and reciprocal.  Consequently, a rigorous commitment to the functional values that can translate to a high quality of community life is an endorsement of democracy in practice and very subversive of totalitarianism and oppression.

Party politics and capitalist economics present us with unnecessary choices between roots and reason, culture and civility, private and social.  Too often our public world disintegrates into an arena of competing interests and appetites.  Cities in the United States and many parts of the world are sprawling, amorphous, and undifferentiated.  Economic development is defined as whatever the infrastructure can support, not what people need for mobility and security and prosperity.  Capitalists see untapped markets and talent everywhere, yet public policymaking seems increasingly marginal to stem exploitation.

Somehow, wisdom became uncoupled from technical virtuosity.  How else can we explain traffic congestion, air pollution, overcrowding, isolation, and resource depletion?  The solution may be to make values and technique mutually supportive and enriching.

It won’t be easy.  Since the dawn of capitalism, people have stayed together only to defend shared oppression — racism or colonialism, for example — not to support a common humanity, a shared community.  The competition that accompanies a rising standard of living eventually pulls people apart, furnishing the haves and have-nots with different means, levels of education, circles of influence, and daily experiences, all of which leads to different outlooks on life.

But many people, whatever their circumstances, love their cities, regions, and nations — the places in which they invest their hopes and futures.  Quality of life indicators or sustainability indices or Gross National Happiness measures or similarly-nominated criteria hold the tantalizing promise of repairing the seams between work, politics, ethnicity, science, and religion in specific geographic areas.  They may be a necessary step to making cities and regions more livable, equitable, and viable for the people who live there.

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The causes of the changes in American cities over the past hundred years are subject to interpretation.  Three of the most original, convincing, and influential decoders of American cities are Lewis Mumford, Jane Jacobs, and David Rusk.  Contemporary American urban and regional planners see cities largely through their eyes.  Architects also weigh in, of course; their designs give form and feeling to cities.  And average citizens contribute mightily to their communities’ contours through the zoning laws they support.  This interplay between planning, design, and regulations goes a long way to explaining what we regard as right or wrong with our cities.

Americans have what generously can be described as a love-hate relationship with their cities.  Since more people have been moving out of cities than moving in, the present mood towards cities may be described as disenchantment — a relative, qualified disenchantment, perhaps, but definitely more chagrin than delight.

To be disenchanted, one must first have been enchanted.  So when did we regard our cities with deep affection?  When was this time of affinity, if not ardor, with our urban spaces?

For Jane Jacobs, the spectacularly influential observer of urban America, the golden age of American cities was characterized by small family-owned and -operated grocery stores, delicatessens, hardware stores, clothing stores (not yet referred to as boutiques), bakeries, and butcher shops; neighborhoods that met our daily needs; downtowns that satisfied anything beyond our daily needs, with wondrous cinemas, restaurants, and department stores; sidewalks, street lights, street cars, and street life; a sense of place and a sense of community — all of which were disappearing when Jacobs wrote her best selling books in the 1960s.

Jacobs’ solution — the return to enchantment — was to allow cities to regain their historic texture and sinew and scale by opposing the huge housing projects and highways and parking lots that were advocated at the time by mainstream American urban planners and economic developers.

Jane Jacobs’ ideas of the American city supplanted those of Lewis Mumford, a towering figure during the formative years of American urban planning as a profession.  In a large body of work beginning in the 1920s, Mumford advanced the theory that each city was unique with its own story to tell: a tale of geography, history, climate, industry, and politics — some parts purposeful, others accidental, but all woven together to explain why this or that city is the way it is.  Mumford identified elements and patterns that all American cities had in common by virtue of having to abide by the same federal regulations, such as basic commuter flows and sites of exchange and power.  But even these, according to Mumford, were endowed by local customs and practices with their own flavor and meaning, so it was best not to generalize about cities.  Mumford had a soft spot for early-twentieth-century urban America, before, as he saw it, the Great Depression siphoned off investment from cities.

It’s fairly simple to understand why Jane Jacobs is revered today while Lewis Mumford, after 40 years of preeminence as an urban theorist, is regarded as passé.  Mumford privileged the creativity, imagination, and agency of local leaders and citizens, traits that are tough to assess objectively.  We can, however, measure and analyze the physical attributes that Jacobs venerated: building heights, setbacks, the shape and location of doors and windows, the size of blocks of buildings, viewsheds, and the quality of materials.  Not only can we measure these forms, we can evaluate them according to the distances human beings can walk, the level the human eye can see, and the aesthetics humans prefer.  Jane Jacobs, in other words, gives us both the components and standards for mathematical models of the world in which we live and thus came to inspire two generations of urban designers and planners.

Jacobs, unknowingly or not, gave a modern voice to the ideas of Marcus Vitruvius Pollio, the Roman engineer who wrote the multi-volume De Architectura in the two or three decades before the birth of Christ.  According to Vitruvius, all architecture imitated nature.  Since humans represented nature in its perfection, the most stable, functional, and beautiful architecture reproduced human proportions.  The most perfect architecture, in other words, was what we now call human-scale or pedestrian-scale.

Vitruvius influenced Renaissance architects, but, like Jacobs, was turned on end by capitalism.  Vitruvius’ architectural theory flourished until the industrial revolution when function and cost came to dominate form and design.  Jane Jacobs fought an uphill battle for mainstream acceptance from the first word she wrote and only very recently have her ideas been taken seriously.

The post-World War II enthusiasm for building a better America, fueled by unprecedented economic growth, carried with it an urge, a lust not only to expand as never before but also break from the past.  Freed of the styles that disciplined Renaissance builders, post-war American architects gravitated towards an aesthetic that shouted monumentality, aerodynamics, and cheapness, as expressed in ever-broader highways, ever-more-aloof structures, and a predilection for the newest, synthetic materials.  Master planning came into vogue as a comprehensive way of dealing with urban problems, but this usually meant imposing the prevailing economic and aesthetic values on residents and neighborhoods that didn’t necessarily share them.  Don’t want a freeway through your city neighborhood?  Too bad.  It’s important for moving cars to, from, and between the outskirts where most investment is occurring.  You don’t really want to paint or pay extra for brick, do you?  Let’s clad all our new houses in vinyl.  Suburban was the standard; anything else risked being labeled substandard and becoming a target for distain or removal.

Jane Jacobs’ theories were counterintuitive.  How could small and traditional possibly outperform big and brash in a growing America that was flexing its muscles?  Jacobs became a hero to academics, a few urban planners on the fringe, and a dwindling number of community activists who chose to stay and fight for their threatened urban neighborhoods.  But architecture paid scant heed to her, and zoning paid even less.  Zoning regulations reflect average persons’ wishes and prejudices and suburbanization was (and still is) considered modern, forward-looking, emancipating, wealth-creating.  Buildings don’t get built or profits made with nostalgia, which is how Jacob’s ideas appeared to many in the real estate development industry in the 1960s, ‘70s, and ‘80s.

America faced the titanic challenge after World War II of housing tens of millions of new baby boomers and immigrants, building factories and offices for the millions of new jobs being created, and moving and parking millions of new cars.  The master planning of vast areas of a city, the designing of buildings with a blank slate rather than an order established by Jacobs or Vitruvius, and the replacement of the old (designed by someone else) with the modern (designed by me) could be terribly satisfying.  The ambition seemed to be its own reward to people like Robert Moses and modernist architects.  Politicians, not wanting to be spectators in the new metropolitan order, followed the money by following suburban norms.

It was only when population and job projections slowed in the late-1980s and people began to question the hows and whys of growth that Jane Jacob’s ideas entered the mainstream.  But Jacobs focused on the city when most Americans were now living in the suburbs.

In a series of compelling studies in the 1990s, David Rusk, a former city mayor, showed how cities were linked to their suburbs.  According to Rusk, economies had regionalized, but their potential was constrained by the nineteenth century governance models followed by many communities with a region.  Rusk demonstrated how the physical, social, and economic isolation of the poor in inner cities could contribute to the decline of entire metro areas.  Moreover, Rusk quantified how financial disparities within cities, and between cities and suburbs, could be reduced through regional revenue policies, regional housing policies, and regional land use policies.

David Rusk offered a plausible analysis of American metropolitan areas, a new way of modeling change that corresponded with visible shifts in local economies and geographies, and a clear means of monitoring regional performance.  It was an exciting new policy direction that didn’t involve major new public investment or government consolidation or restructuring, but a redistribution of existing metropolitan resources.  Relatively small changes in regional affordable housing policy, for example, could have major positive implications for urban public education and safety and regional workforce development — three of the biggest public sector cost drivers.  Rusk’s theories, in essence, both captured the moral dimension and appreciation of agency of Lewis Mumford by championing social and economic inclusion and supported Jane Jacobs’ insistence on the primacy of place.

Since at least the end of World War II, planning, architecture, and zoning have aligned in the U.S. to give the majority of Americans the growth, change, and physical design they wanted.  Today, the majority is changing in many ways; most obviously, it is aging and diversifying.  But the motivations of real estate development policies, then and now, remain the same: to provide a comfortable, affordable, predictable, and convenient lifestyle for the majority of Americans.  The American Dream, at its most basic level, is a lifestyle of comfort and convenience without too many surprises at a price we can afford.

Today, we reminisce fondly about the well-paying jobs in the post-World War II golden age of American manufacturing, but we forget that most of those jobs resulted from the re-alignment of planning, architecture, and zoning during that period from urban-oriented to suburban-oriented.   We are now seeing what may be the beginning of a new re-alignment, a shift in focus from use to form and from transportation to mobility and accessibility for all.

Will the new confluence of planning, architecture, and zoning allow cities and regions to take off?  Will enough businesses spring up around universal design and sustainability and personal mobility to create transformative economic and social forces?  Capitalism will always exert pressures to expand.  Can we expand inwardly, yet profitably?  Does the term “expand inwardly” even make sense?

The big question is: Are the stars lining up so our cities once again may enchant?

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The contest between giving power and grabbing power always has a political dimension, and our story now switches from the grassroots democracy of the neighborhoods to the deal-making of the backrooms of City Hall, private clubs, and political party offices.

Six years prior to the 2011 special election, following the retirement of Bill Johnson, Bob Duffy received the Democratic nomination for mayor.  In Rochester, where registered Democrats outnumber Republicans by more than three to one, whoever receives the Democratic Party’s endorsement is essentially crowned mayor.  Still, Duffy’s campaign was remarkable for its shallowness: a lot of rhetoric and puffery about reducing crime and creating jobs, with few specifics.

Upon election, Duffy fired nearly all of the city’s senior management, replacing experienced public servants with prominent members of the local business community — the old boys network — none of whom had worked in government.

Duffy’s signature initiative for his first term was the rollback of Bill Johnson’s signature initiatives.  During his first full week in office, he stopped the ferry service to Toronto, proclaiming it a failure though it was less than one year into its three-year operational plan. Duffy rolled back Neighbors Building Neighborhoods in every aspect but the name, turning the neighborhoods into “advisors” and centralizing all decision making in City Hall.

Poverty was uniformly treated as pathology-based rather than inequality-based.  “Poverty is not an excuse,” Duffy often asserted.  “Tired of excuses”, he replaced the city’s community policing strategy with harsh, zero tolerance practices that brought large numbers of young African-American men into the criminal justice system and alienated large portions of the minority community.

The city’s comprehensive master plan, downtown plan, and neighborhood plans — developed during the Johnson administration — reflected the ideas of residents regarding relationships between zoning and physical space, as well as strategies for enhancing the social and economic fabric.  These were ignored by the Duffy administration; indeed, they were removed from the city’s website.

Though a strong proponent of downtown development, often at the expense of neighborhood development, Duffy abruptly stopped the $230 Renaissance Square plan to revitalize a major downtown Rochester intersection — and the years of regional planning and cooperation that went into it — ostensibly because of concerns over design, but more plausibly to embarrass the popular County Executive, a Republican, who championed the project.  Across the street, Duffy began his own massive redevelopment project that committed the city to substantial infrastructure investments and financial subsidies to developers, but didn’t identify the funds to pay for them.

The smaller projects started by the Johnson administration that the Duffy administration couldn’t stop, they repackaging as their own.  “Johnson carried the ball 95 yards and Duffy carried the ball the last five yards and took all the credit for scoring a touchdown,” said a former senior official in both administrations, using a comparison to American football in which a player must traverse a field 100 yards long to score.  However, projects’ scopes were frequently changed without consulting the citizens who had originally designed them.  Often, it appeared that City Hall saw the neighborhoods primarily as opportunities for meeting the needs of private sector developers rather than residents.

Insularity from every stakeholder outside the Democratic Party apparatus and a few businesspersons became the standard of the Duffy administration.  Because he was an incumbent Democrat, Duffy cruised to re-election in 2009 — he ran unopposed — without having anything approaching a serious public conversation on his record.  The signature initiative of his second term was an attempt to gain control of the city’s independent public school district and its $700 million budget.  The quest was extraordinarily divisive in no small part because Duffy conducted no outreach to the communities it would effect.  He asked few questions, and listened to fewer suggestions.

As with NBN, Duffy was more interested in centralizing power than in communicating with citizens — though he courted the media.  Duffy, a charismatic and attractive politician who was clearly relaxed in front of television cameras, remained personally popular with the public, though his major initiatives regarding schools, economic development, and public safety were deeply controversial.

Shortly after promising to gain control of city schools no matter what and threatening those who opposed him — “It’s my line in the sand,” he said — Duffy resigned to be lieutenant governor, a fitting capstone to a career that truly began with his resignation as police chief.

To replace him, the Democratic establishment hand-picked Thomas Richards, and it fought tooth and claw to keep him from having to go before the voters in a legitimate electoral campaign, from having to debate in any substantive way the options for Rochester’s future.

The six years in Rochester between the retirement of Bill Johnson and the special mayoral election saw the explicit movement of power away from citizens and voters and toward a Democratic establishment and mayor’s office that cloaked themselves in the rhetoric of empowerment but believed their own experts know best.  Insularity became governing policy.  The mayoral succession debacle was therefore not a new power grab, but a continuation of one that began when Johnson retired.

Johnson’s entry into the mayoral special election thus frightened the political and business establishment.  Whatever the ups and downs of his administration, Johnson was always more available to citizens than to power-brokers; political and economic power were always shared.

Every plebiscite is shaped in some way by the geography in which it occurs.

The Rochester metropolitan area is somewhat of an anomaly in Upstate New York, a region of the United States that had endured heavy manufacturing job losses since the 1980s.

Unlike most of its peers, the Rochester metropolitan area slowly gained population and   jobs.  The growth, however, has not been even.  While most of the suburbs and all of the exurbs grew, the City of Rochester — which is fully built-out and legally cannot expand geographically — steadily lost residents and jobs.  Even within the city, growth was uneven.  Between 1990 and 2010, about a third of the city’s neighborhoods gained population and were clearly enviable places to live; a third lost people and were obviously distressed; and a third remained about the same and could be considered “transitional” between relative health and decline.

The neighborhoods aligned, not only geographically, but also according to race and income; the most prosperous neighborhoods were also the whitest.

The two main candidates, Tom Richards and Bill Johnson, conducted a generally positive contest in which each candidate highlighted his own attributes and rarely resorted to personal attacks against his opponent.  Unmistakably, however, the campaign was waged against the backdrop of regional economic decline and urban class resentment.

Johnson portrayed himself as an experienced city manager who wouldn’t be co-opted by insider special interests.  He readily admitted that he didn’t have all the answers to move the city forward, but said he would tap into the best minds and innovative ideas from the Rochester area’s 19 universities, as well as from newly-empowered residents.

Richards insisted his business experience would be instrumental in bringing new jobs and economic development to the city, and said his priority was “implementation, not planning”.  Richard’s, the major party nominee and therefore apparent frontrunner, seemed careful not to say anything that might offend anyone.

Johnson, for his part, annoyed the business establishment by questioning the ethics and sustainability of providing massive public financial subsidies for private developers, a practice that Richards asserted was necessary to attract private investment.

Both discussed the cuts, efficiencies, and re-allocations they might adopt to close the city’s projected budget deficient.  The debate on budget priorities had undertones of long-standing community anxieties, such as downtown interests versus neighborhood interests; poor versus rich; and black versus white.

The Green Party nominee, a young, articulate, small business owner, generally echoed the views of Bill Johnson, and threatened to be a “spoiler”, denying victory to one of the other candidates.

Tom Richards raised and spent more than twice as much money as the other two candidates combined.  Most of Richard’s campaign contributions were large donations from corporate interests.  Johnson and the Green candidate garnered many small donations from individuals.  Richards was endorsed by business groups; Johnson by labor unions.  City Hall treated Richards as if he were the incumbent mayor, announcing new neighborhood projects daily during the final two weeks of the campaign in a transparent attempt to portray Richards as a man of the people.

The mainstream media covered the campaign as a series of “what if” scenarios — What if you did this in this situation?  What if you did that instead? — as if the individual actions of a mayor could alter the city’s course.

Residents at public forums tended to view the city’s future as part of a vast process tied to the national economy and globalization.  “Are there limits to what residents can do by themselves?”  “Don’t we need more state and federal help?”  “Why should we give tax breaks to businesses if their jobs will end up overseas?”

Both the media and citizens were right, of course.  Urban decline and revitalization in Rochester and in America are products of uneven development, global economic restructuring, and public policy at all levels of government.  Decline and revitalization are also shaped by mayoral politics.  Mayor Bill Johnson quickly re-shuffled the city’s power structure, giving the grassroots a leadership capacity they never had before.  Mayor Bob Duffy even more quickly co-opted grassroots community leaders, intimidated potential and actual opposition, and restored the old boys network of privilege and patronage.

The election results were: Tom Richards, 49 per cent of the vote; Bill Johnson, 42 per cent; and the Green Party candidate, nine per cent.

In America’s winner-take-all electoral system, a candidate can take office without receiving a majority of the popular vote.  In the end, the dedicated volunteers of the third party candidates could not overcome the professional, well-funded Democratic Party machine.  Johnson and the Green Party candidate split the progressive vote, handing the victory to the conservative Richards.

The vote also divided along race, class, and age lines, with Johnson getting most of the votes in minority, poor neighborhoods and the Green Party running well among university-age voters.  The most dependable, “prime” voters in American elections — elderly whites — turned out for Richards.

Voter turnout was relatively high by national standards for special elections, owing no doubt to the vigorous public debate during the campaign, which would never have occurred without Johnson in the race to provide more than token opposition for the Democratic Party nominee.

“In the five years Richards was at City Hall, I never saw him at a single neighborhood meeting,” a community activist stated at a public forum before the election.  By being forced to crisscross the city and publicly debate the issues, Richards was forced to hear firsthand residents’ concerns.

The question was whether or not Richards really listened and would recognize the contributions that people at all levels can make.  The real question, in essence, was whether or not the campaign made Richards a better mayor.

The more realistic assessment is that Bill Johnson’s bold — even radical — experiment in citizen empowerment is likely over in Rochester.  Without the unifying focus of Neighbors Building Neighborhoods, or a City Hall that enables meaningful participation by all citizens in decision-making about physical development, community leadership in Rochester will likely dissipate and fragment and — like that of almost all other American cities — be reactive rather than truly progressive and proactive.  “Every neighborhood group in the city is on edge,” said the city’s Director of Planning and Zoning in early 2012, an ominous sign for any city.

When people have power taken away from them, they don’t become indifferent, they move away when they can and mistrust city government more than ever when they can’t.

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Saint-Exupéry, the mid-20^th century author of The Little Prince, was a keen observer of the human condition in the tradition of the philosophes, those 18^th century intellectuals in politics, economics, and the sciences who believed that progress in the best sense of the word occurs when we stand on one another’s shoulders, build on each other’s achievements, recognize and share our talents, and place stone upon stone until the edifice is complete.

The passion for mutuality, espoused by philosophes like Voltaire, Locke, and Rosseau, was captured by Jefferson, Franklin, and Madison in the U.S. Bill of Rights and Constitution, through which it entered the American soul as freedom of religion, freedom of speech, freedom of movement, and a general tolerance for difference and dissent.  Even Adam Smith, today identified with rabid individualism and capitalist greed, wrote in 1759 that the market depends most fundamentally, not on maximizing profits, but on a network of trust, what Smith called “sympathy” or “sentiment”, and what today we might refer to as social capital.  This mutual sympathy, this shared sense of material and moral well-being, according to Adam Smith, is innate in humans and is, in fact, the basis for individual happiness and prosperity.  Moreover, Smith claimed, human sympathy compels us to work hard to build a society in which everyone has an equal opportunity to prosper.

These are the philosophical underpinnings of civic leadership in the United States.  A sense of community, a feeling that we are all in this together, is in the legal and moral DNA of America, and it’s something that civic leaders dismiss at their peril.

Americans expect their public leaders to confirm their general vision of community, establish priorities and policies to achieve that vision, engage in constant two-way communication, and build consensus.  We forgive our leaders if they sometimes contort this way and that, as long as it’s only political posturing and doesn’t prevent them from making difficult choices on our behalf.

And the decisions are tough.  People want not only safety and financial security, but also opportunities to learn and grow, a healthy environment, and lifestyle options; not just for individuals but also families, not just for adult taxpayers but also children.

However, the people who make up our communities and our economy are rarely asked to participate in the decisions that affect their lives — at least not until public coffers begin to run dry.  When a municipality does not have enough money to satisfy both the demands for economic growth and the demands for other quality of life amenities, citizens typically will be cajoled to volunteer, to pick up the slack, and allowed a shallow, perfunctory role in charting their community’s future.  The resulting, minimal, social capital is expected to make up for the lack of financial capital.  But citizens are rarely meaningfully involved at the beginning of the planning process, where the fundamental decisions are made and the course for the future is set.

Why aren’t the skills, local knowledge, community spirit, and passion of citizens fully harnessed for the regeneration of the places in which they live?  The answer can perhaps best be revealed in a case study from a typical American city.  Rochester, New York supported for over ten years what was arguably the boldest and most successful citizen empowerment process in modern America before it was unceremoniously dismantled.  It’s difficult to generalize from case studies because no two communities are ever the same, but the starkness of the Rochester experience — the deep contrast in leadership philosophies and the transparency of the subterfuge — exposes the power relationships that operate in nearly all American cities.

The pursuit of political power in a democracy is rarely raw but subtle and well-camouflaged by deception and intrigue.  Let’s begin our Rochester, New York case study on 29 March 2011, the date William (Bill) Johnson lost his bid to return as mayor of Rochester in a special election.  The election result was not surprising considering that Johnson ran on a third-party line and only four of the 1,265 mayors of U.S. cities with more than 25,000 residents at the time were elected without the endorsement of the Democrat or Republican parties.

Johnson had been Rochester’s mayor from 1994 to 2005.  He left an indelible mark on the city.  Every neighborhood boasts of prominent development built or initiated during the Johnson administration.  Most notably, through a process called Neighbors Building Neighborhoods, he involved average citizens in key city decisions to a degree unparalleled, perhaps, in American urban history.

When Johnson was mayor, citizen empowerment and community control were embraced by residents, but mistrusted by the business and political “establishment” who, for the first time, had to share power.

Johnson retired from politics in 2005 to become a Distinguished Professor of Public Policy at the Rochester Institute of Technology, and the establishment power brokers saw an opportunity to regain control.

We must now introduce a few new actors in our drama, the first being Robert Duffy, the city’s popular police chief who resigned, and, with the endorsement of the Democratic Party, Bill Johnson, and the business community, was elected mayor.  Duffy was re-elected to a second four-year term as mayor in 2009 and abruptly resigned to run successfully for lieutenant governor of New York State.  Before he left office, Duffy systematically dismantled most of the programs Johnson started.

On New Year’s Eve 2010, the day before he became lieutenant governor, Duffy appointed Tom Richards as his successor.  Richards was briefly CEO of a regional utility company before becoming the city’s corporation counsel, or chief attorney, under Duffy.  Tom Richards was sworn in as mayor in a private ceremony.  The media and public weren’t invited.  The official word from City Hall was that Richards was the new mayor and would serve until a general election could be held in November.

According to the city charter, however, only the City Council had the right to appoint a new mayor.  Instead of officially appointing Richards (or someone else), Council opted for a special election on 29 March 2011.

Critics were infuriated by the way the city handled the succession process, believing that a general election was more democratic.  A general election would allow enough time for candidates to organize and campaign.  It would also allow time for a primary election in which the voters of each political party select a candidate to represent them.  In a special election, party leaders pick their candidates.  The critics said that City Council, kneeling to Duffy and party leaders, deliberately avoided appointing a mayor in an effort to engineer a Richards’ victory in a special election.

A federal inquiry of the mayoral succession process was launched.  Three weeks after his appointment, federal officials said there were enough questions about whether Richards was legally the mayor that he needed to resign to continue his campaign for the special election.

Before he left office, Richards orchestrated a change to the city’s emergency succession plan.  This plan was drawn up after the 11 September 2001 terrorist attacks to provide a process for maintaining critical city operations if a catastrophic event resulted in the death or incapacitation of the mayor.  Based on the plan that was revised by Richards, City Council named Carlos Carballada, the city’s economic development director, as acting mayor.  Actually, the public was told that he wasn’t mayor, but the “Emergency Interim Successor”, an office with all the powers of the mayor.  Carballada had come of out retirement as CEO of a local bank to become the city’s economic development director under Duffy, a position not even in the chain of mayoral succession in the original emergency succession plan.

The City of Rochester, which had three mayors in the previous 37 years, thus had its third mayor in three weeks.

The legitimacy of Carballada’s appointment was challenged in two lawsuits, both of which were dismissed on technical grounds.  Critics questioned the city’s political motivations.  More pointedly, they accused the city of running roughshod over citizens’ rights.

As expected, the Democratic Party nominated Tom Richards as its candidate for the special election.  The Republican Party chose not to run a candidate in the heavily-democratic city.  The Green Party selected a candidate.  Bill Johnson, reluctantly, entered the race on the Working Families Party and Independence Party lines, promising a vigorous public debate to “make sure Tom Richards confronted the issues in front of the people.”

Most stories of political intrigue have a local history that is rooted in broader societal forces.  Although the personalities, locations, and specific circumstances may be different, these stories resonate from a distance because we recognize something familiar in them.  In fact, the way power and leadership played out in Rochester mirrors that of many, many American cities.

Twenty-five years ago, the most influential people in Rochester were the bankers, utility executives, newspaper CEO, and a handful of large property owners.  This “old boys network” (they were all men, and the families of most had lived in Rochester for generations) influenced virtually all political decisions because they guided, managed, and promoted almost all economic growth.

Twenty-five years ago, it was still possible for a handful of people to manage local growth.  Indeed, it was in their self-interest.  If they wanted to sell more newspapers, electricity, new homes, or bank accounts, the local market had to grow.

The local market was the primary source of growth because these businesses were protected from competition.  Banks at that time had to operate within state lines.  Utilities were monopolies.  The largest-circulation daily newspaper in Rochester was also a monopoly and rarely saw serious competition for readers or advertisers.  Developers did not enjoy explicit legal protections, but compensated through extensive personal connections.

Developers, bankers, utility, and newspaper executives were connected with a lot of other businesses and individuals, as well.  In fact, it was virtually impossible to start or run a business, or even a charity, without interacting with all or most of these executives.  They also cultivated political influence.  These were the days when banks, utilities, and the media were highly regulated, and to get the best deal for their businesses, the executives learned to negotiate the political and regulatory systems and befriend politicians and key bureaucrats.  There connections, in other words, placed them at the center of important economic, social, and political networks.  It also convinced many of them of their unparalleled ability to solve their communities’ problems, confirming John Adams’ adage that “Power always thinks it has a great soul”.

This was the time when Tom Richards, the “acting mayor” who resigned under federal pressure, and Carlos Carballada, the “emergency interim successor” to the mayor, came of age as corporate executives.

Today, it’s a different world and a different Rochester.  The traditional businesses have been bought up, broken up, or deregulated.  New executives move to the area, only to stay a year or two before moving on.  Yet the small, exclusive old boys network (which now contains a few sons and daughters) struggles to hold on to power.  Often, their main claim to power is that they are wealthy, either by birth or, like Richards and Carballada, by negotiating a rich settlement package for themselves when they sold or merged their businesses.

Tom Richards ended his two-year tenure as CEO by moving the company’s headquarters out of Rochester in a merger with a larger utility, laying off 225 workers, and negotiating a reported $10 million severance package for himself.  Carlos Carballada, while promoting himself on television as the community’s only “local banker”, quietly arranged the sale of the locally-owned bank he ran to a larger, out-of-town institution with a reported $4 million payout for himself.

Both mergers were accepted by the public with a shrug as typical corporate behavior in a global age.

The old boys network was dominant in Rochester for so long that the community had lost the ability to think about power and leadership in any other terms — until Bill Johnson became Rochester’s first and only African-American mayor in 1994 and shook the traditional power structure.

Bill Johnson was born and raised in the segregated South during the Civil Rights era.  He came to Rochester as an adult to lead the fledgling local chapter of the Urban League, growing it to a nationally-recognized community development and empowerment organization.  Johnson won the Democratic nomination for mayor after a bruising primary that featured nine candidates.

As a youth in Virginia, Johnson experienced first-hand the transformative power of people from all walks of life working together for a common cause.  As mayor, Johnson’s first reflex was to reach out.  “I firmly believe that the stronger we make neighborhood associations, ethnic organizations, environmental groups, business groups, and all residents, the more responsible and capable their leadership becomes,” Johnson often explained.  “If we do that, then important decisions will be made by people who genuinely care about the city.”

The framework for working together was Neighbors Building Neighborhoods, or NBN, a form of open and consultative governance that invited community participation and drove the city’s planning, economic development, community development, capital improvement, and general budget processes.  NBN placed a high priority on the needs of minorities and the poor; balanced downtown and the neighborhoods and other forces within the city; and encouraged partnerships among citizen groups, businesses, nonprofits, and universities for neighborhood development.

As various independent studies spread the word of Rochester’s successful neighborhood regeneration efforts, NBN became an international model, and representatives of cities from all over the world came to Rochester to observe the intimate process of many small groups of citizens empowering themselves.

Most local media attention during the special election campaign, by contrast, focused on a handful of very large projects, such a $100+ million initiative to restore the city’s port area, including a passenger ferry across Lake Ontario to Toronto, and, in partnership with the county and local transit authority, a project called Renaissance Square to demolish and reconstruct a prominent part of downtown Rochester.  However, the hallmark of the citizen-driven Neighbors Building Neighborhoods process was hundreds of small, but cumulatively transformative, neighborhood development projects.

NBN effectively changed how the city operated.

What Bill Johnson did by allowing residents meaningful input into land use planning, economic development, and the city’s budget process was give the city’s power structure a nexus that was better aligned with the demographic and economic shifts that had affected the Rochester region over the previous 25 years.  “When it comes to neighborhood leadership, we’re on our own”, Johnson insisted, expressing a vision of the city that prioritized local needs over the needs of global and corporate interests.

In Johnson’s mind, the time of the old boys network was over.  Other forces, however, conspired to restore it.

(To be continued)

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The term “community” warms the hearts of both conservatives and liberals in the United States.  The ideal conservative community envisions a greater material well-being for everyone arising from individuals working single-mindedly for their own self-interest.  The ideal liberal community is made up of people who subordinate their personal interests to shared goals and work together to achieve a common good.  Who could argue with either vision?

Community, of course, is relative.  And it’s not always about a common good.  There are people who love where they live for its sense of community, yet these are places that perpetuate discrimination and practices that may harm others.  And there are communities of struggle, of survival at the margins, especially in America’s inner cities where residents are neither engaged nor empowered.

Cities are dynamic, even when downtrodden, but very few cities make room for the creative energies of all of their residents.  Mayors love to talk about citizen empowerment and citizen engagement, but, in practice, it rarely transcends a leisurely debate about tolerance and open governance.  A few cities have gone much farther.  In the 1980s, Mayor Harold Washington heroically and successfully championed access and employment opportunities for minorities in Chicago’s notoriously corrupt city government.  Seattle has a respected citizen empowerment program, begun in 1995, which allows residents to plan for the future of their neighborhoods.  The program is criticized, however, for the low involvement of the poor and people of color.   Other cities also try to engage citizens, but rarely empower them.

Perhaps the only American city that explicitly set out to monetarize the social capital of its marginalized residents was Rochester, New York.  Between 1994 and 2006, the City of Rochester demonstrated in practice, through its Neighbors Building Neighborhoods process, that openness, collaboration, and broad citizen empowerment deliver chances for prosperity to even the most marginalized.

The great irony of many American cities is that it is the very resiliency of its large population of poor residents, bred by many decades of having to live on the social and economic fringes, that allows the cities to avoid collapse.  While the rich may move away from problems, the poor must stay and find a way to make a socially-rich life.  The question at the heart of genuine citizen empowerment becomes: How do you intensify this resiliency — this ability to survive in expert and creative ways — so that it has a positive impact on the city’s capability to raise revenues and meet demands for service delivery?  This is the question that Rochester, under Mayor Bill Johnson, set out to answer.

Rochester, a nineteenth-century Erie Canal boomtown, is on the southern shore of Lake Ontario in Upstate New York.  The city (population 210,000 in 2010; down from 320,000 in 1950) boasts one of the finest park systems in the United States, due to its early history as an international horticultural center.  It is home to nationally-significant  museums and galleries, a legacy of the collections of great local industrialists like George Eastman, as well as numerous historic sites, owing to its past as a center of the women’s rights and antislavery movements.  The city also benefits from dozens of active neighborhood associations.  The Rochester metro area (population 1.1 million) contains a dense concentration of universities and high-tech industries.  The number of both people and jobs in the suburbs has increased over the past 50 years, as they declined in the central city.

The City of Rochester, like many American core cities, cannot expand its political boundaries to capture suburban growth.  Over the past five decades, the loss of jobs and middle-class residents to the suburbs has stressed city neighborhoods, despite their natural and historic assets.  Regional mechanisms to aid the urban core have proven inadequate.

The continual challenge to Rochester is to revitalize the city, which despite its considerable assets and scattering of prosperous residential districts, is generally poor and has limited public resources to work with.

Not only are many city residents poor, but, like many poor urban minorities in the United States, they are marginalized.  Consider, for example, African-American children in American inner cities who learn their position in society by virtue of what they see around them.  They see how their parents and grandparents were mistreated, miseducated, or not educated and the resulting blight or ghetto living conditions.  They watch television and see that the success does not look like them or live where they live.

Now let’s consider a very different world, a utopian world.  The philosopher John Rawls, in his book A Theory of Justice, speculated how people might live in a world without hierarchies, a world in which “no one knows his place in society, his class position or social status, nor does anyone know his fortune in the distribution of natural assets and abilities.”  Rawls theorized that people living with such a “veil of ignorance” would not descend to anarchy or create oppressive hierarchies; rather, they would choose “strongly egalitarian” relationships.  What Rawls predicted, essentially, is that the issues that divide us can be overcome with the right kind of relationships.

Clearly, Rawls wasn’t an urban American mayor that has to deal with whatever economic and social systems are in place, yet Rochester’s experiment in citizen empowerment — sparked by a mayor, not the grassroots — provides intriguing insights into the validity of Rawls’ theory of justice.

When Bill Johnson was elected mayor in 1994, one of the first initiatives of his administration was Neighbors Building Neighborhoods, or NBN.  As a primary development strategy, the city decided to tap into the energy and knowledge of all of its citizens.  Johnson, the city’s first African-American mayor, was a veteran civil rights activist and neighborhood organizer.  He was determined to do everything in his power to make sure that the minority community was not overlooked.  Moreover, Johnson believed that the city’s largest minorities, African-Americans and Latinos, were fundamentally communal, not individual, and did things for the benefit of the group.  If minorities could plan for their neighborhoods, Johnson was convinced, it would positively affect the broader city.

With the consent of its neighborhood groups, Rochester was organized into ten geographical sectors for planning purposes.  Organizations and citizens in each sector were encouraged to collaborate and envision a future for their neighborhoods, the result being ten action plans with an initial total of 1,450 action steps.  All of the plans were created by the citizens themselves, not professional planners.

People were encouraged to dream when they created their plans, but not with an anything-goes, pie-in-the-sky attitude because they were also responsible for managing the implementation of their plans.

To ensure the plans were grounded in reality, the city administration set an eighteen-month horizon.  After eighteen months, each sector plan was revisited, revised, or redone.  The city also introduced the notion of partners.  Proposals were allowed only if the citizen planners could identify a partner or partners who would sign a form in support of the project.  An idea could go into an action plan only if citizens could identify resources to fund the idea and had a committed partnership to help implement it.  This forced the entire NBN process to focus on outcomes, not general goals.  On average, nearly 80 percent of each plan’s activities were completed during the lifespan of Neighbors Building Neighborhoods.

NBN valued the here and now, and this was reflected in the neighborhood plans.   The first NBN plans in 1995 focused on quality of life issues — trash pickups, building code violations, and the like — which related to police issues like drug houses and petty crime.  The result was the creation of Neighborhood Empowerment Teams of police, citizens, and city code inspectors to strictly enforce regulations against nuisances such as graffiti, unmowed lawns, vehicles parked in yards, poorly maintained exteriors, excessive noise, and illegal drug sales.

As people got into the nitty-gritty of planning, they identified a number of common concerns focused on zoning.  In response, beginning in 2000, the city re-wrote its zoning code.  This involved over 120 public forums over a three-year period.  Rochester’s citizen-developed zoning code provided the regulatory and legal basis for attaining and maintaining the healthy neighborhoods envisioned in the NBN plans.  It included standards for higher density mixed-use development; delineation of urban village areas; pedestrian-oriented development; flexible adaptive reuse; flexible parking provisions; a streamlined permitting process; more objective code enforcement; and incentives for public art and great design.

The ten NBN sectors were able to leverage private partnerships and funding to accomplish many things the city otherwise might not have been able to afford, such as  new playgrounds, street furniture, public art, neighborhood resource centers, neighborhood festivals, street cleanups, neighborhood marketing initiatives, nearly 300 community gardens, neighborhood business incubators, and a land trust.

Through the Neighbors Building Neighborhoods process, the city and residents developed comprehensive reinvestment strategies to bring back grocery shopping options to inner-city neighborhoods.  The plans were presented to retailers resulting in several new full-service supermarkets opening in Rochester’s poorest neighborhoods.

How did NBN involve individuals who traditionally were not engaged in neighborhood associations, block clubs, charettes, or other neighborhood planning activities?  Certainly, Mayor Johnson’s stature as a role model and facilitator in the minority community was an important influence on his constituents.  Johnson not only encouraged people to take charge of their neighborhoods, he also worked to restore the strained relations between police and the minority community and to improve city schools.  People were also impressed that the things they said they wanted and needed through the NBN process were actually being accomplished.   Perhaps the biggest draw — and residents’ most powerful tool — was a say in the city’s budget process.  Through NBN, citizens helped establish spending priorities for Rochester’s annual capital and operating budgets.  All sectors received equitable allocations in the budget, and this largely eliminated mistrust between “downtown interests” and residents of distressed neighborhoods.

Neighbors Building Neighborhoods was not effortless for citizens.  The City of Rochester did not fund the NBN process for more than incidental expenses.  The city saw its role as a partner in implementing the projects in the neighborhood plans, and refused to assume sole responsibility.  City staff went to neighborhood meetings not to direct, but rather serve as resources and facilitators.  The city didn’t choose NBN leadership.  Essentially, the city focused on outcomes rather than control of the details of how to get there.  All that the city really wanted to know was the bottom line: what residents were trying to get out of the process and whether the plans reflected the consensus priorities of the neighborhoods.  The city, in turn, provided citizen planners with all the tools it possibly could.

The NBN sectors were linked by a city-run NeighborLink computer network, providing access to city databases, GIS mapping software, 3-D virtual planning tools, secure e-mail, and a file management system.  A team of volunteers, or community technology leaders, worked with the city to maintain and update the network.  A Neighbors Building Neighborhoods Institute, administered by the city and a local college, offered citizens free training in leadership, community organizing, and technical planning skills.  Graduation from the NBN Institute was a great celebration.  For many residents, it was the only diploma they had ever received, and it put them on demonstrably equal footing with neighborhood leaders and nonprofit managers when it came to neighborhood planning and organizing through NBN.

As residents became more savvy planners, their focus broadened to major efforts to rebuild the city’s waterfronts and the gateway streets which linked neighborhoods.  In these and virtually every other project in which the city was involved — at every step of the way, from beginning to end — citizens and their partners were at the table in a decision-making capacity.

A critical analysis of the Neighbors Building Neighborhoods process by Cornell University in 2006 found that, “numerous milestones have been achieved.  Through NBN, hundreds of neighborhood projects have come to fruition, while many others have broken ground.  These projects include physical improvements, beautification projects, the construction of new schools and stores, better public services, and increased public safety measures.  NBN also received awards for its successful neighborhood revitalization efforts, and is recognized as a model of best practices.”

The level of change through NBN effectively forced markets to adjust.  Many nonprofits, for example, allocated their funds based on the NBN plans.  American cities, with their chronically precarious finances, routinely work cooperatively with multiple nonprofit agencies to provide many programs and services to residents.  Nonprofits, like city administrations, may have agendas that don’t meaningfully engage residents.  In Rochester, however, nonprofits got the message that they didn’t have to go out and do their own planning.  Residents had already determined what they wanted and would support through the NBN plans.  This meant that tens of millions of nonprofit-sector dollars were spent each year the way residents wanted it spent.  Corporations and foundations also got involved on the neighborhood level because the impact of their investments could be quantified against the goals of the neighborhood plans.  Most local universities became involved in the economic development of city neighborhoods through the NBN process, enabling them to conduct research, address specific problems, test their strategies in the real world, and evaluate results — all in partnership with a trained, outcome-oriented citizenry and a supportive city government.

John Rawls asserted that, when truly given the choice, people will choose justice, defined as equality.  Specifically, people will choose to “maximize the expectations of those most disadvantaged” as they try to make a better life for themselves, for the acquisition of wealth is justified only if it results in prosperity for the poor.

In Rochester, after 10 years of NBN, residential property values had risen throughout the city after years of decline, previously segregated neighborhoods were integrating, citizen trust and public confidence in themselves and city government was high, and new relationships were forged between residents of different neighborhoods and between residents, businesses, churches, schools, nonprofits, and city hall.  In other words, people sat at the same table as equals to plan within a structured process that all accepted, and they chose, not to compete, but to create a broader, more equitable prosperity.

Neighbors Building Neighborhoods ended with the retirement of Mayor Bill Johnson in 2006.  To be precise, it was killed by the succeeding city administration.  The demise of NBN, as we shall see, is instructive for understanding political and economic leadership in American cities, where power is rarely shared.

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In the United States, we have religious communities, educational communities, business communities, sports communities, gardening communities, and media communities, especially online media communities.  There is a community for every interest, meaning that such communities foster little common collective ownership of the places in which we live — no real sense of “community”.

Yet the word community retains for Americans a sense of harmony and fellowship and membership in something larger than the sum of many individuals, a safety net of human benevolence.  Herein lies the magic of community: a vision of decency, of looking out for one another, a breathing space from every-man-for-himself competitiveness.

This vision of community became part of the American consciousness during the early decades of the twentieth century in an era of bitter struggles for workers’ rights.  Millions of exploited and exhausted men and women joined together in now-legendary strikes, lockouts, and civil resistance to win basic economic and political liberties in the workplace.  They proved to themselves and to the world that there is such a thing as a common good, that a mutuality of interests is possible, and, indeed, could define America.  A larger, shared community perhaps makes sense only as part of a fight for economic and social equality, which is why the single-interest groups we label as communities sometimes seem little more than glorified social clubs.

Decades of association with special-interest communities have nurtured a sort of national orthodoxy of separateness among Americans rather than a national vision of unity.  Americans now generally accept without too many reservations the notion that a group’s behavior should be guided by a calculation of its own interests, not by some transcendental common good, even if that good is supported by law and accepted morality.  This does not mean that all special-interest communities are rigid and dogmatic.  On the contrary: it’s precisely the ability of such communities to change their focus over time that Americans want to preserve, and a common good with transcendent rights and wrongs is viewed as a threat to this adaptability.

It’s not so much that Americans can’t recognize right from wrong, or that right and wrong are relative, but they don’t trust other people to do the right thing.  We don’t have to be taught that it is a good thing, the right thing, to rescue someone in distress, help a blind person cross the street, and comfort the sick and destitute and bereaved, but we are suspicious that another’s method of doing right will somehow work to our disadvantage, will somehow prevent us from adapting and changing with ease and at will.

The result is not, as one might think, the absolute triumph of the most powerful interests.  Rather, we engage with one another in a tortured contest to reconcile a view of community as self-interest with a view of community as neighborliness — with profound implications for cities.  We see this prominently in debates over, for example, recreational drugs, sexual behavior, gun control, taxes, and welfare.  What activities should be allowed or restricted, by whom, and who should pay?  The polar differences in our conceptions of community get expressed spatially in what philosopher Michel Foucault called “zones of disorder” into which people are forced, unintentionally but inexorably, by the prohibitions of law or by the morality of religious institutions.  American cities harbor multiple zones of disorder inhabited by single mothers, drug gangs, and the poor, especially the minority poor.

Our deep mistrust of the motives of others coincides with our high anxiety over disorder, one feeds on the other.  Americans of means and privilege surround themselves with people they trust and isolate disorder geographically, meaning few will escape the urban zones of disorder and more people likely will be pushed in.

Capitalism, of course, plays a role in how we envision community.  Widespread homeownership — the proverbial American dream — is one example.  Millions of individually-owned private homes have allowed the United States to escape the concentration of property ownership in the hands of a few that historically has threatened free government and free commerce worldwide.  Home ownership is also the basis of our consumer society.  But high rates of home ownership have also contributed to a stratified society.  Tell me your address and I can guess with high accuracy your income, skin color, and quality of your public schools.  Capitalism, in other words, provides social equality only in the minimum measure necessary to maintain economic productivity and growth.

Americans are conditioned to think in terms of results or payoffs.  Our efforts are valuable if they enhance profits, expand markets, and boost productivity.  This is because we understand that companies are not in business to demonstrate a social purpose, but to make money.  Yet we insist on trying to transform our corporations into instruments of social policy.  Do we want companies to help society by lowering the price of pharmaceuticals or by manufacturing more energy-efficient appliances?  Then show them how doing so will achieve one of those three payoffs.  We may not talk explicitly about morals or values or a common good, yet we desperately want to increase the number of values that businesses and society share.  Americans proved through their struggles, for example, that an educated populace provides a more employable workforce, and that racism and sexism cannot lead to higher corporate earnings.  We continually push our businesses to allocate their capital and other resources in ways that bring economic interests more in line with social interests.  But it is naïve to expect zones of disorder ever to disappear exclusively through economic development, as currently practiced, because resource allocation is fundamentally a function of attitude or outlook or ideology or worldview, however you wish to label it — and this brings us back to community.

If community means self-interest, then the acquisition of private benefits will be an end in itself.  If community means a shared future in which everyone has a stake, then profits will be tied to that future rather than to the next quarter’s bottom line, and it becomes possible to think in terms of a sustained general independence rather than places of privilege and pockets of disorder.

Community, ultimately, is the driver of change because our definition of community sets the parameters for how resources are distributed in the market: what we sanction, legally and morally, and, more important, perhaps, what we prohibit.

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“The expansion of suburbia and migration from the South has worsened big-city segregation,” wrote Martin Luther King, Jr. in 1967. “The suburbs are a white noose around the black necks of cities… suburbs expand with little regard for what happens to the rest of America.”

During the 1960s, the United States experienced what is widely acknowledged to have been the longest uninterrupted economic boom in its history.  Rev. Dr. King watched rural Southern blacks move to Eastern and Midwestern cities in search of jobs, swelling the African-American population of these cities by as much as three-fold.  As opportunity-seeking blacks migrated to cities, whites moved to the suburbs for even greater opportunities, and King deduced a cause-and-effect relationship: the nearly-all-white suburbs were growing at the expense of the increasingly-black cities.  King believed the demographic impulse of blacks-in/whites-out fostered economic inequality and was morally wrong.

But, really, why should the suburbs be concerned about urban and rural areas, materially or otherwise?

Suburban expansion has created economic opportunity for millions of Americans: new homes, new roads, new stores, new schools, all of which have to be built and supported, creating not only construction jobs, but a multiplier effect of related opportunities in banking, insurance, manufacturing, distributorships, legal work, repair and maintenance services, and so on.  Suburbanization, in other words, ramped up the competitiveness of existing markets and created entirely new consumer markets.  Think of the single-family home with its multiple-car garage, indoor electronic entertainment center, and backyard crammed with play equipment, swimming pool, barbecue grill, fire pit, garden, and other diversions, all of which keeps the economy humming and creates job opportunities for everyone.  True, suburban growth is girded by government subsidies for infrastructure, schools, and home mortgages, but U.S. taxpayers support such massive public investment because suburban living — neither city nor country — is deeply appealing to them personally.  So where’s the exploitation?

A fundamental tenet of mainstream economics is that when markets are competitive, there is a balanced match of buyers and sellers, prices and wages are fair, and, therefore, there can be no exploitation of some by others.  One of the problems with such reasoning is that we do not start out equal in the labor market.  Family circumstances matter.  The income of families into which children are born is extraordinarily important for the quality of the public schools they attend.  Parents with higher incomes also have more time to interact with their children in ways that stimulate higher academic achievement: one-on-one reading, for example.  After that, accumulated wealth kicks in.  Wealthier parents may fund their children’s college tuition and initial mortgage payments so the kids can live in upscale neighborhoods and benefit from the same advantages the parents had as children.  If by chance you are born into a deprived background, your prospects for a job with decent earnings and decent benefits and enough money to invest in a home and an education for you and your children are going to be more limited.  Your job options, income, accumulated wealth, and even your life expectancy cannot be expected to reach those of, say, an engineer or attorney.

People are born and grow up in a very unequal world, a condition painfully evident in American metropolitan areas.  One result of the massive population shifts in American cities and suburbs, as Martin Luther King, Jr. pointed out, is inequality in income and living standards, in access to opportunities and basic services such as a quality public education, and in participation in civic and political life.  A 2008 United Nations study found that major American cities, including Atlanta, New Orleans, Washington, D.C., Miami, and New York, have levels of inequality as high as those of Abidjan, Nairobi, Buenos Aires, Santiago, and other Third World cities.

The creation and reproduction of inequality, by definition, means that someone must be deprived or excluded or otherwise treated unfairly.  If the white, suburban, middle-class homeowner represents the well-oiled pivot of the wheel of American metropolitan life, then the black, urban, poor renter is the worn rim — and this brings us to the question of race.

The anthropologist Ashley Montagu studied historical and contemporary encounters of different peoples, often in situations of inequality, and concluded, “the conception that there are natural or biological races of mankind differing from one another mentally as well as physically is an idea which was not developed until the latter part of the eighteenth century.”  For example, there was certainly knowledge of blacks in the Roman world and, as a result of the pilgrimages to the Holy Land, in medieval Europe, but there was no color consciousness.  The ancient Romans may have considered people outside their empire to be barbarians and medieval Europeans may have regarded non-Christians as infidels, but they did not make social distinctions based on physical appearance.

Race, therefore, is a recent historical phenomenon — and an invented one.

The first methodical hierarchy of races was devised by Swedish botanist Carolus Linnaeus in the 1700s.  In 1735, Linnaeus published his dozen-page Systema Naturae, which categorized animals, plants, and minerals by kingdoms, classes, orders, genre, and species.  Linneaus expanded the number of animate and inanimate objects he classified throughout his life.  A 1766 edition of his work reached over 2000 pages and divided humans into five races: Americanus, Europeaeus, Asiaticus, and Africanus, so-called for the parts of the world in which they originated, and Monstrosus, the race of sub-human and mythological creatures such as the satyr and wolfman.

Linneaus classified the elements of nature according to their “observable” aspects, which, for human races, included physical traits such as skin color and facial features, and also character judgments such as “opinionated”, “arbitrary”, and “law abiding”.

According to Linneaus, Africanus is “phlegmatic,” “crafty,” “indolent,” and “negligent,” and, Asiaticus is “lurid,” “melancholy,” “fatuous,” and “avaricious” — all negative characteristics.   Europeaeus, by contrast, is “gentle,” “mentally acute,” “inventive,” and “governed by laws”.

The sense of hierarchy and mastery with Europeans at the top was not confined to Carolus Linnaeus or the natural sciences at this time.  In 1776, British philosopher Adam Smith published the Wealth of Nations, which proclaimed, among other things, the roles of the division of labor, competition, and free trade in increasing wealth.  The industrial revolution was underway, new types of jobs were being created by new technologies in new industries, production was increasing rapidly, and British firms were looking for new markets and new sources of raw materials beyond their nation’s borders.

It was painless for Adam Smith and his followers to preach the virtues of competition and free trade since the advancement of British industry, the unparalleled technological advantage that it was building, ensured that increasing competition and dismantling trade barriers between Britain and the rest of the world would not hurt British industry.  Britain’s comparatively low costs of production gave it an overwhelming advantage over any competitor.  As the wealth of capitalists grew in Britain and other European nations, so did colonialism and the subjugation of people of color and their territories’ natural resources.  Competition came to mean a European nation or industry trampling a less powerful population.  And free trade didn’t necessarily mean free or fair for everyone; the goal was never to level the playing field, but tilt it in favor of the economically powerful.

The powerful drew upon racial and other classifications to justify their domination and exploitation, both domestically and internationally.  Moreover, the classification of people allowed (and still allows) the powerful to exploit others, but recognize it as benignity.  Thus, Africans were “backward” because of their inferior technological achievements, retrograde cultural and political accomplishments, and personal indolence, and “free” trade would bring them up to modern standards.  Similarly, the urban poor were and are never poor because they got a poor start in life, but because they were lazy, had too many children, didn’t marry, drank excessively, and caroused their money away, and, therefore, they are damn lucky to get any low-paying jobs or public welfare.  And women were and remain considered unsuitable for many jobs, especially managerial jobs.

Clearly, any classification — racial, economic, or whatever — is a useful instrument for those doing the classifying.  In modern nations, we have come to view classification as an unavoidable and perfectly acceptable way of making sense of social situations.

Sociology as the empirical study of the behavior of groups of people was born around the time of Carolus Linneaus and Adam Smith, and it is reasonable to claim that the understanding and documenting of differences between peoples was its foundational idea.

The classical writers in sociology, most of whom studied “primitive” peoples, defined difference in many ways, but there was always an implicit, if not normative, sense of direction and improvement: that some people, some ways of living were less evolved, less advanced than others, but that with proper guidance they could be shepherded by enlightened Europeans and Americans into the modern age.  Emile Durkheim wrote of mechanical versus organic solidarity; Karl Marx of pre-capitalist social formations as opposed to capitalist ones; the German sociologist Ferdinand Toennies distinguished between what he called gemeinschaft and gesellschaft, or community and individual self-interest; Max Weber contrasted modern rational and non-rational belief systems; Henry Maine differentiated between traditional societies organized by custom and status on the one hand and their modern counterparts where law and contract were enforced.  Later social scientists have described clashes of power relationships and shown how they can marginalize certain groups from mainstream society: for Franz Fanon, it is the colonized who are marginalized; for Michel Foucault, prisoners and the mentally ill; for Edward Said, Islam and Moslems; and for William Julius Wilson, inner-city African-Americans.

The classification of people as advantaged and disadvantaged, or powerful and powerless, or exploiter and exploited, or modern and traditional, or superior and inferior remains a major undercurrent, if not obsession, for sociology and social thought in general.

As a result, we are conditioned to observe the world in terms of us versus them.  Dominant attitudes, behaviors, and beliefs are the standards for normalcy, and this helps explain the longevity of classifications of people.

Not only are we are accustomed through our social science training to seek out differences between groups of people, but the popular media impose values on these differences.  Normalcy, in America, is a realm of upper-class lawyers and doctors and physically-thin and impeccably-dressed suburban wives that is impressed on the masses through prime time television.  And how does a person who does not — cannot — partake of that world measure herself?  As an underachiever?  Abnormal?  A failure?  Media stereotypes persist because of unwritten hierarchies; in fact, stereotypes would make no sense, would be impossible to construct and perpetuate, without pre-existing classifications of people.

The extraordinary degree of insecurity to which American workers are subjected is also a central factor in the perpetuation of racism and discrimination: the fear of impoverishment or bankruptcy, for example, resulting from unemployment or having to take a lower-paying job, thus making it harder to pay the bills.  Not surprisingly, then, there are attempts to limit eligibility to compete for particular jobs or buy property in particular neighborhoods.  Workers may support restrictions to keep out immigrants, for example, because they believe labor markets will be tighter and wages will be higher than they would be otherwise.  The middle-class may try to regulate the lower class from their neighborhoods to protect property values, the largest chunk of their savings.

Status insecurity is also part of the mix, for there is a status hierarchy closely tied to one’s job and income.  Lawyers, doctors, property owners, and some teachers enjoy positive social status based on their professions; gardeners, plumbers, delivery persons, and most contract workers do not.  Furthermore, those who possess status frequently feel they would morally degrade themselves by mixing socially with those who do not.

Ultimately, Americans express their superiority geographically.

If we can, we move to “better” neighborhoods, with better schools, better amenities, better housing, and people who share our status or the status to which we aspire.  Since there is always someone lower on the hierarchy, there will always be reasons for people of almost any means to flee.

The market, of course, reacts to population shifts in metro areas.  For example, the environmental health of a neighborhood gets incorporated into home values.  In most cities, the price of houses in areas with air pollution, traffic congestion, noise, and crime are lower than in areas without, all other things being equal.  The way real estate markets function ensures that polluted and dangerous areas are more affordable, so it shouldn’t be a surprise that poor people find themselves living next to toxic waste dumps or busy freeways or airport runways or drug houses.  The goal of capitalism is to make a profit, and attempts by cities to force capital to heed race or gender or ethnicity through, for example, hiring schemes or affordable housing requirements or environmental justice audits are destined to have limited success.

As a result, American cities may celebrate their diversity, but they will never celebrate their equality.  Local zoning may encourage ethnic shops and markets, mixed-income housing, and public spaces where people from all walks of life have the opportunity to interact.  But the better-off will continue to see themselves as achieving prosperity by virtue of their individual efforts, even though the difference the individual makes is negligible because people, ultimately, are formed socially by family, schools, and work.

In other words, life is unfair and inequality will continue, even with the welfare state and its goal of equal opportunity for all.  True equality of opportunity depends on equality of family resources, impossible with capitalism and, therefore, implausible with the best zoning and the most enlightened sustainable development.

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“The modern world confuses very practiced thinkers,” future President Woodrow Wilson cautioned the Princeton graduating class of 1905.  “Things new and old jostle one another in our day and live in no peace or concord, arrange no modus vivendi among them.  The new do not seem to have sprung from the old…  We seek to regulate our lives and are baffled.  Law will not come at our bidding or merely because of our need.  No sufficient rule of guidance seems to be anywhere discoverable.”

Wilson wasn’t sure what the graduates could rely on to face the complicated, bewildering world they were about to enter.  Certainly not the certainty that accompanies tradition or custom or habit.  Yet, Wilson, speaking over a century ago, when far more people traveled by horse than automobile, had no doubt that the world he and his students inhabited was “modern”.  Unwittingly, his commencement address captured precisely what makes the modern world modern: not only its technology and attitudes, but especially its transience, contingency, and impermanence.  Moreover, Wilson presumed, perhaps wistfully, that the modern world, despite its ambiguity and discontinuity, should provide an orientation and sense of purpose to human affairs, a law to follow, a rule, a guide, a basis for planning one’s life.

The term “modern” and its variations such as modernizing, modernization, and modernity are among the most common and most important points of reference in human life.  We speak about modern cars, houses, music, medicine, technology, and way of life.  The word modern sets the stage for our understanding of ourselves and our relationship to the world around us.  As our opinions, principles, achievements, and beliefs shift, so does the meaning of modern; in turn, our perceptions of the modern influence our thoughts and actions.

What, then, does it mean to be modern?  One hundred years ago, the modern might have been signaled by the telephone, paid vacation, and urban living; and fifty years ago, by the television, automobile, and suburb.  Today, it includes the internet, genetic engineering, and space travel.  On the other hand, heirloom plants are now in vogue for the most fashionable gardens.  Organic foods command a premium price over pesticide-treated foods.  The market for “traditional” and “natural” remedies to health problems is booming.  A sure-fire way to sell a newly-built house is to claim it was assembled with “old-fashioned craftsmanship”, meaning with all but lost care and skill.  And American real estate developments are designed to resemble neighborhoods of a hundred years ago.  In other words, being contemporary or claiming superiority over the past is not quite enough to rank a person, product, or action as modern.

There are, of course, more weighty examples.  The British monarchy is considered more modern than roughly coeval Islamic fundamentalism, but an anachronism compared to democracy, which is at least a thousand years older.  Queen Victoria surely considered herself and her ideas as modern, as did Woodrow Wilson, Michael Faraday, Clark Gable, Susan B. Anthony, and Frederick Douglass.  In their eras, they represented for their contemporaries the latest politics, technology, fashion, society, and activism; that is, the modern way of life.  They were modern, just as we were are modern, because, through their words, practices, and comportment, they embraced not just change but change that was dynamic in particular ways.

How we understand change explains, for example, why scientific evidence has primacy in modern debates or why the suburban house came to represent the modern American lifestyle — it explains, in other words, why we are modern.

Change, to be modern, must emancipate.

In his autobiography, Long Walk to Freedom, Nelson Mandela recounts his dedication to ending the brutal, racist reality of modern South Africa, and evocatively captures the numerous, often mutually-supportive senses of emancipation.

“I knew that I would spend my life in the liberation struggle”, Mandela wrote.  “To be African in South Africa means that one is polarized from the moment of one’s birth…  An African child is born in an African Only hospital, taken home in an African Only bus, lives in an African Only area, and attends African Only schools, if he attends school at all.  When he grows up, he can hold African Only jobs, rent a house in African Only townships, ride in African Only trains, and be stopped at any time of the day or night and be ordered to produce a pass, failing at which he will be arrested and thrown in jail.  His life is circumscribed by racist laws and regulations that cripple his growth, dim his potential, and stunt his life”.

Clearly, Mandela understood that modern change emancipates politically through the achievement of political rights and the broadening of democracy that would replace apartheid.  Political emancipation was also at the heart of the United States government’s nation-building policies in Iraq and Afghanistan.  It assumes religious emancipation so that all can enjoy political rights regardless of faith.  But the modern understanding of political emancipation also means reducing the power of the few over the many in wider contexts.  This includes the equal treatment under the law of men and women, minorities and whites, citizens and immigrants in public places and at work, as well an end to patriarchal practices, such as arranged marriages, male-biased inheritance, and gender-based discrimination in education.  Political emancipation, in other words, involves ending political oppression and reducing inequalities with and towards unleashing material emancipation.

To be modern, to be emancipated materially, means to live in a society and economy that allows efficiency and choice.  Modern life, in the home or workplace, strives towards efficiency — doing more with less — particularly less labor.  Choice is also expanded.  For example, the goods available in a supermarket of today are of such greater diversity and consistent quality as to be virtually incomparable with what was available in a grocery store fifty years ago.  This goes beyond the ability to purchase at any time of day meat from Argentina, marmalade from Britain, coffee from Kenya, or local bread made from flour milled in Kansas.  It goes beyond being able to plan a tropical-themed party in mid-winter in Manhattan, confident that fresh pineapples and mangoes will be readily available.  Material emancipation means allowing farmers to use modern management practices and technologies that help them produce food as efficiently as possible, while expanding consumer choice.  This has proven the best way to reduce hunger and raise nutritional standards worldwide.

The production of foodstuffs is but one example.  More broadly, emancipation in the modern sense means the improvement of material conditions for the vast majority, especially through state reforms and allowing people to exercise choices they were previously forbidden to exercise.  As material emancipation and political emancipation align in the modern world, material ends often merge with the symbolic ends of being on an equal footing with others: being able to practice one’s religion like others, earning comparable wages for similar jobs, and so on.  The job title becomes as important as the pay check; the head scarf a symbol of self-expression as well as religious identity.  The individual, in other words, becomes the fundamental building block of society.

Modern change also means emancipation from ignorance.  We are convinced that modern knowledge processes, based on objective observation, statistical analysis, experimentation, and publicly verifiable evidence provide us with a heightened level of understanding of the world.  Indeed, they provide the keys to unlock the secrets of nature, the instruments to solve vexing practical problems.  These cumulative knowledge processes, in which discoveries become the basis of subsequent investigations, allowed humans in the arc of a few generations to travel to the planets, develop pharmaceuticals to control diseases, invent machines to alleviate drudgery, and, in general, create new standards and new norms of well being.

However, the rate of emancipatory change is rarely constant.  As our knowledge shifts, sometimes as rapidly as year to year, so do our relations to others and to the world.  Modern life is defined by struggles for workers’ rights, women’s rights, environmental justice, and the rights of oppressed ethnic and racial groups, as well as the underlying concept of human rights, that is, the idea novel to the modern world that rights are attached to the individual human being.  These rights are justified because the modern world is also distinguished by nationalism and colonialism, industrialized killing, and institutional racism — to which we might add global warming, political lobbyists, megacities, megaslums, suburban sprawl, and a redefinition of the family from extended family to nuclear family to a person living in a series of monogamous relationships.

None of this could happen, of course, without the rapidly expanding ability of human beings to produce more.  Capitalism, in other words, is implicated in virtually all change that we consider emancipatory and modern.  The pressures of relentless competition, making a profit, nudging others aside to get ahead, and making a space for oneself in an ever-more-crowded marketplace of products and ideas alters both social space and geographic space.  We have to go where the jobs are because we have to make a living; at the same time, we also want to define an identity with which to express ourselves and against which to measure others.  So as people and investments shift, places grow or decline, winners and losers are made, and struggles to position oneself in modern space ensue.

Modern change is contradictory, and the contradictions are built into our thought processes.  We haven’t yet figured out how to gain except at someone else’s expense or how to reduce waste to a minimum, and so we interpret the world around us in terms of conceptual opposites: haves and have-nots; First World and Third World; less-developed and more-developed countries; even, good and evil.

Consider urbanized areas.  A fault line of modernity runs between the cities and suburbs where most Americans live.  We understand our cities and suburbs in terms of polarities: urban decay and suburban growth, urban crime and suburban safety, urban poverty and suburban wealth, and, notably, urban black and suburban not-black.  Wall Street and Main Street are becoming the newest polarities in the United States, as public policymaking seems increasingly marginal as a way to keep families or places intact.

The contradictions endure, in part, because complexity can destroy value as easily as add value.  As knowledge accumulates — one generation’s learning becoming the basis for the next’s — the world around us appears more layered, more complex, more nuanced, and nearly impossible to unravel.  It is often difficult to distinguish between correlation and causation, between risk and benefit, between push and pull.  Is a drug effective?  Is climate change really a concern?  Is poverty a personal or societal shortcoming?  Is sprawl a net gain or loss?

The modern world seems a perpetually contested ground by those demanding rights or profits or attention, but perhaps the struggle that defines the modern world is even more fundamental.  In 1953, writer William Faulkner expressed his exasperation to a college graduating class.  “What’s wrong with this world”, Faulkner observed, “is, it’s not finished yet.  It is not completed to the point where man can put his final signature to the job and say, ‘It’s finished. We made it and it works.’”  Faulkner’s sense that the modern world is not yet fully developed, is in need of something more, hasn’t yet reached its potential, and is, thus, incomplete, describes a state of being into which all modern humans are inserted at the moment of birth.  As school children we are taught to follow specific steps to formulate and answer questions about the world around us: observe, predict, experiment, and verify.  This would not make sense if we didn’t believe we could improve upon the present, if we did not regard the world and the future as malleable concepts for us to shape.  And so we love our city plans, business plans, and feasibility studies, commissioned to improve our physical world, and our self-help books, purchased to improve our spiritual lives — how to counter stress, keep fit, manage time, live for a century, be a better photographer/parent/lover/planner, etc.

We know we can always do better with our cities, our commerce, and ourselves, and thus we can envision no end to modernity.  There is and never will be a “post-modern”, only an improved and improving modern.

Inescapably, we all are, and always will be, modern

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