Review of Michael Storper’s Keys to the City and ruce Katz and Jennifer Bradley’s celebratory The Metropolitan Revolution
Now a surfeit of urban books chime in with words like “triumph,” “great,” and “creative” in their titles. Their authors offer up lessons to help already successful cities stay on top and less successful ones figure out how to get in on the game. What most of these books don’t provide is much recognition that the whole competitive show may not be getting us anywhere—indeed, that it may be making people worse off.
- First, I turn to Bruce Katz and Jennifer Bradley’s celebratory The Metropolitan Revolution: How Cities and Metros Are Fixing Our Broken Politics and Fragile Economy. Katz and Bradley (both of the Brookings Institution) are not just celebrants of new-found approaches to urban come-back, they are, yes, you read it right, “revolutionaries.” Whence comes this revolution? It is fed, first off, by bodies. For the first time in history, a majority of humans live in cities and their surrounding suburbs (together, the metros). This is also where the production action is. At present, about 84 percent of all US exports, and 90 percent of service exports, come from the metros, we are told. There is thus magic in these agglomerations and the trick is to harness that magic, build on it, and transfer it to the more wayward zones, not only in the US but elsewhere in the world as well. This is the authors’ mission and the warrant for the book.
- Michael Storper’s Keys to the City aligns with Bradley and Katz’s search for a recipe to compete in the urban growth system. But Storper is by no means single-minded. Instead, he aims to understand the fundamentals of urban development, out of which—yes—some competitive strategies can be drawn. He carefully culls research from across the social sciences, including some of his own, in order to investigate why cities differ from one another, and how some come authentically to be great economic drivers, centers of all flows, and incubators of innovation. Most remarkably, and in a way that is quite rare, he merges economics, sociology, and geography for the urbanistic task at hand.
Storper clearly shows that it is not size, per se, that drives development, nor is the elixir to be found in some concatenation of jurisdictional make-up. Most large urban areas are not going to be winners and their populations, accordingly, are not going to experience the wealth-rise implied by the more celebratory scenario. He laments the fact of inequality (both within and across places) that the system produces, but considers it to be a built-in tendency. Not all cities are going to be above average. How they end up depends on their location within larger systems of production.