Democracy and City Life

Politics, Philosophy & Economics

Volumn 3, Issue 1, 2004, Pages 97-124

  King, Loren A ^a  

^a BROWN UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

cities; citizenship; democracy; difference; eminent domain; new urbanism

Indexed keywords

EID: 34248052549     PISSN: 1470594X     EISSN: 17413060     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/1470594X04039984     Document Type: Article

References (36)

1. Iris Marion Young, Justice and the Politics of Difference (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990), pp. 234, 237.
2. Iris Marion Young, Inclusion and Democracy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), Ch. 6, especially pp. 204–28.
3. Alan Ryan, ‘The City as a Site for Free Association’, in Freedom of Association, edited by Amy Gutmann (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998): pp. 314–29. See also Richard Sennett, ‘The Spaces of Democracy’, Harvard Design Magazine (summer 1999): 68-72.
4. Susan Bickford, ‘Constructing Inequality: City Spaces and the Architecture of Citizenship’, Political Theory 28 (2000): 356, 371.
5. Gerald E. Frug, ‘The City as a Legal Concept’, Harvard Law Review 93 (1980): 1059-154; Engin F. Isin, Cities without Citizens: Modernity of the City as a Corporation (Montreal: Black Rose, 1992).
6. Georg Simmel, ‘The Metropolis and City Life’, in Georg Simmel on Individuality and Social Forms: Selected Writings, edited by Donald N. Levine (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1971): pp. 324–48; Richard Sennett, The Uses of Disorder: Personal Identity and City Life (New York: Norton, 1970).
7. Simmel, ‘The Metropolis and City Life’.
8. Louis Wirth, ‘Urbanism as a Way of Life’, American Journal of Sociology 44 (1938): 15.
9. I follow a common practice of using ‘race’, ‘racial’, ‘black’, ‘white’, and ‘Hispanic’ in reference to groups whose members are united by superficial ascriptive traits (most notably skin color) and shared historical experiences (most obviously legacies of oppression and discrimination, but also shared cultural symbols and traditions).
10. Compare Richard Sennett, Conscience of the Eye: The Design and Social Life of Cities (New York: Norton, 1990), pp. 132–7.
11. John Rawls, Political Liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), pp. 212–54; ‘The Idea of Public Reason Revisited’, University of Chicago Law Review 64 (1997): 765-807.
12. Amy Gutmann and Dennis Thompson, Democracy and Disagreement (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), pp. 52–164.
13. Frug, ‘The City as a Legal Concept’.
14. See Myron Orfield, Metropolitics: A Regional Agenda for Community and Stability (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution, 1997).
15. See Vicki Been, ‘Locally Undesirable Land Uses in Minority Neighborhoods: Disproportionate Siting or Market Dynamics?’, Yale Law Journal 103 (1994): 1383-422.
16. See, for instance, Michael R. Greenberg, ‘Improving Neighborhood Quality: A Hierarchy of Needs’, Housing Policy Debate 10 (1999): 601-24.
17. On the complex interplay between historical legacies of racial discrimination, on the one hand, and persistent disparities with respect to accumulated wealth, neighborhood quality, and life chances, on the other, see Melvin L. Oliver and Thomas M. Shapiro, Black Wealth, White Wealth: A New Perspective on Racial Inequality (New York: Routledge, 1995) and Dalton Conley, Being Black, Living in the Red: Race, Wealth, and Social Policy in America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999).
18. See Wilson, The Truly Disadvantaged and When Work Disappears: The World of the New Urban Poor (New York: Knopf, 1996); Alex-Assensoh, ‘Myths about Race and the Underclass’; Elijah Anderson, Code of the Street: Decency, Violence, and the Moral Life of the Inner City (New York: Norton, 1999).
19. Again, see Conley, Being Black, Living in the Red. See also Wilson, The Truly Disadvantaged, pp. 60–1; Philip Moss and Chris Tilly, Stories Employers Tell: Race, Skill, and Hiring in America (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2001), pp. 209–48; Keith R. Ihlanfeldt, ‘Information on the Spatial Distribution of Job Opportunities within Metropolitan Areas’, Journal of Urban Economics 41 (1997): 218-42.
20. On class homogeneity and declining political engagement in suburban areas, see J. Eric Oliver, ‘The Effects of Metropolitan Economic Segregation on Local Civic Participation’, American Journal of Political Science 43 (1999): 186-212. More generally, consider J. Eric Oliver, ‘City Size and Civic Involvement in Metropolitan America’, American Political Science Review 94 (2000): 361-73.
21. On such spatial patterning (but also the economic heterogeneity and growing income disparities among black Americans) and the enduring legacies of discriminatory zoning and mortgage financing facing affluent black families, see Bart Landry, The New Black Middle Class (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987); Mary Pattillo-McCoy, Black Picket Fences: Privilege and Peril among the Black Middle Class (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1999) and ‘The Limits of Out-Migration for the Black Middle Class’, Journal of Urban Affairs 22 (2000): 225-42; Bruce D. Haynes, Red Lines, Black Spaces: The Politics of Race and Space in a Black Middle-Class Suburb (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001).
22. See, respectively, Witold Rybczynski, City Life (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1995) and Douglas S. Massey and Nancy A. Denton, American Apartheid: Segregation and the Making of the Underclass (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), especially pp. 17–59, 88-114.
23. Sennett, The Uses of Disorder, pp. 68–73.
24. Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities (New York: Random House, 1961).
25. Sennett, The Uses of Disorder, p. 133.
26. For a sense of this possibility, and associated tensions, see Charles Taylor, ‘The Politics of Recognition’, in Multiculturalism: Examining the Politics of Recognition, edited by Amy Gutmann (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994), pp. 25–73; Thomas M. Scanlon, ‘The Difficulty of Tolerance’, in Toleration: an Elusive Virtue, edited by David Heyd (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996), pp. 226–39.
27. Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991), p. 319.
28. See James Howard Kunstler, Home from Nowhere: Remaking our Everyday World for the Twentieth Century (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996).
29. David Harvey, Spaces of Hope (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), pp. 164–79.
30. See David Sibley, Geographies of Exclusion: Society and Difference in the West (London: Routledge, 1995); Lyn H. Lofland, The Public Realm: Exploring the City's Quintessential Social Territory (New York: Aldine de Gruyter, 1998), pp. 208 ff.
31. On this idea, especially in municipal settings, see Archon Fung and Eric Olin Wright, ‘Deepening Democracy: Innovations in Empowered Participatory Governance’, Politics and Society 29 (2001): 5-42; and also Joshua Cohen and Charles Sabel, ‘Directly Deliberative Polyarchy’, European Law Journal 3 (1997): 313-42. These arguments are framed in light of several successful recent deliberative reforms, most notably innovations in community policing and school management in Chicago, and participatory strategies for setting priorities for the municipal budget in Porto Alegre, Brazil. On these cases see, respectively, Archon Fung, ‘Accountable Autonomy: Toward Empowered Deliberation in Chicago Schools and Policing’, Politics and Society 29 (2001): 73-104, and Rebecca Abers, ‘From Clientelism to Cooperation: Local Government, Participatory Policy, and Civic Organizing in Porto Alegre, Brazil’, Politics and Society 26 (1998): 511-37.
32. For more detail of the organization and mission of the DSNI, see www.dsni.org (URL last consulted 25 July 2002). For a history of the initiative, see Peter Medoff and Holly Sklar, Streets of Hope: The Fall and Rise of an Urban neighborhood (Boston, MA: South End Press, 1994).
33. Relevant here are recent explorations of feasible schemes of regional governance in US metropolitan areas: see Young, Inclusion and Democracy; Peter Dreier, John Mollenkopf and Todd Swanstrom, Place Matters: Metropolitics for the Twenty- First Century (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2001); Gerald E. Frug, ‘Beyond Regional Government’, Harvard Law Review 115 (2002): 1763-836; Myron Orfield, American Metropolitics: The New Suburban Reality (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution, 2002).
34. Medoff and Sklar, Streets of Hope, pp. 147–58.
35. For instance, Joseph E. Stiglitz and Andrew Weiss, ‘Credit Rationing in Markets with Imperfect Information’, American Economic Review 71 (1981): 393-410 suggest that, where too little information is available for lenders to distinguish lowfrom high-risk borrowers, credit will be rationed, leaving excess demand. Under imperfect information, lenders will set interest rates below the market clearing rate, reasoning that demand for credit at higher rates suggests either that the borrower accepts the high rate because she has a low expected probability of repayment (adverse selection) or that, in accepting the higher rate of interest, she will choose a correspondingly riskier investment than she might otherwise select, in an effort to achieve enough of an increase in return to compensate for the higher cost of credit (moral hazard).
36. For an elaboration of this point, see Loren A. King, ‘Democratic Hopes in the Polycentric City’, Journal of Politics 61 (2004): 203-23.