Eleven—
The Hollow Center:
U.S. Cities in the Global Era

Sharon Zukin

Cities graphically represent the disappearing center of American society. Over the past twenty years, they have become both more visible and less important symbols of the economy. Paradoxically, despite enormous efforts at rebuilding, they are less different from each other than they were before. The problems of big cities—crime, drugs, high housing prices, unemployment—are just as familiar in Spokane or Tulsa as in New York City. Meanwhile, the provincial decay of smaller cities has been negated by the spread of television, computers, and imported consumer goods. We ordinarily describe America as an urban society, but most Americans no longer live in cities. They are as likely to find their "center" in the suburban shopping mall or office park as in the downtown financial district. To some degree, Americans have always had a love-hate relationship with cities. Throughout American history the major thinkers and many ordinary men and women have loved the countryside because it offers an escape from social pressures. Cities had their own compensation because they brought a varied population into a common public life. Today, however, the public middle ground that was previously identified with cities is dissolving into a collage of racial, ethnic, and other private communities. At the same time, even cities as commanding as Los Angeles and New York are being "globalized"; that is, they are becoming more dependent on political and economic decisions that are made at the global level.

In 1986, a list of urban trends drawn up for the U.S. Conference of Mayors described a sorry situation: population drain, increased poverty, an income gap between city and suburban residents, gaps among racial groups, long-term unemployment in places where manufacturing has declined and services grow slowly, homelessness, hunger, low education levels, high crime rates, and very high taxes.^[1] Such conditions cannot

be described as anything but structural. Disinvestment by industry and the middle class feeds—and in turn responds to—concentrations of the poor, the ill-educated, and the unemployable. Nonetheless, neither the federal government nor private markets give cities much encouragement. Since the early 1970s, no president of the United States has drawn up an explicit urban policy. Under the Reagan administration, the Department of Housing and Urban Development was used as a patronage arm of the Republican party. The conservative thrust of federalism over the past twenty years has consistently reduced both programs and grants. And during the 1980s, the cities' biggest demands—for social services, public housing, and jobs—were sacrificed to the rhetoric of fiscal purity.

Between the Gramm-Rudman Act of 1985 and the attacks on Big Government by two Reagan administrations, state and local governments were squeezed to only 10 percent of the federal budget. In New York City, the federal government contributed the same amount—$2.5 billion—to an $11 billion municipal budget in 1981 and one that had grown to $27 billion in 1989.

Businesses and households that can afford to move have been leaving cities for many years. Industrial decentralization to the suburbs began a century ago, closely followed by middle-class households seeking "bourgeois utopias." Land is both cheaper and more attractive outside cities. Labor is generally cheaper, too, more docile, less likely to be nonwhite. Restrictions on uses of suburban property also tend to benefit the "haves." Large companies can influence weak suburban governments for preferential zoning and tax laws, and wealthy home owners provide a pressure group for socially exclusive development. In recent years, however, cities have lost jobs and residents to areas farther away. Among households, suburbanization has grown less rapidly since the 1970s than moves to "exurban" locales. Businesses, for their part, have decentralized operations. Many have moved to, or set up branches in, low-wage regions of the country and overseas. To some degree this "footloose capital," as Bluestone and Harrison and others call it, is related to a desire to lower costs and escape the limits imposed by unionization. In part it also reflects a shift from local to nonlocal ownership of firms (as in Buffalo, New York, or Youngstown, Ohio), and an intensification of outsourcing strategies (especially devastating to Detroit). More important, footloose capital also applies to new business start-ups in growth sectors, such as electronics and telecommunications, where manufacturing is likely to be exurban. Once limited only to industrial plants, the outflow of economic activity from cities now includes a significant number of offices and corporate headquarters. The resulting "counter-urbanization" has further reduced most cities' claim to functional pre-eminence in American society.^[2]

Not surprisingly, Americans have been attracted by alternatives to tra-

ditional cities. On the one hand, they increasingly live, work, and shop in exurbs, especially in the Sun Belt, in regions not previously known as centers of urban life. On the other hand, a small but growing middle-class population inhabits the gentrified centers of older cities. Like exurban residents, gentrifiers enjoy the amenities of personal consumption that are typical of a geographically mobile population. But they are tied to the city by a desire for access to its cultural markets as well as its historic symbols of power. In terms of numbers, gentrification has had a much smaller impact on cities than either suburbanization or exurban migration. It has great appeal, however, because like the exurbs, gentrified areas become great spaces of consumption.

Exurbs and gentrified downtowns are important not only because of visible spatial shifts. They are also significant "fictive spaces" in America's social geography. They convey a powerful image of the way many Americans want to live, an image of escape from the constraints of cities and a confirmation of the free movement of both people and investment capital. A simultaneous decentering to the exurbs and recentering of downtowns tear apart the old image of cities as engines of production. A more subtle picture, instead, differentiates among cities according to their position in both the service economy and a new organization of consumption. This new order alters the relation between urban space and economic and cultural power.

Cities and Economic Power

The post-postwar economy has sharpened the effects on cities of global organization. Since the 1970s, the major area of growth—business services—has depended on linking local to multinational firms in expanding markets. While some services have been bought by or have merged with international companies, others seek clients and contracts overseas. This course of development imposes a dual dependence on American cities. The cities rely on the services to fuel further growth, employ residents, and expand the tax base; but the largest employers among local service institutions, as in mass-production manufacturing, are increasingly responsive to global rather than local trends.

These conditions are especially acute in cities whose financial institutions are major players in global markets. New York and Los Angeles, with their large concentrations of international bankers, stock market traders, and foreign investors, owe their growth since the 1970s to globalization. Just as these two cities have the largest number of corporate financial headquarters and other institutional resources, so they also have the tallest office buildings, the highest land values, and the most business expansion in their downtowns. In large part the economic value

of doing business downtown reflects an infusion of foreign property investment. Foreign financial institutions, especially Japanese and other Asian banks, occupy a major portion of downtown office buildings. Not surprisingly, New York and Los Angeles, as major concentrations of the power that moves capital around the world, are considered "world cities." Whether this refers only to their pre-eminent position in global financial markets, or to some index of greater cultural sophistication as well, is unclear.

In some aggregate terms—new employment, for example, or business revenues—the financial, insurance, and real estate industries compensate for cities' losses in traditional manufacturing employment.^[3] Yet aspects of the new economy suggest reasons for alarm. Most of the highly paid, prestigious downtown jobs are held by suburban rather than city residents. Men and women of color, who represent a growing portion of all cities' populations, have not made such inroads into the financial services area as they have into the public sector. Because of the layoffs that follow stock market downturns, all employment in this area is risky. The threat of global financial crisis also imposes risk on many property investments, from office construction to the ownership of "signature" or "trophy" buildings that are designed by famous architects and located in high-rent districts.

The technological revolution in computers and telecommunications that made office decentralization possible also creates the means for local financial institutions to move away. "Back offices" that house computer and routine clerical operations have easily been detached from money-center banks, while headquarters and other "front offices" remain in more central locations. The importance of face-to-face contact and the symbolic legitimacy of place may enhance the city's viability as the site of a world financial market. Yet even in New York, high land prices and high wages for clerical personnel create a potential for the city's being abandoned by financial institutions.^[4]

In cases where banks, stock brokerages, and insurance companies have not moved away, they have destabilized the labor force by shifting from permanent to temporary employment. These arrangements are not limited to cities, of course. Since 1980, temporary employment of all kinds has been the largest growth sector in jobs around the country (as well as overseas). Some temporary positions may pay as well as permanent jobs and may also offer health insurance and other benefits. But by establishing a large number of temporary positions that are outside the normal career stream, financial services organizations create a tenuous base for urban economic development.

Neither do financial services firms recruit widely among the cities' populations. Jobs at the top are often filled through networks estab-

lished in college and business school; these job holders live in gentrified areas downtown or in the suburbs. For the most part, high-level positions are also still restricted by race and gender. When it comes to entry-level jobs requiring lesser skills, urban residents confront another type of barrier. Financial and other business services firms do not find adequate personnel among the city's high school graduates. Lacking training in math, competence in standard interpersonal communication, and skills in dress, deference, and punctuality, young men and women from the city are passed over in favor of suburban youth. Growing opportunities for employment outside cities, however, as well as a shrinking labor pool, cause urban employers much concern. In some cities, notably Boston, the financial community has developed a training-and-recruitment partnership with local high schools. In others, such as New York, this degree of institutional interdependence has not yet grown.^[5]

Some demographically minded researchers speak of these employment problems in terms of a job-skills mismatch, and the structural roots of this analysis also appeal to those who think in terms of a postindustrial economy. They consider that the decline in traditional manufacturing industries drastically reduces the number of entry-level jobs that are available to high school graduates of modest academic achievements. Further, if job requirements in business services emphasize math, interpersonal, and other job skills that urban high school graduates (and dropouts) lack, then the growth of such jobs takes place without benefiting the urban population. The concentration of ethnic and racial minorities in cities, however, introduces a disquieting series of bias questions. According to the job-skills mismatch analysis, urban minority residents are unemployed in the city's growth sector because they are intellectually and culturally unemployable. Their soaring unemployment rates first of all reflect the loss of a base in blue-collar jobs in plants that have moved out of the city or shut their doors. Second, this unemployment reflects the diminishing educational achievements of the urban minority population.^[6]

But the job-skills mismatch explanation of urban unemployment ignores several important factors. At least since the 1950s, many men and women of color have been employed in the service industries. They have generally been steered toward certain areas—notably, personal rather than business services, and the public rather than the private sector—and discouraged from entering others. In recent years, as racial and ethnic minority students have made up greater proportions of urban high school and college graduates, these students have, presumably, gained the qualifications to get financial jobs. At graduation, however, they confront a decreasing number of entry-level jobs, many of which have been shifted overseas or eliminated by automation (for example, insurance claims processors and bank tellers in financial services, telephone opera-

tors in other fields). Further, the hiring process in the financial services area is socially exclusive. It still segregates men from women and people of color from the jobs traditionally held by whites.^[7]

This exclusion of part of the urban population is heightened by their absence, by and large, from another growth area in most cities, the sector of individually owned small businesses that are often identified with ethnic or immigrant entrepreneurs. The ethnic concentrations in most large cities enable businesses that cater to their special needs (such as food and travel services) to succeed in an "enclave economy." Alternatively, the capital that many immigrants have access to by means of self-help or mutual-aid associations often provides a base for those groups to enter various niches in the urban economy (as owners of manicure parlors, greengrocers, restauranteurs, and newsstand proprietors). Many of these businesses rely on family capitalism. Family members work long hours at low wages, and defer their individual advancement in favor of the family as a whole or the younger generation. But a preference for recruitment among their own group reinforces other hiring practices in the larger society. The garment industry has had a resurgence in the last ten years, especially in the Chinatowns of New York and Los Angeles, but Asian owners and foremen do not recruit Latinos and blacks.

Immigrants' entrepreneurialism has, at any rate, made a broader, though not necessarily cheaper, array of goods and services available in many urban areas. Child care day workers, street peddlers, and housekeepers represent new or reborn segments of the ethnic division of labor, while their better-educated compatriots staff health care facilities in both the public and private sectors. Despite the success of many immigrant groups—Chinese, Koreans, Indians, Filipinos, Cubans, West Indians, and others—poverty still bears a racial edge. Many of the Latinos and U.S.-born blacks who live in cities are among the poorest urban residents. Although statistical indices of racial segregation have steadily declined, these men and women are more concentrated by race than other groups. Race counts again in the tendency for middle- and low-income African-Americans to live in the same neighborhood. Moreso than in other ethnic and racial minorities, social class fails to separate urban blacks who have steady work from those who do not.^[8]

Opportunities for entrepreneurialism and employment do not compensate for the low-wage jobs many urban immigrants hold. Some researchers describe these jobs as "sweatshop" labor, pointing to conditions in such growth areas as the garment and computer industries in New York and Los Angeles. Child labor, piece rates, long hours, and other types of exploitation have not been documented for these industries, but to the degree that they hire only non-union labor, perhaps paid off the books and informally contracted, employers contribute to a para-

doxically cash-rich, mobility-poor urban population. The simultaneous proliferation of these jobs and high-level jobs in business services, as well as the absolute difference in incomes between them, has shaped a polarized social structure. Because the polarization of incomes in the city so clearly refers to the ability, or lack of ability, to consume, the urban class system is seen as even more divided between rich and poor than in the country as a whole.^[9]

In New York City, where the average income of the poorest 10 percent of the population (including welfare payments) was $3,698 in 1986, there were 53,000 taxpayers with adjusted gross incomes of $100,000 or more; 2,840 with at least $500,000; and 1,764 with more than $1 million. Eighty-two people in New York are believed to have assets worth more than $275 million. The second-place city, Los Angeles, has only 32.^[10]

Polarization also refers to divided spaces. Although a "dual city" image is much used by urban critics, the segmentation of incomes and separation of classes and races really require a more specific mapping. Peter Marcuse heuristically outlines a "quartered city," made up of the luxury city of the rich; the gentrified city of managers, professionals, and intellectuals; the "suburban" city of the lower middle class and well-paid blue-collar workers; the tenement city of the working poor; and the ghetto of outcasts, the unemployed, the homeless.^[11] Significantly, the occupants of each quarter have more in common with their counterparts in other cities—in terms of jobs, mobility, and choices about what to consume—than they have either contact or common interests with residents of the other quarters. This is especially true for the luxury and gentrified areas, whose residents are likely to be foreign investors or at least consumers in an upscale global culture. The rich and upper middle class also tend to set themselves apart from other city residents by using private facilities (car phones, taxis, prep schools) instead of relying on public institutions.

Such images break the myth of the city as a middle ground between social groups. Both visually and metaphorically, the spaces occupied by more affluent groups are "islands of renewal in seas of decay."^[12] Yet the area that attracts reinvestment has become larger and more visibly coherent in recent years. Like new office buildings, new upper-income housing in most older cities is mainly centered downtown. Downtown's expansion feeds on relatively undervalued property markets, the growth of business services, and investors' desire for centrally located projects that minimize risk. But in visual terms, it represents a new and broader landscape of power that grows by incorporating, eliminating, or drastically reducing the "vernacular" inner city inhabited by the city's powerless. These men and women are pushed toward less central areas and nearby suburbs that are relatively cheap and may be racially mixed. No

longer geographically bound to the inner city, the less affluent and the poor carry the inner city with them as both a racial stigma and an inability to attract investment.

Public officials are not oblivious of trying to govern "the city of the poor masquerading as the city of the rich."^[13] Neither luxury investment nor gentrification raises a city population's median income, which makes the city government that much more dependent on those who pay high taxes. The problem, however, is that city budget authorities are chasing mobile investors. Not only industrial firms but also real estate developers who used to operate only in local markets are now national and even international in scope. To compel them to stay in cities and build the business centers that seem to attract more growth, municipal authorities make concessions. Business influence has always been an important factor in local government, but the new element since 1980 is the formalization of these arrangements in public-private partnerships.

Private-sector organizations like the Chamber of Commerce or the local real estate trade association now initiate redevelopment projects. Their financing depends in part on city government's ability to float municipal bonds and take out short-term loans, as well as its willingness to offer tax reductions, zoning incentives, and aid in acquiring land. "Public" goals tend to converge with those of private developers. The common program is worked out in meetings among business leaders and public officials, and managed by public authorities dominated by business institutions. A focus on high-rent downtown land and new construction is supported by the city's commitment to block off streets, enhance cultural amenities, and, in general, facilitate the "privatization" of development. Under these conditions, urban planners in public employ have no creative work.

Pressure to counter new downtown development with housing that is "affordable," that is, slightly below market rate, reflects the strength of "neighborhoods" where middle-income voters live. The linkage mechanism that was developed (in Boston and San Francisco) in response to such pressure permits developers to have their downtown development—but requires more affordable housing as a quid pro quo. Developers are assessed a percentage of development costs for building such apartments, or agree to allocate a portion of their project to less affluent groups. In some cases, as in Battery Park City in New York, the below-market-rent housing is built elsewhere, outside the most expensive areas. This gains new low- or, more often, middle-income housing at the cost of strengthening social class segregation in the heart of the city. At any rate, such linkages are viable only where developers have a lot to gain by agreeing to them; in other words, in cities like Boston, San Francisco,

and New York in the mid-1980s, when "market forces" buoyed the economy. Chicago suggests more a rigorous pressure to make developers respond to public goals (that is, racial integration, increasing the affordable housing stock, and letting neighborhoods share in downtown's prosperity). There, however, the opportunity has depended in large part on a new African-American mayor, the late Harold Washington. He attracted strong black support, dedicated staff members in city agencies, and white coalition partners—all at a time when the city attracted a new round of corporate investment downtown by nationally oriented business services.^[14]

Public-private partnerships institutionalize the acknowledgment of dependence on the financial sector that followed the mid-1970s outbreak of fiscal crisis. At that time, commercial banks and other financial institutions threatened New York City, Yonkers, and Cleveland with bankruptcy, supposedly for the city government's profligate use of public finances. Calling in municipal debt served to discipline city agencies and remind them of the need to balance budgets. But fiscal crisis also fulfilled another end. It dramatized the death of the War on Poverty and ended the long New Deal era of social welfare at city—and federal government—expense. Most cities survived the fiscal crisis of the 1970s by concentrating layoffs and reductions on such "nonessential" services as schools and libraries, leaving police, fire, and sanitation agencies wounded but not completely cut down. In more drastic cases, such as New York, Yonkers, and Cleveland, bankers imposed a nonelected supercommission made up of leaders from the financial community and the state to oversee the spending of elected city officials. These supercommissions were given the right of approval on city budgets. Both formally and informally, they exercised control over mayors who were inclined toward populism.^[15]

In the United States, linkages are usually limited to the developers' impact on the city's built environment. Provision of low-income housing units is only one possibility; developers may also provide "public areas," such as plazas or indoor galleries; they may preserve a landmark structure on the building site; or they may contribute funds to renovate publicly owned infrastructure, especially transportation facilities. The entire situation, however, is dominated by the private sector. A city's leverage depends on how marketable the project is and how much profit it can bring the developer. No linkage requires developers to extend their efforts to the sore area of employment. Often the indoor public spaces that developers provide are designed to be inhospitable to strangers, and after they are built, they are policed by private security guards. Most of them are entries or backdrops to shops. Even the outdoor spaces that are

most praised for their use of public art and open landscaping (New York's Battery Park City being a prominent example) serve to advertise an image of the city as clean, safe, and almost classically cultural.^[16]

Dependence on the private sector for creating new public spaces is only a visible means of privatization. Many cities have also tried to save money by privatizing essential public services, that is, by contracting out work, letting private, for-profit firms build and operate facilities, and selling publicly owned assets.^[17] While hiring a privately owned towing or waste removal company may seem a reasonable way to reduce the public payroll, shifting other services strikes at government's reason for existence. Courtrooms and prisons may be leased, hospitals may be run by private chains, and forms may be processed outside the public sector. But the efficiency of private managers is based on skewing service to the ability to pay, not equity or universal service. Turning city services over to private firms also means losing control. It suggests that the last vestige of citizenship in the city is gone, that the bureaucracy of city government is just a functional arrangement with no pretense to mediating a moral order.

Though hardly new, the dominance of private organizations in redevelopment and the divorce between downtown and the neighborhoods have been accentuated during the recent growth in service economies. Cities face renewed problems of allocating scarce public resources among needy populations while attracting successful businesses that could easily move away. The irony of a city's success in enhancing its "business climate" is that the occupants of high-income jobs go elsewhere to live. Moreover, the expansion of corporate facilities displaces poor residents farther from the core. And the wide array of private consumption opportunities in the city is monopolized by a narrow band of the most literate, affluent, cosmopolitan men and women. Under these conditions, most public institutions are degraded. They are either ceded to the poor, like public schools, or harnessed to the private sector, like public building authorities. Economically, the sense of public life in the city is eroded.^[18]

Cities and Cultural Power

The shift from an industrial to a service economy is paralleled by visual as well as social changes. Just as the use of space shifts from "dirty" to "clean" work, so the visible legend of the city changes to reflect a new landscape of cultural power. To some degree this change is based on the consumption patterns of more affluent, highly educated residents—gentrifiers who graduated from college during the 1960s and 1970s. But it

also represents change in the ideological meaning of the city, and as such it shapes the conscious production of city space.

Architecture and design are the intimate partners of redevelopment in this process. Downtown becomes a competitive arena of style, the real estate market's cutting edge. Whether they are in Pittsburgh's Golden Triangle, Renaissance Center in Detroit, or New York's Battery Park City, the buildings are both monumental and commercial. Indeed, they are monumental because they are commercial. They are meant to provide a new skyline for the city, a vertical perspective on the city's financial power. Not coincidentally, they are all important waterfront developments. Reusing this land wrenches it from the docks, the dives, the wholesale markets that for many years enclosed the commercial district and limited its expansion. The waterfront's reuse grows out of both the desire to capture a scarce amenity and a reconsideration of the cultural value of centrality.^[19]

Cities never lose the moral aura of central places. This is the secret of their uniqueness that, in turn, explains the endless fascination with rebuilding and the deep nostalgia for structures that have been torn down. What common history there is in American cities is located in the center. This is the marketplace of ideas and commerce, the site of oldest buildings, the area of public ceremony and desire. Theaters coexist with peep shows, corporate headquarters with wholesalers and jobbers, city halls with video arcades. Despite its heterogeneous uses, this is the most attractive place for real estate investment. The irony is that more investment tends to destroy the center by eating away at its diversity.

The recent redevelopment of the center is partly a reaction by institutional investors to risk in alternative investments such as Third World loans, suburban shopping malls, and office buildings in economically troubled Houston or Denver. But it also reflects a quest by certain parts of the middle classes for access to the city's historic cultural power. Beginning in the 1960s, a reaction against publicly funded urban renewal among more culturally sophisticated middle-class men and women inspired them to advocate the preservation rather than the tearing down of old buildings with historic value. They were mainly attracted to buildings in the center—the public halls and private houses that once belonged to, or were designed by, a patrician elite. These were among the first structures to attract the aesthetic eye of gentrification.

During the 1970s, the number of gentrifiers who put down roots in center-city neighborhoods rose. Mostly single men and women or childless couples, they bought nineteenth-century houses that had become run down and restored their old-style beauty. The way they used these houses differed from previous residents. They preferred architectural

restoration to modernization (except for creature comforts like bathrooms, kitchens, and air-conditioning). If the houses had been converted to rentals or single-room-occupancy hotels, they returned them to single-family use, usually the owner's, or converted them into pricey condominiums. Gentrifiers also tended to empty the streets. They didn't congregate on corners or in front of their homes, and they didn't mingle with neighbors. Neither did they patronize some of the old neighborhood stores, which were soon replaced by the restaurants, bookshops, and clothing stores that catered to gentrifiers. From one point of view, gentrification created a middle-class neighborhood on the basis of cultural consumption. From another, considering the relative costs of housing downtown and in the suburbs, it represented a rational form of middle-class housing investment.^[20]

By the 1980s, a significant movement of investors into some downtowns created pressure on government to generalize the benefits of incremental, private-sector urban renewal. While local governments created historic landmark districts and enacted legislation to encourage reuse of old buildings in the center, the federal government changed the tax laws to make historic preservation and commercial reuse more deductible. Every U.S. city now glories in its historic downtown as a magnet for further private-market investment. Gentrification thus provided a stepping-stone from the federally funded urban renewal that tore down so many old buildings during the 1950s and 1960s to the speculative new construction that augmented the central city during the 1980s. Today, no downtown is considered complete without office towers, ethnic quarters, cultural complexes, and gentrification.

As a cultural ensemble, downtown's selling point is that it contributes to urban economic growth by attracting tourists. But the major tourists are the city's own residents. Those at higher income levels seek out new restaurants, shop for imports of finely wrought or singular goods, and go to look at the places where art is produced, exhibited, and sold. These spaces for cultural consumption are generally located in the center, or in adjacent derelict districts, where rents are cheap, buildings are old enough to provide an atmosphere, and a dense pattern of support services emerges. New York's SoHo provided an unplanned model for this sort of urban revitalization. But during the 1970s, Boston's Faneuil Hall Marketplace and Baltimore's Inner Harbor turned it into a planning model. Faneuil Hall is particularly interesting because its developers took a strong design concept from the existing use of the building and used it to displace the fruit and vegetable vendors who rented stalls there. They were replaced by stands selling arts and crafts products, imported foods, and other gift items that can be found elsewhere. The essence of the transformation, however, is that it opens Faneuil Hall to

middle-class use and signals to white residents and tourists that this is a place for them. By making a permanent commercial "festival" out of a grubby daily market, the developers of Faneuil Hall eliminated both the "periodic" use of the space and authentic, even functional, popular culture.^[21]

In large part, redeveloping the downtown depends on the commercial re-creation of an urban middle-class culture. More sophisticated than suburbia, the newly interesting downtown is a realm of the senses. Its spatial organization and visual cues "open" the center to a highly selective consumption. In its conversion from small shops, industrial lofts, and working-class homes, downtown is caught up in—and spearheads—an "artistic mode of production." Artists are the primary consumers in this image of the city, and everyone in the more cerebral, or more pretentious, part of the middle class is interested in bridging art and life.^[22]

The new downtown also bridges public and private spheres. Large mixed-use projects typically blend shops on the lower floors, offices in the middle, and apartments above. They allude to the density and vitality of older city streets without the hint of chaos, the expectation of the unexpected, that is part of an old city's fabric. New urban spaces give a clear sense of keeping the unruliness of the city out. To enter them, people come inside from the street: they are neither purely public nor private spaces. The State of Illinois Center in Chicago is perhaps the most perverse example of this "liminality." Built for government offices, the project has the atrium design of modern hotels, and the first few floors comprise a shopping center. Projects like these usually enclose an extremely large volume of space. They often include glass-sided elevators or high escalators, which are likely to be filled with moving crowds. But the grandeur of their scale conflicts with the triviality of their function. While shopping may have become a social experience that men and women value in itself, the stores in these mixed-use projects are usually branches of national chains that sell mass-produced goods.^[23]

To some extent the quest for distinction in mixed-use spaces has come to rest on the notion of the city as festival. This suits the reorganization of the city as a consumption space, where shoppers are provided with a built environment that contextualizes the ephemeral while the buildings themselves are decontextualized from the city's past. The festival aspect of urban space fits a postmodern susceptibility to eccentricity and invention. Its "free-market populism" benefits the eclectic consumer while segregating those who can pay from those who live on the street. Much of the festival use of the city center relates to the "society of spectacle" that is described in the work of contemporary cultural critics. Born of the late-nineteenth-century burst of commercialism and urbanization, a city of spectacle features passive crowds floating among commercial dis-

tractions. But the city's adoption of a festival theme also reflects the influence of theme parks in the culture of contemporary spaces. Theme parks, or their urban equivalents in either red-brick or atrium shopping centers, organize varied bundles of consumption. Equally important, they also organize how people experience the space of consumption: the city becomes an imaginary stage-set for dream fulfillment.^[24]

While the qualities of place can be abstracted in both historic preservation and new construction, the real downtown is formed by joining circuits of economic and cultural capital. Old buildings provide an object of aesthetic interest; a site for relatively low-cost cultural production and consumption, especially among more adventurous cultural consumers; and a magnet for real estate investment. The physical infrastructure generates markets for architectural restorations as well as avant-garde art; together, they create a downtown "scene" that—with enough consumers—sparks a booming local service economy. This local economy, however, is highly skewed toward high-class and international uses. It has more art galleries than dry cleaners, more clothing boutiques than supermarkets. The local real estate market grows in tandem with the sale of historical replicas, from Victorian furniture to "French country antiques." Recognizing these areas of the city as historic landmark districts legitimizes property investment there and gives a certain cachet to local business establishments. The areas become well known by means of articles in the daily newspapers and magazines. Target of an ever more mediated middle-class consumption, the historic and cultural downtown attracts more new investment to the central business district. In part because of the arrival of foreign investors, the old financial district sprouts new office towers. What these buildings represent—their cultural power in the world economy—contradicts the local or avant-garde spirit of most initial gentrifiers.

If downtown spells fun for the more sophisticated middle class, it is not so hospitable to the unemployed, the homeless, and lower-income groups. Over the past twenty years revitalization has eliminated low-rent housing from the center, especially the skid row flophouses and single-room-occupancy hotels that catered to a transient, older, jobless group of men that used to be labeled homeless. Revitalization has also displaced the stores such people patronized—food and liquor shops, used clothing stores, pawnshops. New shops and the firms in new office buildings displace the labor market. Unlike the old docks, railroad yards, and warehouses that used to abut the center, they do not recruit the homeless as casual labor. The new downtown provides so much less living space for a poor population that these men and women are literally homeless. High property values and low vacancy rates decrease their chances of finding even a temporary place to settle down, while the density of activity and

transportation downtown continually lure them to the center. In recent years the homeless population has been swelled by more women and by families with children that cannot make enough money to pay the rent. Ironically, they are driven out of most private-sector public spaces, especially in front of the tonier shops, and so they try to find shelter in the bus and subway stations, railroad terminals, and city streets.^[25]

Just as middle-class consumers of the city demand more meaningful public space, so do homeless men and women seek public space as the last remaining shelter. Whether cities can provide public space for either group—in which proportion, and where—has become an index of public and private social power.

Cities and Social Power

As the largest cities have begun to elect mayors from African-American and Latin communities, the cities themselves have become less prized. Public institutions are required to expand their functions to cover more human needs—adjudicating court cases, tending children all day, providing temporary shelter—while funding lags. Crime and drug sales plague many residents who cannot insulate themselves behind private security guards. From banker to mayor to drug gang, in the city there are many kinds of social power.

When we talk about cities in America today, we should differentiate between three "orders" of cities that create vastly different claims to social power. Within the global social order, the most power is concentrated in New York and Los Angeles, America's largest cities and largest financial and communications capitals. These cities are not fatally threatened by recent downturns in jobs and housing prices that are so inflated they forestall mobility. But their prosperity has left a hollow ring of outer boroughs or inner suburbs between downtown's expansion and more affluent suburban counties. In both cases, the "city" will only continue to grow as a result of regional growth; most older areas of the city house new immigrants who are saving to move out and an underemployed native population. Other cities may look like smaller versions of New York and Los Angeles. By contrast, they lack the base in transnational enterprises that gives these two cities global scope and scale as well as a fearsome glamor.

Aside from the two world cities, a more purely national order differentiates power according to cities' age and region of the country. Newer cities are mostly southwestern and southeastern. They have a "suburban" style of life, which is automobile-dependent, home-owning, private. They also have a base in newer manufacturing industries—mainly as a result of extensive military contracts—as well as regional and national

services. Lacking a claim to the social power of global capitals, they nonetheless provide the sort of middle-class life that people identify with the American Dream. And they may be the only cities in the country to do so.

Within cities, another order differentiates between the populist power of the neighborhoods and the financial power of the business center. Neighborhood residents hold the city's remaining manufacturing jobs, work in the civil service, and provide the major part of the work force in the private service economy. But because they cannot or will not move out of the city—for reasons of income and race—they bear the burden of the moral problems that no city government can solve. In the neighborhoods are the homeless shelters, the drug wars, the violence that rips through public schools. And in the neighborhoods we also find the fierce sense of territory that inspires racial terror. From these contradictions arises that which is known in American society as community, the city's only form of legitimate social power.

Since the urban reforms that began in the late 1960s, "community" has been a universal rallying cry for improving public services. The concept of community has also been a focus for organizing low-income men and women to demand access to political power. While community movements have made social power in the city more competitive than before, they have also provided a way to integrate unorganized groups into political life.

Twenty years of experience indicate that the vehicles of community empowerment are flawed. Administrative decentralization, for example, has often suffered from too little funding controlled by too few people. Central bureaucracies, both federal and citywide, have been reluctant to give up control over hiring and budgets. Many civil servants, moreover, such as police and fire fighters, do not live in the cities where they are employed, either because they cannot afford high housing prices or they want better living conditions. Neither are coalitions that elect minority-group mayors effective tools for community empowerment. On the one hand, urban minorities are often divided along the racial and ethnic, as well as political, lines. Terms like the "black community" and "Latin community" encompass a wide variety of competing local groups. On the other hand, the public goods and social conditions toward which they strive are not necessarily allocated by public command. Quality of life in the city is so dependent on income that it is essentially controlled by private decisions.

Despite its real limitations, the concept of community suggests how little even the poorest neighborhoods of a city conform to the stereotype of "social disorganization."^[26] Non-nuclear families and the working poor make up a large portion of the urban population, but the areas where

they live generate their own, fairly continuous structure of community organizations. Linked by individual activists, these organizations respond to both community issues and external conditions. The encouragement of City Hall (and formerly, the federal government) enables them to develop a fairly stable base that may remain outside the control of traditional urban institutions, especially political parties. At best, community organizations goad the city government into giving poor residents of the city a little more access to public goods—longer library hours, a drug treatment program, a slightly more responsive police department. At worst, they have no effect on housing, jobs, and income—the basic parameters of living conditions.

The structure of the whole society affects the issues that are considered urban problems. But while poverty, drug addiction, and decaying public infrastructure are national in scope, no national institution has the moral authority to compel their solution. Moreover, as long as cities have little autonomy in the face of global markets, their problems are defined in terms set by the private sector. Americans still visualize cities as the public center of their society. Yet it is a hollow center, more an image of power than a means of empowerment.