Americas Quarterly

represents, among other things, a map of the deployment of resources. Any visitor to Mumbai is arrested by the mammoth water pipes that snake through the slums, bypassing these informal settlements to deliver their contents to more privileged areas. There are similar examples even in the supposedly more equitable urban-sub-urban environment of the United States.

Since suburbs have dramatically lower population densities than urban centers, the extent and expense of sewer, water, electrical lines, roadways, and other infrastructure make them more costly to build and maintain, which means that suburbs require, in effect, enormous subsidies.

Such inequities stem from the disaggregat-ed styles of governance that prevent rational regional planning. U.S. urban development in particular has been marked in recent decades by the flight of capital from the center to the suburbs, leaving many inner-city areas bereft of basic services. In cities like Detroit, the morphology is a donut: the center city carved out and desperate, its tax base gone, is surrounded by a halo of privileged sprawl. Imaginative infrastructure planning can redress this imbalance and prevent population flight. To cite a particularly striking and successful example, Medellín has used the construction of beautiful new cultural facilities in the city center to bring renewed life to neighborhoods that were once gritty and riddled with violent crime. Today, urban crime rates have dropped dramatically and the city is moving beyond its reputation as a lawless drug capital to a place of livability, equity and calm.

In the New York metropolitan region, new construction follows a pattern set by many other urban centers. Most of the new building takes place outside the central city in the vast in-between space that has become, alas, the primary form for twenty-first century urbanism. The old centrifugal pattern of commuting in and out of the center has been supplanted by lateral movements through what was once periphery and is now a more polycentric arrangement. But even this description misleads. Many of these centers— shopping malls, office parks, golf “communities”—are

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Fat City Michael Sorkin

single-use phenomena that must be extensively networked by individual movement (in cars) to coalesce into a structure that can support the requirements of daily life.

Here is use-zon-ing at the global scale,

reflecting the larger economic reorganization that global capital flows induce, dropping factories into zones of low wages, locating offices near airports and highway interchanges, and inflicting its “creative destruction” on the hapless and exploitable. This urban pattern, drawn by the invisible hand in all its social mindlessness, has been the object of criticism since the rise of nineteenth-century movements for urban reform. The development of European cities tied to manufacturing and industry aroused a storm of early criticism. Friederich Engels eloquently identified how such cities brutalized and alienated their working-class residents. In the U. S., critics like Jacob Riis and Ida Tarbell revealed the inequities and injustices of urban industrial slums.

Architects, urban planners and others subsequently picked up the mantle of reform and proposed intriguing visions of their own. One idea that is particularly resonant for our time revolves around the concept of the “garden city.” In its classic—if schematic—incarnation by the nineteenth-century Englishman Sir Ebenezer Howard, this was a proposal for a network of small cities surrounded by open agricultural land that would relieve the pressure on major urban centers. These were to be both self-contained and—in some measure—self-sufficient. The technology of the day—the railroad—was to play a key role in enabling this linkup, and the idea reached its most well-known development in the establishment of a ring of suburban cities around London after World War II.