One might presume that urbanization—the percentage of Americans living in urban areas—has been on a steady incline since the onset of the Industrial Revolution (at least I did before diving into the data). That story was true for a very long time, with Americans consistently leaving rural life behind and flocking to "The Big City." Chicago, New York, Detroit, and the panoply of cities we've come to call "Great American Cities" grew at almost unimaginable rates throughout the nineteenth and early- to mid-twentieth century.
But in the wake of the Second World War urbanization began to slow, and then level off. This trend had a variety of causes including "white flight" and attempts by overconfident bureaucrats to engineer the perfect city from scratch (replete with ugly overpasses and well-intentioned but poorly implemented "projects").
Urbanization's slow-down has corresponded with a persistent decline in rural population, but the real story is suburban expansion. In 1950, 23 percent of Americans lived in suburban areas. In 2020, that figure was 49 percent. While it's not entirely true that our great cities have "hollowed out," to the extent that they've declined, the dense urban core of most cities is consistently losing people to their suburban outskirts.
This shift has afforded Sun Belt states an immense opportunity in the postwar era. Cities like Phoenix, Atlanta, Houston, and Miami have boomed, at least partially because of their openness to suburban development. Where the cities of the prewar era built upwards, the cities of the postwar era built outwards. Sprawl is a defining characteristic of most of these cities, even if they have robust urban centers.
As people and capital continue to flock south of the Mason-Dixon line, those of us who are ambitious enough to imagine that great cities are not simply a twentieth-century artifact face a dilemma: How can you build great cities without dense urban cores?
We are compelled to begin by defining a "Great American City." Precision eludes us here, but a quick survey of cities like New York and Chicago provides us a few touchpoints.
First, these cities are centers for social, cultural, and economic capital. People, businesses, and social organizations want to move to these places. Moreover, people in these places are driven to build businesses and social organizations that serve the needs of the city, the surrounding area, the nation, and the world.
Secondly, these places are simply nice places to live. They maintain a high quality of life amenable to human flourishing and child-rearing. This usually corresponds to density and walkability.
Lastly, but surely not leastly, these cities are beautiful. We must not neglect the value of aesthetics. Great American Cities build and maintain robust public works, monuments, train stations, libraries, and architecture.
Overlaying these three core characteristics is the city's "brand." What separates a good city from a great city is its distinct cultural identity; an identity reflected in its people, its mores, its buildings, and its way of life. Great cities, while hubs for cosmopolitans, are not themselves cosmopolitan: To be a New Yorker means something very different than being a Chicagoan. People crave specificity; we want to be a part of something distinct, to be proud of our membership thereof, even if we enjoy the company of people from every corner of God's green earth.
Keeping these characteristics in mind, here are some starting points for imagining what a great city can look like in the age of suburbs, and how a city like Phoenix might be on the vanguard of a movement of New American Cities:
Building a brand: Any great city must have a great brand. The brand must be organically sourced, building both on the heritage and the aspirations of a given city, its industries, and its citizens. But it must also be shaped and boosted by business owners, members of civil society, and public leaders who provide form to the raw material lying around. To borrow an analogy from physics, building a brand requires the transformation of potential energy into kinetic energy.
Social capital: Many a CEO will tell you that personnel is policy. The same is true at the macro scale. Any great city must not only attract but retain high quality people. This is important both for the sake of the city's economy and for the sake of human flourishing. Aristotle recognized that man is a social animal. The God of the Hebrew Bible said that it is not right for man to live alone. I reckon they're both right.
Economic capital: Recruiting and retaining talent, attracting investment, and creating a large and durable tax base are all impossible without economic growth. A great city must promote and harness sustainable economic growth.
Density: One additional component of great cities tends to include density: These places are walkable and maintain robust public transit. Suburbanization complicates density. Indeed, while many public policy decisions have resulted in our present situation, it cannot be denied that people seem to like suburbs. Otherwise they would not have chosen to live in them. Visionaries in our time must imagine how the many blessings of density can be reconciled with the proliferation of suburbs. Building walkable communities within the larger city community is one solution: An interesting project called "Culdesac" in Tempe is just one example of what is possible.
One of the great insights of twentieth-century urbanist Jane Jacobs is that flourishing cities cannot be created from the top-down. They must grow organically. "Organic" growth, however, should not be understood to exclude personal will. Cities depend upon their people (in their private and public capacities, in their personal lives and through corporate endeavors) to flourish. Moreover, great cities must assent to some level of competent public sector management: It is particularly important in resource-constrained environments such as Phoenix that the public sector plays a role in managing growth. Nonetheless, the public sector, insofar as it manages growth, must make room for non-state actors to build communities, organizations, and businesses without undue interference.
As the era of the Great American City comes to a close, we need not abandon the many blessings of city life. Our task—the task of policymakers, civil society builders, job creators, everyday people—is great. But it is far from insurmountable. The era of the New American City has begun. Phoenix may be its proving ground.
