The way most presidential elections play out, you’d think that the big issues facing the country are the demise of the family farm and the decline of the industrial base, while the 70% of us who live in urban areas are like the voters of Florida and Michigan: forgotten, forlorn, and dismissed.
At least that’s the way Inga Saffron sees it. The architectural critic for Philly Inquirer, she calls out the three candidates still standing for painting a picture of the United States as “a collection of Norman Rockwell small towns surrounded by picture-book farms. “
She goes on:
For Democrats Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, the plight of rural farm families ranks among the urgent crises facing America. Republican John McCain frets about veterans, the unborn, outer space. But you won’t hear much about aging cities on Earth fighting to keep their downtowns alive and their overcrowded commuter buses on the road. Cities just don’t figure in the political imagination anymore.
She has a point. Out on the hustings, these guys are far more likely to be out touring chocolate factories or downing beers in American Legion Hall (both worthwhile activities, don’t get me wrong) than talking about important things, like gentrification, sprawl, why the 2 and 3 trains run so slow on weekends, etc.
Oddly, all the key issues—immigration, environmental sustainability, homeland security, all pass through cities in one way or another.
Saffron again:
Supposedly, the reason that candidates are loathe to mention the C-word is that the Suburban Nation of grill-obsessed dads and van-driving moms dominates the electorate. Since it’s assumed that cities will vote Democratic no matter how badly they’re treated, there’s no percentage for either party to talk up things like pocket parks, waterfront development, or – can you imagine? – wasteful sprawl. Besides, the discussion will only alienate voters who still associate an urban platform with cities in flames.
This is true, but the real reason cities are invisible in the national conversation, is I think, much deeper. Cities in America have always been seen as too dirty, too crowded, too immigrant, too radical, too perverted to be really and truly American.
From the earliest days of the Republic, Thomas Jefferson hated them, considering them to be, as he wrote to Benjamin Rush, “as pestilential to the morals, the health and the liberties of man. True, they nourish some of the elegant arts; but the useful ones can thrive elsewhere; and less perfection in the others, with more health, virtue and freedom, would be my choice.”
Indeed it was not that long—the late 1980’s at least—that cities were thought to be hopeless charity cases, places of futile rehabilitation that were the deathtraps of starry-eyed Jimmy Carter like idealism.
Obviously, this has changed. Saffron says this is because of cities getting a little Sex-and-the-City type glamour, but I think the fabulous life of Carrie Bradshaw was symptomatic of larger cultural changes than a cause of them.
The real reason that cities have turned around is because people, especially young people, decided that they were cool again, and that commuting out from Westchester or Marin County, in a word, sucks. For other sociological reasons, those same young people started marrying later, which meant they stayed in cities longer, which meant they made—and spent—more money for a longer period of time.
And next thing you know—boom! you get the “Big Apples Little Boom,” as the Washington Post called it.
But again, why no place for us in the political discourse? Oddly, the best chance urban issues got to have a real serious airing was in the brief happy presidential run of Rudy Giuliani.
And we all know how well that went.
