The Shape of the New American City Edited by Eugenie L. Birch and Susan M. Wachter

Abstract

John Fairfield offers a passionate reading of American political history that tries to reinvigorate democratic traditions in the face of neoliberal capitalism. He thinks that Americans can build a more equitable society, and that we can best do so if we understand past efforts, what they accomplished, and how and why they often fell short. In short, he is writing to create a useable past for progressive activists. In this sense, we can view the book as a product of a long effort, dating back to a wave of young, insurgent historians in the 1960s and 1970s who challenged the idea that there has been an American consensus around liberal notions of economic organization and growth. Here are the author's own words: "In showing that our past contained multiple possibilities and that out choices shaped which of those possibilities would be realized, historians provide us a fuller understanding of our past and underscore the importance of the choices we make" (p. xi).Fairfield touches on many of the influential theories of American civic life, with the pragmatic political philosophy of John Dewey coming closest to his intent, and the book's title pays homage to Dewey's classic The Public and Its Problems. Fairfield's goal is to recover the cooperative or community-centered alternatives to the excesses of individual-focused and unregulated capitalism. He locates the greatest possibilities for these alternatives in the active life of heterogeneous cities. His heroes, by and large, are workers who organize for self-improvement and empowerment. The bad guys are malefactors of great wealth, hypertrophied corporations, urban elites, and their comfortable minions of the middle class. The book is dedicated to the memory of Christopher Lasch, one of Fairfield's professors and another critic of the excesses of individualism and consumer society.The book proceeds in four sections. The first is explicitly about practical political economy, detailing early nineteenth-century efforts to create institutions to support active citizenship, and the failure of the free labor ideal to satisfactorily incorporate racial difference. The second is about ways in which nineteenth-century Americans contested the formation of a democratic culture in the interlocking realms of physically accessible urban space and the political space of discourse and debate. The third covers the resurgence of progressive citizenship in the early twentieth century and its collapse in the repression and aftermath of World War I as "public opinion" became transmogrified into "public relations." The final section focuses on the replacement of the goals of republican citizenship and industrial democracy with individual consumerism, labor security, and the rise of privatized suburbia to supplant the shared space of the public city. It ends by invoking a second intellectual hero in the person of Henry George and his "public vision of the good city."The quick summary in the preceding paragraph does not do justice to the richness of the discussion. Each of the major argument...

Counting and Understanding the Contingent Workforce

“…It is well documented that Latino immigrants are heavily concentrated in certain job niches, especially in construction and various service sectors, termed ‘brown-collar jobs’ (Catanzarite, 2000). Their employment concentration in these niche jobs usually depresses their job quality and wage levels (Liu, 2011). Their work ethics, strong ethnic networks, as well as employment constraints associated with undocumented status and lack of proper work authorisation, make them natural targets of temporary agencies (Kirschenman and Neckerman, 1991; Peck and Theodore, 2001).…”