City Making: Building Communities Without Building Walls.

• Author: Ford, Richard Thompson
• Position: Book Review

I might as well come clean now. I know Jerry Frug quite well; he's a friend, we've worked on a casebook together, and had numerous conversations about law, urbanism, and public policy. I wrote a blurb for City Making in which I gave it the extremely high praise it deserves. It's a great book, one of a very few that attacks the issue of local politics and the social economy of the metropolis with intelligence, passion, and vision.

I could proceed to write a review that recounts all of the reasons Frug is right about the many things I think he's right about. But Frug's arguments in favor of his positions are better than mine would be. And nothing but praise would make for a boring review. Instead, and at the risk of picking nits, I'll suggest that Frug pulls some punches that need to be thrown in the fight for what I consider to be our shared goal: the reform of local government law guided by a combination of politically progressive commitments and institutional pragmatism.

The Gilbert's summary of my argument is that, for Frug, as for most leftists, when progressive ends and institutional pragmatism conflict, progressivism wins. This is not always the right prioritization. Effective institutional reform will require some tough choices. Redistribution of public resources will involve losers as well as winners, and the losers will not always be people who can easily afford it. Although I think Frug is right that most people would benefit from significant reform of local governmental institutions, some would not benefit and even more would suffer in the short run for the sake of long run gains. Understandably Frug emphasizes the gains and not the sacrifices. Occasionally this emphasis results in obscuring conflicts between some traditionally progressive commitments and the innovative (and often more promising) progressive urbanism that animates City Making. The public-spiritedness to which Frug aspires will require some degree of consensus on common norms of behavior and as a result some people will have to adapt. Eliminating graft and corruption (classic local government ailments that undermine public trust) will require dismantling patronage systems and impoverishing the people who benefit from them, not all of whom are wealthy.

Frug is acutely aware of the shifts in consciousness and sacrifices the more privileged residents of our cities will need to make in order to make better cities for everyone, but the left will eventually have to swallow hard and acknowledge that the groups we normally consider our constituents will have to change too. If making better cities means changing the cities we've got now, then fostering better citizenship means changing the people we've got now: rich and poor, white and black, well-housed bourgeois and homeless vagrant.

City Making consists of four large parts. The first is an intellectual history of Anglo-American local government law. Frug traces the city as a legal concept from its origins in the medieval law of corporations. The medieval municipal corporation was formally a type of chartered corporation, governed by the same law that covered business enterprises and universities: All of these entities were voluntary associations of citizens--private enterprises--and agents of government in the sense that they operated according to charters granted by the state and were required to serve the public interest. The corporation was a hybrid of what we now think of as public and private; it was an agent of government and an association of citizens. A radical turning point in Frug's history comes with the development of a sharp public/private divide in the nineteenth century that redefined American cities as purely public governmental entities or "creatures of the state." (1) The public/private division of corporations initiated a change in local government doctrine that deprived cities of much of the formal autonomy they enjoyed as chartered corporations and submerged the associational aspects of cities in favor of their more technocratic, governmental qualities.

Frug's central point here is that cities have been systematically deprived of the power that would allow them to act in forward-looking, expansive, and broadly public-spirited ways, even as they have been empowered to implement myopic, reactive policies in the service of insularity and a narrow vision of the public good that is limited to the immediate interest of local residents: "[A] complex transformation occurred over a period of hundreds of years, a transformation that increasingly narrowed the definition of the city's nature to that of a state subdivision ..." (2) Frug wants to recapture some of the formal powers and associational qualities of the medieval municipal corporation for American cities. Although, as Frug notes, medieval cities were far from democratic in the modern sense, they did offer a haven from the oppression of feudalism: stadt luft machtfrei--the city air makes one free.

It is important that Frug defends city "power" and not local "autonomy." (3) Autonomy is commonly seen as a benign sort of power--the simple ability to control one's own destiny. Frug is acutely aware that "autonomy" for cities as they are presently organized has often led to insularity, segregation, "fiscal zoning," and a general pursuit of a narrow, local self-interest at the expense of the general public good: "The current definition of city power ... fuels a desire to avoid, rather than to engage with, those who live on the other side of the city line.... [,to] think of the city line as separating 'us' from 'them': crime, bad schools, and inadequate resources.... (4) His analysis suggests that "autonomy" is, in today's political environment, more pernicious than overt power. Local government law has "organized [cities] in a manner that has helped separate metropolitan residents into different, sometimes hostile, groups.... [and has] authorized ... cities to wield their zoning and redevelopment authority to foster their own prosperity even if it is won at the expense of their neighbors." (5) The tense and often acrimonious relationship between cities and suburbs is only one example of this phenomenon: The combination of municipal boundaries and the residency criterion for exercise of the franchise insures that political segregation accompanies the residential segregation most evocatively (if incompletely) described in terms of the chocolate city/vanilla suburb divide.

The second part of City Making explores why the city and the citizen have become insular and selfish agents and argues that a reformulation of local government law might help to remake cities and their citizens into more outward looking actors, aware of and interested in their interconnections with others. Frug offers the model of the "postmodern subject" (6) as a guide to local government reform, but don't worry, he doesn't advocate asking Jacques Derrida to redraft city charters or hiring continental social theorists as city managers. Frug's postmodernism is a reflection of the insight that entities that we now think of as separate and autonomous are not only interdependent but also often contain elements of their symbolic opposites: Big cities contain prosperous "suburban" areas with detached single-family homes and rolling lawns while many "suburbs are worse off than central cities because their property values are so low that they cannot afford even the limited social services that central cities offer.... " (7) And against the common view that the inner city is distinguished from the suburb by its central business district, Frug points out that "[t]wo-thirds of American offices are currently located outside of city downtowns. Tyson's Corner, Virginia, has more office space than downtown Miami.... " (8)

This recombination of the elements of city and suburb is reflected in the way people live their lives. The typical American is not easily defined, storybook style, as city mouse, country mouse, suburban mouse; instead we cross boundaries regularly:

[F]or child care, work, shopping, recreation, entertainment, visiting friends.... [,most people] don't even know the name of the town where the all they shop in is located; all they need to know is the name of the mall. Areas that do have names are commonly identified in a way that ignores local government boundaries: Route 128 in Massachusetts, Silicon Valley in Northern California.... (9) For Frug, this day-to-day reality of metropolitan life offers a potential inspiration for rethinking the function of municipal boundaries. Many reformers believe that the only solution to racial and class segregation and the reality of what Frug calls the ageographical city is a centralized metropolitan government. Frug by contrast aspires to create a local government--with its characteristic civic virtues of relative intimacy, opportunities for meaningful citizen participation, and proximity to specific local concerns--that is more inclusive, territorially flexible, and cosmopolitan. Unlike many postmodern theorists who chant fluidity, suppleness, flexibility, and contingency as a mantra but give the reader no clue how we could achieve them or respond to them, Frug offers concrete and workable proposals for law reform in the service of his more abstract ideals. Even if one finds fault with the proposals, they are invaluable as heuristics, demonstrating that viable reform is conceivable when we suspend reflexive judgments and outdated preconceptions.

Frug argues that a unique function of the city is to promote a cosmopolitan public community through the provision of common services and the creation of common public spaces. His ideal of the city involves what Iris Marion Young has called the "being together of strangers." (10) Frug's city is a reaction to the two dominant conceptions of local government--neither of which comes close to describing the cities in which we actually live, and neither of which is even...