City Making: Building Communities Without Building Walls.

• Author: Calia, Roland
• Position: Review

Frug, Gerald E.

Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press. (223 pp)

City Making: Building Communities without Building Walls is a provocative look at how to foster a broader sense of community in America by breaking down traditional legal boundaries between cities and suburbs. To achieve these goals, Gerald Frug proposes a number of radical, even utopian, policy solutions.

The basic premise of the book is that cities and suburbs are closely interrelated. However, public policies embedded in legal rules have segregated metropolitan areas into two nations--black and white, rich and poor, expanding and contracting.

American municipal law operates under legal doctrines that emphasize state control of cities, the restriction of cities to "public" functions, and the strict construction of city powers. States have chosen to use their power over cities to splinter metropolitan areas into a multitude of different jurisdictions, each exercising exclusionary powers over policies such as land use and zoning. As a result, metropolitan residents have been artificially split into different, often hostile groups.

As a solution to the problem of fragmentation, Frug proposes to replace current legal definitions of cities with radical structural alternatives that focus on fostering cooperation among citizens, neighborhoods, and cities.

The best way to break down boundaries between city and suburb, according to Frug, would be to establish new forms of regional organization. He proposes shifting power from the state government to regional legislatures to define the legal authority of a metropolitan region's cities.

These regional legislatures would be vested with the authority to define the powers of local governments in areas such as land use policy. Cities could no longer unilaterally implement policies. Rather, they would have to negotiate with other entities in the region to secure approval of particular policies.

The regional legislature would be assisted by citizen "juries" in determining case by case applications of rules. Chosen by lot or through interest group representation, these juries of up to 100 members would evaluate expert testimony and apply legal rules to the facts--e.g., judging disputed instances of exclusion, such as how many homeless centers are appropriate for a particular neighborhood. The regional legislature, however, would retain the ultimate authority to ensure that juries did not stray from their mandate.

Frug goes one step...