Building American Cities in the 21st Century: Can We Have Shared Purposes?
Building American Cities in the 21st Century: Can We Have Shared Purposes?
Bill Bowen’s essay several weeks ago discussed the two most common mental models that dominate discussions and debates in the U.S. today about urban policy.[i] On one hand, there are systems-based models based on collaboration among diverse types of stakeholders using evidence-based policymaking. On the other hand, there is the free-market framework based primarily on the principal of private property rights and the independent assessment of interests among private parties with minimal governmental interference, at least from the Federal government.
Bill concluded his essay with a call for pragmatism. Neither mental model is best for all situations. Rather, the complex, evolutionary processes we use to build cities and to solve the problems of social relations within cities demands an ever-changing blend of these two idealized mental models.
Bill’s analysis is undoubtedly correct. But I’d like to add an additional layer to the discussion.
What factor(s) should guide our pragmatic choices between using market-based criteria or collaborative systems-based criteria to assess different options about urban policy? In other words, what factors relate to the purposes we seek to achieve by guiding the evolution of our urban spaces?
Do American cities have a set of commonly shared purposes that inspire our urban aspirations today?
Whenever one tries to understand the dynamics of any system the first question to ask is “What is the purpose of this system?” The purpose of any system is never embodied in the function of any one piece of the system. The purpose is a property of the entire system. It emerges only when all parts of the system interact with each other.
Complex social systems like cities, of course, never have one simply stated purpose. Indeed, the purposes of a city are multiple, and they can evolve over time. Cities reveal their purposes as their components interact over time to reveal a vector of aligned behaviors.
Specific events occur in the city, and those events become patterns. Patterns repeat themselves and thereby steer the city’s evolution. Patterns repeat because they are produced by underlying social structures. The social structures remain stable when they create the patterns of events that, over time, help achieve the purposes that are desired by those groups within the city that exert social authority. When this aligned vector of behaviors is relatively stable, one can identify a city’s purposes.
Do we have shared purposes for our cities in the 21st century?
Looking backwards in time, American cities have had powerful shared visions in our past. A vision doesn’t need to be universally shared. It just needs to have a persistent hold on a solid block of those who exercise political, economic, and cultural authority within a specific geography. Perhaps looking to the past can help us assess whether we have shared purposes for our urban future.
The urban historian Alexander Wood, for example, has written a wonderful new book about the enduring shared vision that created an unprecedented fifty years of city-building in New York between 1880 and 1930. In those five decades, Wood writes,
“…nearly a million buildings were erected in the present-day city limits that provided places to live, work, worship, and play for close to seven million people. Half a dozen great bridges were built, as were dozens of tunnels, several hundred miles of subway, surface streetcar, and elevated rail lines, and thousands of miles of new streets, sidewalks, and utilities.”[ii]
Wood’s account of building New York in the fifty years prior to the Great Depression reveals the same kind of pragmatic back-and-forth balancing act between the two urban policy systems that Bill Bowen discusses.
Wood clearly argues that the principal model used to organize the 50-year building process was the market-based assessment of private financial gain. “To a remarkable degree, New York’s growth was driven by people speculating on the future and building to make a profit,” he writes. “The preeminence of private real estate interests created many of the architectural wonders of the age and gave the city its congested character, but it also transformed the business of building.”[iii]
Yet Wood also argues that a combination of key factors required that many strategic decisions were made within the collaborative, non-market model of stakeholder negotiations. Market dynamics were always primary, but widespread collaborations were equally necessary to offset myriad conflicts that continually emerged among the stakeholders, including the city’s established elites and those who were determined to improve their own prosperity. Non-market negotiations about key conflicts often prevented paralysis in the market-driven building processes.
Among the sources of conflict were the boom-and-bust cycles of the era, the “permeable structure of the industry” (which allowed many workers to grow into small-scale builders in their own right), the growing radicalism of many skilled trade workers who wanted higher wages and safer working conditions, and the broader urban political context in which New York’s real estate building industry sparked thousands of related public sector investments in infrastructure. “In the long-run, city officials, employers, and workers struck agreements to share the fruits of prosperity, maintain the peace, and prevent these conflicts from paralyzing urban growth …”[iv]
Why were they able to reach so many ad hoc agreements that kept the market-based process of building for profit moving forward for more than fifty years?
I argue that Wood’s history demonstrates that virtually all stakeholders in New York during those years shared an enduring vision that the great city’s core purpose was to bring prosperity to as many of its residents as possible by building as much as possible as fast as possible.
From the Wall Street offices of the city’s great nouveau riche financiers to the private townhomes of its old patrician elites to the tenements filled with working class families and the city’s newly arrived most destitute immigrants, virtually all residents shared the common idea that their own future prosperity was tied to building what became the world’s largest city.
Wood argues that three important themes blended in those decades to create boundaries within which the thousands of different stakeholder groups in New York were compelled to negotiate their conflicts when it was necessary to do so to avoid paralysis.
The first theme was the ever-present timeclock that limited most construction activities within the city’s 9-month building season. The onslaught of winter weather each year created externally imposed deadlines for each step in the building process, from acquiring land, demolishing older structures, digging out foundations, pouring concrete, making asphalt, securing permits, recruiting skilled and unskilled workers, purchasing materials, custom manufacturing specific components, and arranging for transportation of materials to building sites. Each step needed to be choreographed according to the rhythms of the seasons if the city’s massive scale of building was to occur without interruption. Each step, therefore, created opportunities for every stakeholder to leverage their position to achieve gains and/or to overplay their hands to their own loss. Yet compromises could always emerge because all stakeholders believed that paralysis was not an acceptable option because “the building season” created compelling deadlines.
A second theme was the broadly shared commitment to high-quality building standards. As with all competitive markets high quality usually led to higher costs. But the consistent demand for new buildings in the growing city, combined with a broadly held pride about the city itself among all key stakeholders, meant that buyers and renters were willing to pay higher prices for higher quality, at least in most segments of the market.
The third theme was the common commitment among all stakeholders to use the city’s raucous local political dynamics to resolve most serious disputes when direct negotiations among stakeholders threatened to slow down the pace of building. All stakeholders were engaged in citywide politics, borough-level politics, neighborhood politics, and even block-by-block dynamics. Both legitimate and illegitimate paths were frequently used to leverage local politics to arbitrate and/or impose solutions to any problem that threatened to derail almost any building project, whether grand or trivial. The business of local politics was the business of local building. And the business of local building was the business of spreading prosperity to more people who were previously not members of the established status quo. Paralysis was politically unacceptable to all parties.
Within the boundaries of these overall themes, virtually all stakeholders were able to reconcile their ambitions within the needs of the ever-changing real estate market, and within the “bottom line” shared vision that the purpose of the city was to grow, and to thereby spread prosperity more broadly. If the pie got bigger each year, most stakeholders believed they would get their share.
Wood is careful to point out the many contradictions to this civic faith that were experienced by different groups. Shares were certainly not shared equally, nor were they shared equitably. But the civic commitment to the core purpose of the city survived each challenge and remained in place until it collapsed in the chaos of the Great Depression.
So, what lessons can we take from this extraordinary period in the history of New York? Our first lesson is that it is indeed possible to generate a sustained core purpose that can inspire widespread growth in an American city.
People from all social classes and income levels can share a common vision of city-buildingif if each group is included in the vision of how growth can spread prosperity among all (or at least most). If the vision is convincingly inclusive, antagonistic stakeholders can negotiate their way toward shared goals. Cities can be win-win environments if all groups are genuinely engaged in the process.
Second, it is important for us to remember that freewheeling, profit-seeking, private investment can be (and often still is) the core engine for most city-building. At no time in the extraordinary growth spurts of New York between 1880 and 1930 was public money a central part of financing privately owned buildings. Private investors took great risks and earned great rewards. But not all projects made profits, and those that failed were not rescued from their own mistakes.
Third, public investments and public rules were crucial to the process. Yet public investments were focused on building publicly owned infrastructure. The public ownership of that strategic infrastructure helped ensure that the prosperity of growth would be shared broadly among all stakeholders, especially those who sought their own upward mobility. And public rules ensured that buildings were built with enough quality to maintain their value, and thus their ability to transmit wealth, and upward mobility, to future owners.
Fourth, the processes by which systems-based models of stakeholder compromise and consensus building occur within the broader framework of market-based city-building may sound like a careful and rational process of calculating interests and creating what economists call Pareto Optimal rational choices. More often, however, the process is driven by bare-knuckles power politics among vested interest groups, each of which seeks its own gain.
A vital corollary, however, is that this process needs to be governed by a shared goal of spreading prosperity more broadly, not just distributing future growth among a small group of existing elites. If existing elites are not committed to creating broader prosperity through city-building, disaffected stakeholders can push back through local politics and create widespread paralysis.
So, looking back at the history of New York’s unprecedented era of city-building between 1880 and 1930 inspires me to believe it is possible to adapt the lessons of that era to the very different urban dynamics we have today. The challenge is how to translate the lessons of the past to the 21st century.
Do we have shared purposes for our cities in the 21st century? We certainly have many proposed shared purposes. We have proposed visions of diversity, equity, and inclusion. We have proposed visions of environmental sustainability. We have proposed visions of Edge Cities, Mixed-Use Cities, Learning Cities, Shrinking Cities, Global Cities, Mega Cities, and many others. But do we yet have a set of shared purposes that have taken broad control of the city-building process in enough scale to transform any existing city into a model to be followed widely?
In future posts, I will try to use the lessons of our past to assess current initiatives to answer the question, “What is the purpose of our 21st Century cities?”
Bob Gleeson
[i] Bill Bowen, “Two Visions for Urban Policy,” The Urban Lens, May 27, 2025.
[ii] Alexander Wood, Building the Metropolis: Architecture, Construction, and Labor in New York City, 1880-1935 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2025) p. 4.
[iii] Wood, p. 5.
[iv] Wood, p. 7.