Volume 13, Number 12 · January 1, 1970
An Urban Anarchist
By Richard Sennett
The Economy of Cities
by Jane Jacobs
Random House, 268 pp., $5.95
In the past twenty-five years American cities have become an enigma to the people who plan them. It is by now common wisdom that, as poor blacks and Puerto Ricans have moved into cities while more prosperous whites have moved away, the city has become the setting where unresolved national conflicts between the races and classes are being fought out. The question then arises: what relation does the city as a distinctive kind of human settlement have to those forces tearing it apart? People speak glibly of 'urban violence,' but what is there about the conflicts between blacks and whites, or students and police, that is traceable to the peculiar arrangements of city life?
Review, 3342 words
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