Questioning The Urbanity Of New York City

28 June 2007 - 7:00am

A new book brings together perspectives on how New York's urban renaissance has made the city less urban and more suburban.

The Suburbanization of New York: Is the World's Greatest City Becoming Just Another Town? is a "collection of 14 essays [that] captures the sense of frustration shared by anyone bothered that prosperity in American cities seems inseparable from corporate branding. Worse, the newcomers with the wherewithal to pay obscene housing prices don't seem interested in the politics that a prior generation held dear."

"In other words, there's a changing of the landscape and a changing of the guard. And a fear that something irreplaceably, uniquely "urban" is being lost."

"..."At any given moment, the temporary population of the city overwhelmingly comprises people who either now live in suburbia or who have grown up in suburbia," [Francis] Morrone writes. "I suspect that it is this overwhelming suburban presence that has made Manhattan seem a simulacrum of itself, a pod-city."..."

Source: The San Francisco Chronicle, June 26, 2007
Bookmark and Share
The following list shows the top 10 metropolitan statistical areas, as defined by the U.S. Office of Management and Budget, where commuting by public transportation has grown the most. None of them are among the nation's top 10 most populous metro areas, and yet seven are within the top 20.