Book description
At 1:27 on the morning of August 4, 2005, Herbert Manes fatally
stabbed Robert Monroe, known as Shorty, in a dispute over five
dollars. It was a horrific yet mundane incident for the poor, heavily
African American neighborhood of North Philadelphia-one of seven
homicides to occur in the city that day and yet not make the major
newspapers. For Michael B. Katz, an urban historian and a juror on the
murder trial, the story of Manes and Shorty exemplified the
marginalization, social isolation, and indifference that plague
American cities.
Introduced by the gripping narrative of this murder and its
circumstances, Why Don't American Cities Burn? charts the
emergence of the urban forms that underlie such events. Katz traces
the collision of urban transformation with the rightward-moving social
politics of late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century America. He
shows how the bifurcation of black social structures produced a new
African American inequality and traces the shift from images of a
pathological black "underclass" to praise of the
entrepreneurial poor who take advantage of new technologies of poverty
work to find the beginning of the path to the middle class. He
explores the reasons American cities since the early 1970s have
remained relatively free of collective violence while black men in
bleak inner-city neighborhoods have turned their rage inward on one
another rather than on the agents and symbols of a culture and
political economy that exclude them.
The book ends with a meditation on how the political left and
right have come to believe that urban transformation is inevitably one
of failure and decline abetted by the response of government to
deindustrialization, poverty, and race. How, Katz asks, can we
construct a new narrative that acknowledges the dark side of urban
history even as it demonstrates the capacity of government to address
the problems of cities and their residents? How can we create a
politics of modest hope?
"Brilliantly conceived and beautifully written, Why Don't
American Cities Burn? is a terrific read that is difficult to
put down. Katz considers changes over the past half-century through
the lenses of urban geography and population demographics,
institutional structures, the public's ossified view of the deserving
and undeserving urban poor, and how the zeal for market-based
solutions has led towards new poverty technologies that recast the
poor as entrepreneurial actors. Most important, Katz introduces his
book with a story that humanizes the field of social sciences
that-paradoxically-appears at times to have forgotten the people in
the sea of quantitative analyses."-Peter Hendee Brown, University
of Minnesota
Michael B. Katz is Walter H. Annenberg Professor of History at the
University of Pennsylvania. Among his many books is The Price of
Citizenship: Redefining the American Welfare State, also available from
the University of Pennsylvania Press.
