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Following on Dahl’s heels is Douglas W. Rae’s City: Urbanism and Its End, an extraordinary assessment of the birth and death of urbanism and its effects on New Haven’s past, present, and future. It is a great book, the happy marriage of an astute, scholarly synthesis and an accessible walking tour of the city. Rae strikes an avuncular tone throughout the book as he urges the reader, while visualizing the described surroundings, to make sense of the relationship between the details and the big picture. But while his manner of address is lofty, he never condescends to his object of inquiry. Having served both as a professor of political science and management at Yale and as chief administrative officer for John Daniels, New Haven’s first black mayor, Rae seems to have mastered both the theoretical and the practical, the abstract musings of urban scholars as well as the quotidian speech of demanding citizens and their civil servants.

Rae’s mission is clear: he aims to chart the rise and fall of urbanism in New Haven and to make evident the need for new strategies in the post-urbanism era. Urbanism, according to Rae, stands for “patterns of private conduct and decision-making that by and large make the successful governance of cities possible even when City Hall is a fairly weak institution.” The private conduct and decision-making that most drove the forces of urban growth in New Haven were the day-to-day interactions of businesspeople, homeowners, and other residents who walked the same wide sidewalks alongside diversified, mixed-use real estate.

Central to his elaboration of urbanism, its rise and decline, are two complementary concepts regarding the way cities are run. The first, government, comprises the formal structures of elected and appointed political leadership, while the second, governance, comprises the myriad ways in which decisions on how the city will be run are made outside the confines of City Hall. The distinction is a classic and useful one, and Rae deploys it skillfully as he outlines the contours of the city’s rise to the heights of urban vigor during World War I and its decline from that perch around the time of the Vietnam War.

Rae is somewhat skeptical of the powers of government. He places little stock in formal institutions and their capacity to drive a city in one direction or another. Urban growth and urbanism itself in New Haven largely grew out of the fortunate confluence of a number of factors: the city’s proximity to New York and Boston, its location on the water, the development of fixed-path rail travel, the city’s religious and ethnic diversity, and the proliferation of social organizations. All of this happened, to varying extents, organically, without the driving leadership of city government (perhaps with the exception of Mayor Frank Rice’s fetishistic attention to developing the city’s sidewalks. Rice prided himself on “excellence in small things,” and New Haven’s hundreds of miles of standardized concrete sidewalks are a testament to this idiosyncratic style of government).

His emphasis on civic, extra-governmental leadership and organization notwithstanding, Rae does have deep respect for great leaders. He reserves his highest praise for Mayor Richard C. Lee, who led the city from 1954 to 1970. In Rae’s estimation, Lee was “the greatest mayor of New Haven’s twentieth century and was among the most remarkable mayors who served anywhere in the United States during that century.” Lee’s greatest successes were governmental, his greatest failures were in governance. His vitalization of the city’s Redevelopment Agency and his wresting a greater share of grant money from federal and state coffers than any other American mayor stand as towering achievements in an era of extraordinarily difficult and inept mayoralties throughout the nation.

Yet even Lee’s ambition could not counter the “underlying problems ... so deeply rooted in [New Haven’s] history, so powerful, and so complex that no mayor and no mayoral administration lasting a mere sixteen years could have overcome them.” As was the case in nearly every Rust Belt city, the forces of suburbanization and industrial decay were too strong for Lee to overcome. As urbanism itself fell apart under these pressures in the 1960s, Lee was left to pick up the pieces.

Lee’s goals for New Haven in the 1950s and ‘60s were clear: in Rae’s words, those goals included “making central-city land an object of competition between would-be investors, restoring the vital fabric of enterprise downtown and in the neighborhoods, making the central-city housing stock desirable again (both to potential residents and to mortgage underwriters), enlivening the civic life of neighborhoods and the city at large, and restoring a class of grounded leadership linking citizenship based on residence with citizenship based on ownership and investment.” No small task, especially when confronted with growing racial strife, the death of the businesses that formed the city’s economic base, federal redlining—the refusal to grant mortgages and insurance to financially risky areas—that devastated the parts of the city most in need, and a host of other problems common to the major American cities. The Lee administration tried valiantly, consolidating a brain trust in emulation of the Kennedy administration and hitting the pavement like legendary New York Mayor John V. Lindsay. Yet Lee’s administration also made some of the classic errors of the time, for example driving a highway connector—today called the Richard C. Lee Highway—straight through the heart of the old, strong Oak Street neighborhood.

This is not a new story, but it is one that bears retelling to show the manifold ways in which cities expand and contract. The greatest achievement of this book is Rae’s dense and lucid discussion of the technologies of city governance, of civic life through its heyday and subsequent demise. Indeed, City offers very little that is entirely new about urbanism. Rather, its strength and brilliance derive from Rae’s meticulous demonstration of how the details of day-to-day city living corroborate or refute the tenets of Urbanist thought. He pairs well-selected observations from theorists like Jane Jacobs and John Stilgoe with meaningful anecdotes or assessments of data culled from such maverick sources as telephone books and social club rosters, translating the theories into their real life meanings. For example, Rae usefully cites Richard Sennett’s discussion of “useful disorder”—the challenging yet socially productive complexity that results from interactions of diverse groups of people —to explain the value of blocks where houses and stores mix and the virtues of schools where immigrants from various countries conversed in a cacophony of languages.

Rae paints a rich portrait of New Haven’s social history as he describes its businesses, social organizations, religious institutions, and other prominent players, and how they brought about the “networks of networks” to which Rae ascribes the vitality of New Haven’s golden age. Rae argues that the strength of the city as a place to live and do business came from the sedimentation of individuals’ business, personal, and social interests in the same small, centered community space over time. He presents unconventional evidence to support his various theses about the engines of urban growth and decline. For example, a series of maps showing the location of employees and managers of city businesses accompanies Rae’s discussion of “working-class localism” and “upper-class localism.” These two different “networks of networks” complemented each other because of their spatial proximity. Both lower and upper classes lived within a small, navigable, and well-managed area, so their economic, political, and social drives, though differing in detail, all worked towards a shared vision of a stronger central city.

As Rae indicated in an interview with the New Haven Advocate, the book’s greatest failing is its cursory treatment of the role that unions have played in New Haven’s history. He duly addresses the political role the unions played in the early part of the 20th century, supporting candidates and working on elections, but fails to account for the unions’ softer and more enduring contributions—their support of social organizations, for example. This omission partly relates to Rae’s (arguably purposeful) neglect of what has become the most heatedly contested issue in contemporary New Haven politics: the relationship between Yale and the city. Given the longstanding and complex strife between the city and its resident university, it is understandable that Rae would seek to push the question of the university role in the city’s history to the margins. Indeed, Rae ends City with an acknowledgement that this relationship is “the subject of another book.” But the current book could have paid a little more attention to Yale’s role in New Haven. The university’s economic impact is indisputable, but more nebulous effects no doubt exist: the skewing of the city’s central district to student rather than resident needs and the racial disparity between town and gown, for instance.

City is not meant to be tendentious or prescriptive, so Rae cannot be faulted for not laying out a specific plan for New Haven’s near future. But what is heartening is how much he has conveyed about what makes cities work. Rae so vividly and sensibly explains how the city thrived in the past that one can easily envision what will make the city great in the future: a sense that the people are moored to the place through homeownership and the establishment of longstanding personal and social connections, the restoration of a vibrant cultural life downtown, leadership that effectively mobilizes government and involves organizations of governance, and regional integration that makes New Haven a major player in the life of a greater swath of the Connecticut population. City offers an extraordinarily instructive past for those concerned with New Haven’s—and the American city’s—future.

This article appeared in the July 2004 issue of Next American City magazine. SUBSCRIBE NOW!