urban archipelago – Sheila Kennedy

City And State

In the wake of John Kerry’s 2004 electoral defeat, the editors of The Stranger, an alternative newspaper published in Seattle, published a wonderful rant. The editors looked at the red and blue election map, and pointed to the (visually obvious) fact that even in the reddest states, cities were bright blue. America’s urban areas comprised what they called an “urban archipelago” that reflected political values and attitudes vastly different from those of rural America.

Academic researchers have since confirmed that observation: virtually every major city (100,000 plus) in the United States of America has a political culture starkly different from that of the less populous areas surrounding it. As I wrote in a post back then, the problem is, the people who live in densely populated cities have demonstrably less political voice than their country cousins. Most states don’t really have “one person one vote” and the result is that rural voters are vastly overrepresented. State taxes paid by city dwellers go disproportionately to rural areas, and the people who populate state legislatures have gerrymandered voting districts to keep things that way.

Representative government wasn’t genuinely representative then, and in 2021, the situation hasn’t improved.

Earlier this month, Governing Magazine noted the same problem, in an article titled “Why Cities Have More People But Less Clout.”

Gun violence is on the rise in Philadelphia. In January, homicides jumped by a third over the same month in 2020, which itself had been the deadliest in three decades. Non-fatal shootings increased last month by 71 percent.

City officials, wanting to address the issue, have repeatedly come up with gun control measures they believe will save lives. Their efforts, however, have gone nowhere. Pennsylvania, along with more than 40 other states, blocks localities from passing their own firearms regulations.

Last fall, Philadelphia sued the state to end its gun pre-emption law. “If the Pennsylvania General Assembly refuses to do anything to help us protect our citizens,” said Darrell Clarke, the president of the Philadelphia city council, “then they should not have the right to prevent us from taking the kinds of actions we know we need to keep our residents safe from harm.”

Good luck with that. Courts have repeatedly upheld Pennsylvania’s power to block local gun control laws. Across the country, states have consistently pre-empted localities on a broad range of issues, from minimum wage increases and paid sick leave requirements to bans on plastic bags or removal of Confederate monuments.

Sounds pretty familiar to us Hoosiers…

The article reports what most of us know–that the majority of the nation’s economic growth has been concentrated in major cities that are the primary economic engines of their states. You would think that would make them deserving of support– but state officials pretty consistently opt to keep money flowing from those cities to rural, less prosperous areas of the state. Cities send far more tax dollars to the state that they receive back in spending.

As cities are prospering (or at least were, before the pandemic and the great migration out of downtown offices), they have been moving in an increasingly progressive direction. Only three of the nation’s 25 largest cities have Republican mayors. Meanwhile, a majority of state legislatures are controlled by the GOP. That creates a disconnect that leads to frequent pre-emption, particularly in Republican states in the South, Southwest and Midwest.

It isn’t just a partisan political gap; the urban/rural divide “reflects and is reinforced by other overlapping differences, including cultural attitudes, education levels, class and race.”

Democrats can compete and win statewide in states including Michigan, North Carolina, and Wisconsin — and now Arizona and Georgia — but they’re shut out of power at the legislative level in all those places. Pennsylvania falls into this category as well.

The article acknowledges the a long tradition of outstate resentment of the dominant city–a resentment made stronger by the partisan split.

“They don’t have any reason to take into account the interest of the urban population in making legislation, and they have a lot of interest in not doing so,” says Schragger, the UVA law professor. “Particularly on cultural issues and fiscal issues, it pays for these legislators to resist giving cities more home-rule powers, because their constituents tend to be opposed even to local policies that are contrary to national conservative positions.”

The article is further evidence of America’s undemocratic move to minority rule, buttressed by giving every state two senators, irrespective of population count (the recent Republican Senate majority, which refused to rein in Trump’s abuses after his first impeachment, was elected with 20 million fewer votes than the Democratic minority), and
by the anti-majoritarian operation of the Electoral College.

How we give America’s urban majority at least an equal say with its rural minority is an increasingly critical question.

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Rural versus Urban

These days, “us versus them” seems to describe the whole world: Israel versus Gaza, ISIS versus non-Muslims, cops versus African-Americans, theocrats versus secular folks, Republicans versus Democrats… Choose your team–there are plenty of them.

When I wonder why Americans can’t “just get along,” as Rodney King memorably put it, I think back to a wonderful rant published by the editors of The Stranger, an alternative newspaper published in Seattle, in the wake of the 2004 elections. Looking at the red and blue of the election map, they noted that cities were bright blue dots in even the reddest states–that urban areas comprised an “urban archipelago” with political values and attitudes vastly different from those of rural America.

Researchers have confirmed their observation: virtually every major city (100,000 plus) in the United States of America has a political culture starkly different from that of the less populous areas surrounding it.

As New York Times columnist Gail Collins noted a couple of years ago, people living in densely populated urban areas understand the need for government–paved roads and public safety and garbage collection. That farmer out at the end of the gravel road who rarely gets a visitor (and isn’t worth the effort of the burglar), doesn’t see much reason to pay taxes.

Living with lots of people who are different from you shapes a certain worldview, an identifiably urban value structure. As the authors of the Urban Archipeligo wrote in that seminal essay,

Look around you, urbanite, at the multiplicity of cultures, ethnicities, and tribes that are smashed together in every urban center…: We’re for that. We’re for pluralism of thought, race, and identity. We’re for a freedom of religion that includes the freedom from religion–not as some crazy aberration, but as an equally valid approach to life. We are for the right to choose one’s own sexual and recreational behavior, to control one’s own body and what one puts inside it. We are for life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness…..

Unlike the people who flee from cities in search of a life free from disagreement and dark skin, we are for contentiousness, discourse, and the heightened understanding of life that grows from having to accommodate opposing viewpoints. We’re for opposition…. Republicans have succeeded in making the word “liberal”–which literally means “free from bigotry… favoring proposals for reform, open to new ideas for progress, and tolerant of the ideas and behavior of others; broad-minded”–into an epithet….

Let’s see, what else are we for? How about education? Cities are beehives of intellectual energy; students and teachers are everywhere you look, studying, teaching, thinking…. It’s time to start celebrating that, because if the reds have their way, advanced degrees will one day be awarded based on the number of Bible verses a person can recite from memory. In the city, people ask you what you’re reading. Outside the city, they ask you why you’re reading. You do the math–and you’ll have to, because non-urbanists can hardly even count their own children at this point. For too long now, we’ve caved to the non-urban wisdom that decries universities as bastions of elitism and snobbery. Guess what: That’s why we should embrace them. Outside of the city, elitism and snobbery are code words for literacy and complexity. And when the oil dries up, we’re not going to be turning to priests for answers–we’ll be calling the scientists. And speaking of science: SCIENCE! That’s another thing we’re for. And reason. And history.

Is this stark “we versus they” picture fair? Of course not. There are plenty of thoughtful and measured inhabitants of rural precincts. That said, the inclusive culture created by the urban worldview is one of the reasons so many marginalized folks–LGBT people, Jews, atheists, artsy nonconformists– tend to migrate to cities.

The problem is, the people who live in densely populated cities have demonstrably less political voice than their country cousins; most states don’t really have “one person one vote” and the result is that rural values are vastly overrepresented. State taxes paid by city dwellers go disproportionately to rural areas, and the people who populate state legislatures have gerrymandered voting districts to keep things that way.

Representative government just isn’t very representative these days.

Until we address gerrymandering—and the efforts to suppress the votes of minority voters—the values of rural areas will continue to be over-represented, and the views of folks living in the urban archipelago will continue to be ignored by policymakers.

And that’s not good for democracy.

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The Color of Change

In his most recent column, Neil Pierce reports on the results of a study done by McKinsey, the global consulting firm. The study predicts a continuation and acceleration of the move from rural areas to cities. It is not an exaggeration to say McKinsey sees ongoing urbanization of the planet.

The upshot?

“Globally, cities are economic dynamos. They typically attract skilled workers and productive activity that triples per capita income over rural areas. With the opportunities that cities bring them, 1 billion people are likely to enter the global “consuming class,” virtually all in developing world metropolises, by 2025. Their activity and buying demands will have a cumulative upward impact of roughly $20 trillion a year on the world’s economy.

On top of that, the cities where the new urbanites live will likely be obliged to double their annual investments in buildings, roadways, water systems, ports and public buildings from today’s $10 trillion a year to $20 trillion a year by 2025. Businesses will have immense new opportunities; it’s reasonable to expect “a powerful and welcome boost to global economic growth.”

So far, so good. But as Pierce notes, all is not paradise. There are substantial challenges lurking beneath the surface good news: where will government agencies get the capital necessary to build the roads and sewers and other infrastructure that will be required? What about the impact on an already stressed environment?

Pierce does not address the social effects of urbanization, but those effects may be the most consequential. There is substantial scholarship suggesting that people who live in more densely populated cities tend to hold different political and social beliefs than their country cousins. Almost by necessity, city dwellers are more tolerant of difference, more supportive of funding for government services (it’s a lot harder to do without such “amenities” as garbage collection and police protection once you’ve left the farm.) There’s a reason that cities show up as islands of blue even in the reddest of states on those ubiquitous political maps.

Not long after the 2004 Presidential election, the Seattle alternative paper The Stranger ran an article titled “The Urban Archipelago,” and subtitled “It’s the Cities, Stupid.” It’s still worth reading in its entirety–a passionate manifesto about citizenship and cities and the politics of urban America. The essay began by analyzing the 2004 election results and making a convincing case that–as the authors put it–the Democratic party is the party of urban America.

The essay is long and angry, and very partisan, but much of it rings true. I particularly like this section, which outlines “urban values.”

But if liberals and progressives want to reach out past our urban bases, it might be helpful to identify some essential convictions, thereby allowing us to perhaps compete on “values.”…

So how do we live and what are we for? Look around you, urbanite, at the multiplicity of cultures, ethnicities, and tribes that are smashed together in every urban center (yes, even Seattle): We’re for that. We’re for pluralism of thought, race, and identity. We’re for a freedom of religion that includes the freedom from religion–not as some crazy aberration, but as an equally valid approach to life. We are for the right to choose one’s own sexual and recreational behavior, to control one’s own body and what one puts inside it. We are for life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. The people who just elected George W. Bush to a second term are frankly against every single idea outlined above.

Unlike the people who flee from cities in search of a life free from disagreement and dark skin, we are for contentiousness, discourse, and the heightened understanding of life that grows from having to accommodate opposing viewpoints. We’re for opposition. And just to be clear: The non-urban argument, the red state position, isn’t oppositional, it’s negational–they are in active denial of the existence of other places, other people, other ideas. It’s reactionary utopianism, and it is a clear and present danger; urbanists should be upfront and unapologetic about our contempt for their politics and their negational values. Republicans have succeeded in making the word “liberal”–which literally means “free from bigotry… favoring proposals for reform, open to new ideas for progress, and tolerant of the ideas and behavior of others; broad-minded”–into an epithet. Urbanists should proclaim their liberalism from the highest rooftop (we have higher rooftops than they do); it’s the only way we survive.

Let’s see, what else are we for? How about education? Cities are beehives of intellectual energy; students and teachers are everywhere you look, studying, teaching, thinking. In Seattle, you can barely throw a rock without hitting a college. It’s time to start celebrating that…. In the city, people ask you what you’re reading. Outside the city, they ask you why you’re reading. You do the math–and you’ll have to, because non-urbanists can hardly even count their own children at this point. For too long now, we’ve caved to the non-urban wisdom that decries universities as bastions of elitism and snobbery. Guess what: That’s why we should embrace them. Outside of the city, elitism and snobbery are code words for literacy and complexity. And when the oil dries up, we’re not going to be turning to priests for answers–we’ll be calling the scientists. And speaking of science: SCIENCE! That’s another thing we’re for. And reason. And history. All those things that non-urbanists have replaced with their idiotic faith. We’re for those.

As part of our pro-reason platform, we’re for paying taxes–taxes, after all, support the urban infrastructure on which we all rely, and as such, are a necessary part of the social contract we sign every day. We are for density, and because we’re for density, we’re for programs that support it, like mass transit.”

Un-PC as the whole thing is–it would not be unfair to call it a “rant”–there is enormous truth in the essay’s descriptions of urban and rural values. Cities are certainly not Edens–density and diversity bring significant challenges, and plenty of city folks are bigots and worse.

That said, cities do more than drive economic growth. They incubate civilization.

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