The American City
A Social and Cultural History
Daniel J Monti, Jr

Published by Blackwell, 2000 
ISBN 1557869170
Buy this book online

by Nigel McGurk


The cataclysmic events of September 11th and its aftermath have marked the end of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty first in the most tragic and unexpected of ways. Months later and the impacts are still reverberating around a shocked globe. The abject terror faced by the world’s leading nation on September 11th has raised questions to which we will not know the answers for many years to come. “The American City” was published prior to September 11th and it is not the intention of this review to consider the book in the direct light of events in New York. However, it is difficult to read the book and not to relate parts of it to events etched on everyone’s mind, especially when the subject matter is so clearly related. So whilst I have tried to write this review without September 11th in mind, I apologise in advance to anyone who considers that this has not been achieved.

America helped define the twentieth century more than any other country. Its influence on and dominance of the rest of the world has been relentless ever since the sinking of the Lucitania forced the American government to reconsider an isolationist stance during the Great War. However, whilst America has since “conquered” the world through globalisation, it remains a country that is tremendously inward-looking and is characterised by extraordinary contrasts. 

The lives of the haves and have-nots and the impacts on a highly-policed society of the freedom to carry a gun, are as much a part of American cities as all-night diners, skyscrapers and freeways. There are more murders in Washington DC in any eighteen month period than there have been in Northern Ireland since the troubles began in the late 1960s. Obesity and drug abuse is as much a problem among the ghettoes of the unemployed as it is in the colleges and fortified estates of the rich. The American Dream seems to be as much about an endless desire for material goods, the consumption of which only leaves a yearning for more, as it is about starting from scratch and “making it.” Yet despite all this and more, Americans are undeniably proud of their cities and of being American. 

Daniel J Monti, Jr’s book is very personal and very American. It is not easy to grasp all of the points being made. This is not necessarily a criticism of the author, more the choice of subject and the attempt to provide too many answers. The title of the book indicates the sheer size of the task attempted. Monti’s love for his subject is clear – the notes to each chapter each comprising a chapter in themselves – but his message is somewhat muddied due to his subjective approach and self-conscious attempts to explain his opinions. Again, this is not necessarily a criticism, more a difficulty in understanding that the author is just being very American.

“The American City” seems to begin from the precept that many people consider city-life in the United States to comprise an urban nightmare. Monti’s opening refers to a film he would often present in his lectures. This condensed 24 hours of people and traffic passing through Times Square into just five minutes. The image of the city’s streets, or arteries, “clogged” with life was too much for many of his students, who professed to never wanting to live in such a place. 

Early on in the book, the author makes the point that civic life is considered to have been part of America’s past and is not part of today, where people live hurried lives yet neither influence the place in which they live, nor interact with the people with whom they share their public space. He doesn’t make the point that it is ironic that America, the land of the individual, also comprises some of the biggest, densest and most influential cities in the world, where communal life must exist to an enormous extent merely for urban life to function. In fact, it is not until the conclusion of the whole book that Monti “reveals” this fairly obvious point as a key finding. 

“The American City” considers elements of the development of urban America in great depth. In identifying the increasing popularity of Business Improvement Districts (BIDs) as a method of making parts of cities “look better and feel safer” for example, Monti recognises that they are only one of a continuous stream of initiatives which have been introduced throughout the last 200 years in the United States. In the eighteenth century local store owners would build sidewalks, construct sewers and pave roads in front of their businesses well before widespread taxation led to city-wide service provision. Two hundred years ago, such a commitment was seen as gentrifying prosperous and ordered areas. Today, the author makes the telling point that when successful, the effect of BIDs is to “reassert the legitimacy of bourgeois values in parts of cities which seem to have forgotten them.”

This return to the past is a common theme of the book. Monti considers the social and cultural history of cities for a number of reasons. First and foremost, “The American City” provides a commentary on the development of cities over a two hundred year period. Second and third, Monti considers how history has shaped the present and whether there are elements of the past that are as common today as they have always been. 

As the subject matter is as wide ranging as religion, tolerance, privacy, politics, commerce and a plethora of other cultural and social topics, the sensation felt by the reader must be similar to that felt by Americans on a whistle-stop tour of Europe – “What day is it ? Rome in the morning, Florence in the afternoon, it must be Wednesday.” The depth of research and the fascinating detail flagged up is a reason for reading the book alone. Together with a team of undergraduates, Monti collected and read microfilm records of newspapers from fifty different cities, building up a source of knowledge and an archive of events which reflected what was happening locally and how people reacted to events outside their own cities. It is the author’s stated intention to continue this archiving process and to share the benefits over the internet. This is being achieved in partnership with the schools and colleges within each of the cities. Thus, the true benefit of this research is not the cramming of less than 400 pages with albeit interesting information, but the genuine blossoming of a firmly rooted tree of knowledge. 

Urban planning comprises only a small specific portion of the book, but underlies much of the rest. In considering planning issues, the author sets out his understanding of the views on cities of two of the most eminent urban planners and thinkers, Louis Mumford and Sir Peter Hall, before providing his own opinion.

Mumford’s view that urban life was inherently disorganised and had little that was good to say about cities or their future. He considered them to produce “…not only high levels of illness and mortality but also profound changes in the ways men interacted (or failed to interact) with their neighbors…” and to encourage “…social as well as spatial separation between classes.” According to Mumford, such problems had grown to the extent that they could never be put right. 

Monti quotes Sir Peter Hall as being more positive – although strangely there is no reference to the fact that Hall remains very much a modern influence whilst Mumford was born into the Nineteenth Century and his life and views were shaped between fifty and a hundred years ago. Similarly, the fact that the two planners lived/live on either side of the Atlantic is not considered worthy of note. Hall is “…mindful of the great artistic, technological, and cultural accomplishments…he also speaks of order…which animates the lives of the persons who live and work in cities.” Monti then expresses surprise that Hall is “mute” on where morality in the city comes from and chooses instead to describe the structure of cities with passion. This is unfair on Hall, who I’m sure would describe himself as an urban planner rather than a moralist! It is merely a writer’s tool used by Monti to introduce his own view, which eventually becomes the main conclusion drawn by “The American City” that morality and civic culture are at the heart of American cities only this fails to receive the recognition it deserves. 

Monti further develops and then summarises his concluding view as “The good news is that…(we)…share in the cultural and civic bounties of the cities anyway. The bad news is that we do not see the urban way of life made in cities as part of our cultural inheritance, and we do not appreciate the contribution it has made to our lives.”

This is where my grasp of the book fails me. Through his analysis of culture and history, the author provides a fascinating commentary about the development of American cities. He does not however, provide clear evidence that cities are not part of America’s cultural inheritance. Indeed, the book seems to suggest to me the very opposite – that America’s cultural inheritance is defined by the nation’s cities. I remain confused as to why Monti makes such a fuss about “revealing” that American cities have a civic culture and that in much of urban America people are sociable and work together for the common good. Surely we all knew this. This is the case to a greater or lesser extent the world over, irrespective of nationality, underlying economic or socio-political regimes. I’m afraid that to me, this conclusion by “The American City” merely confirms my opinion that many Americans have a perception of themselves that is not shared by the rest of the world. In considering themselves in the mirror, they are apt to reflect that “yes, we’re different, but hey - justifiably so.” This just isn’t the case.

Perhaps in the light of what “The American City” comprises, to criticise Monti’s conclusion is unfair. Monti himself goes to great pains to state that the conclusion is just his own opinion. This opinion is based upon an encyclopaedic knowledge of urban America that few other writers can rival. As a reference text, as a source of information leading to further reading and as an individual’s views on what has made the American cities of today, Daniel J Monti, Jr’s book is a work of major significance. 

Whilst the language is personal and Monti often takes a long time to travel a short distance, this only reflects the author’s burning passion for his subject. The beneficial corollary of this is that on occasion Monti’s descriptive writing rises to great heights. In my view, whilst hidden away in the first chapter, his confession to his passion is the most beautifully written paragraph in the book and should introduce the whole volume. Instead, it concludes this review. 

“I love cities. I am drawn to their early waking, to ships that suddenly appear with the light and to trains stocked with people whose untold stories and steady steps take them to fill another day. I join them in the unbounded energy of those days, all the passing and being passed, our reflections on store windows and voices in each other’s ears. Whether together or alone we bear witness to the sights and sounds of a world in the making. But it is at night that I find myself lingering most, viewing the city’s lights and shadows in quiet communion, ushering in tomorrow as a promise and closing it like a prayer.”

Nigel McGurk BSc (Hons) MCD MBA MRTPI is a professional development land manager and town planner based in Cheshire and practising throughout the north west of England.

© Copyright  2002 Nigel McGurk/The Journal of Psychogeography and Urban Research