The Good City and the Good Life [Hardcover]

Daniel Kemmis (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 28, 1995

Daniel Kemmis is a successful politician, former Montana state legislator, and current second-term mayor of Missoula, Montana. He is rare among elected officials as a thoughtful interpreter of and commentator on the nature of citizenship and political responsibility; even more rare, he is a fluent and engaging writer. The Good City and the Good Life is a wide-ranging discussion of democracy as a human enterprise. Kemmis uses personal experience and the experience of other cities and citizens in exploring key issues before the public. These issues include economic growth and development, education, health, and cultural life, from hometown Missoula to Baltimore, Dallas, and Seattle in the United States, to Germany and Japan in looking around the world. Though laced with references to literature, philosophy, history, and the work of important contemporary urbanologists, this is a down-to-earth and deeply felt work intended to reach out to all levels in a society concerned about its future

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

In this earnest, cordial meander, Kemmis (Community and the Politics of Place) draws on his own experience?as mayor of Missoula, Montana, and visits elsewhere?to explore the notion of community. People who label themselves taxpayers, he observes trenchantly, do not see themselves as democratic citizens. Similarly, he notes that urban critics such as Jane Jacobs view politicians only as obstacles, while he considers them "entrepreneurs" of power. Citing various civic and cultural initiatives around the country, Kemmis suggests that communities can and must seek to achieve such abstractions as wholeness, grace, character and healing. He's basically right, but his not-so-deep survey fully engages neither the current debates about communitarianism nor the endemic economic and racial problems of America's large cities.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 226 pages
• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin; 1St Edition edition (September 28, 1995)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 039568630X
• ISBN-13: 978-0395686300
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.7 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #594,040 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Montana Mayor Looks at the Interconnectedness of City Life, December 29, 2006

By 

Mark B. Cohen "Improving government for the ... (Philadelphia,PA USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Good City and the Good Life (Hardcover)

Currently a senior fellow at the Center for the Rocky Mountain West at the University of Montana, the author wrote this book in 1994 when he was serving as Mayor of Missoula, Montana after having served as a state legislator, Democratic Minority Leader, Speaker of the House, and city councilman in Missoula.

Before I read this book, I doubt that I had ever heard of Missoula. Not only does the author make Missoula live in the reader's mind as functioning, healing city, but without hype or boosterism, he makes Missoula stand as an example of the interconnectedness of all things human that interact with cities.

This book has various important themes. One is the decline of politics. "(O)ur prevailing politics is steadily dehumanizing us,...and we seem incapable of making it serve us better....a politics beyond the politics of universal anger and mistrust." He believes more people should be engaged and active citizens, instead of just proclaimed taxpayers. He points out that evil totalitarian governments have taxpayers, but only democracies have citizens.

A second theme is the rise of cities as agents of economic growth, healers of public distrust and cynicism, and enablers of world peace and world trade. An active participant in the sister cities movement, he vigorously argues for layers of relationships--schools with similar schools, hospitals with similar hospitals, professions with similar professions,etc.--to make the sister city relationships part of the daily lives of both communities.

As Mayor, he developed sister city relationships with Date, Japan and Neckargemund, Germany around the 50th anniversary of the end of World War II. He also developed a "sister-in-law" relationship with Evian, France, Neckargemund's other sister city. He estimates that there should be about 50,000 such relationships in the early 21st Century. He credits President Eisenhower with beginning the sister cities movement.

His language of praise is both eloquent and imprecise. "The key to it all," he says, "is that there is such a thing as the self-contained identity of your own city and the identity of another, which, although it can never be fully known in part because it can never be fully realized, still exists as that which gives a city its unique personality, and within which its citizens seek and occasionally achieve their own identity and whatever they will achieve of their own human wholeness.

"It is," he says, "in this complex subtle process of achieving greater human integration and wholeness through knowing and celebrating the wholeness of human communities that the world-healing work of the city-to-city movement continues."`

Third, beyond the sister cities movement is the healthy cities movement, pioneered by Dr. Leonard Duhl, an architect of President Lyndon B. Johnson's War on Poverty. This, too, has become an international movement, pushed by both the National Civic League and the World Health Organization. This has roots in the past as well as in the future: it was Plato who coined the term "healthy city." This has meanings both medical--improving the physical health of the citizenry--and metaphorical--improving the quality of civic intereactions.

Fourth, cities inherently have vital functions. "(T)he need to gather in one place...has always been, and still is, the reason for cities." Cities are places that maximize the possibility of human interaction between a wide circle of friends and acquaintances, that allow linkages between different generations as well as between people of the same generation, that allow the growth of responsibility and citizenship.

He greatly admires the writings of Jane Jacobs, and likes her "first fundamental of successful city life: People must take a modicum of public responsibility for each other even if they have no ties to each other. This is a lesson nobody learns by being told. It is learned from the experience of having other people without ties of kinship or close friendship or formal responsibility take a modicum of public responsibility for you."

"The entire purpose of this book, " he says, "is to suggest that the refocusing of human energy around the organic wholeness of cities or city-states promises a profound rehumanizing of the shape and conditions of our lives.

"By attending to the health of the body politic, for example, we are reminding ourselves of the ancient wisdom that individuals cannot be fully health, physically and mentally, in isolation, but only as meaningful players in a meaningful community.

"Or again, the attention to the potential of our cities is reminding us that children cannot realize their own full potential except in the context of a well-functioning community.

"In these, and countless other ways, the healing (the making more whole) of cities is serving to heal--to reknit--the often frayed and sometimes severed strands of our humanity."

This is an excellent book for anyone who is interested in the future and potential of cities. The author has not only walked a long way in Missoula, but he has traveled throughout the U.S. and the world in various governmental, non-profit and charitable roles.

This is also an excellent book for anyone interested in a rebirth of our politics. The author values citizen participation above any other reform, and waxes lyrically about its benefits. His ideal is not a government that automatically does the right thing--he doubts that is possible--but a government that involves the people, learns from their accumulated wisdom and experience, and helps them achieve a measure of personal growth through engaging in deliberative and constructive processes of planning and development.

Written at a high point of cynicism towards government and urban life, it perhaps will find a larger audience in the current, more optimistic time. For those who believe that local government can have a positive impact on its citizens, our country, and our world, this is the book to read.