In The Great Inversion and the Future of the American City we travel the nation with Alan Ehrenhalt, one of our leading urbanists, as he explains how America’s cities are changing, what makes them succeed or fail, and what this means for our future.
Just a couple of decades ago, we took it for granted that inner cities were the preserve of immigrants and the poor, and that suburbs were the chosen destination of those who could afford them. Today, a demographic inversion is taking place: Central cities increasingly are where the affluent want to live, while suburbs are becoming home to poorer people and those who come to America from other parts of the world. Highly educated members of the emerging millennial generation are showing a decided preference for urban life and are being joined in many places by a new class of affluent retirees.
Ehrenhalt shows us how the commercial canyons of lower Manhattan are becoming residential neighborhoods, and how mass transit has revitalized inner-city communities in Chicago and Brooklyn. He explains why car-dominated cities like Phoenix and Charlotte have sought to build twenty-first-century downtowns from scratch, while sprawling postwar suburbs are seeking to attract young people with their own form of urbanized experience.
The Great Inversion is an eye-opening and thoroughly engaging look at our urban society and its future.
The Great Inversion and the Future of the American City
and over one million other books are available for Amazon Kindle. Learn more
| ||||||||||||||||||||||||
Browse our Bookshelf Favorites store for big savings on popular fiction, nonfiction, children's books, and more. |
Book Description
Frequently Bought Together
Editorial Reviews
From Booklist
In the future, American cities could look like late-nineteenth-century Vienna, with lively, affluent metropolitan core areas and the lower classes consigned to life in peripheral suburbs. Such cities will go well beyond gentrification and involve the displacement of the poor in inner-city areas by the wealthy, according to urbanologist Ehrenhalt. He details how the trend toward such cities is already apparent in Chicago, Atlanta, Washington, Houston, and other metropolitan areas. Drawing on census data and economic research, he examines the factors behind the trend, including mass transit, retail and housing development in downtown locations, and the declining appeal of long commutes to distant suburbs. Ehrenhalt also offers detailed portraits of the future of suburban sprawl in areas struggling to re-create the appeal of cities by developing more accessible commercial zones. This is an engaging look at demographic changes that promise a very different future for cities and suburbs. --Vanessa Bush
Review
“Ehrenhalt takes his reader on a tour of the changing American cityscape . . . An enjoyable and engaging read, especially for those considering a move back to the city . . . Solidly researched with great questions asked and plenty of hard facts and anecdotal answers provided.”
—Richard Horan, Christian Science Monitor
“The Great Inversion and the United Nations agree; the world is becoming more urban by the day . . . To Ehrenhalt’s credit, he does not pass moral judgment on the process. With clear prose that is both informative and entertaining, he objectively states the facts (and presents a great number of voices from immigrant businessmen and local civil servants to politicians from Elite African-American families and developers), leaving his readers free to render their own verdict.”
—Joshua Bloodworth, Dominion of New York
“Most writers on cities are either cheerleaders or naysayers. Ehrenhalt is neither, and he has written a balanced, hard-hitting book that is a persuasive forecast of our complex urban future.”
—Witold Rybczynski, author of Makeshift Metropolis
“The future of the city is the future of America and the world. Alan Ehrenhalt shows us how a desire for urbanism is bringing people back to America’s downtowns, and what suburbs and communities of all sorts must do to thrive in the future. The Great Inversion is a must read for anyone concerned with American cities, urbanism, and the future of the way we live.”
—Richard Florida, author of Who’s Your City?
"[The Great Inversion] is a serious, provocative, and gracefully written, and consistently interesting look at how the urban-suburban balance is shifting"
—Better! Cities & Towns
—Richard Horan, Christian Science Monitor
“The Great Inversion and the United Nations agree; the world is becoming more urban by the day . . . To Ehrenhalt’s credit, he does not pass moral judgment on the process. With clear prose that is both informative and entertaining, he objectively states the facts (and presents a great number of voices from immigrant businessmen and local civil servants to politicians from Elite African-American families and developers), leaving his readers free to render their own verdict.”
—Joshua Bloodworth, Dominion of New York
“Most writers on cities are either cheerleaders or naysayers. Ehrenhalt is neither, and he has written a balanced, hard-hitting book that is a persuasive forecast of our complex urban future.”
—Witold Rybczynski, author of Makeshift Metropolis
“The future of the city is the future of America and the world. Alan Ehrenhalt shows us how a desire for urbanism is bringing people back to America’s downtowns, and what suburbs and communities of all sorts must do to thrive in the future. The Great Inversion is a must read for anyone concerned with American cities, urbanism, and the future of the way we live.”
—Richard Florida, author of Who’s Your City?
"[The Great Inversion] is a serious, provocative, and gracefully written, and consistently interesting look at how the urban-suburban balance is shifting"
—Better! Cities & Towns
Product Details
Would you like to update product info or give feedback on images? |
More About the Author
Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.
Customer Reviews
“ This is an excellent book, written with the data in mind but without the more heavy-handed charts and foot notes that often can be presented in such texts. ”
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
10 of 10 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover
This is an excellent book, written with the data in mind but without the more heavy-handed charts and foot notes that often can be presented in such texts. Much as "edge cities" was coined in the late 1980's and came into common usage, so too based on the context of the research, will the term "the great inversion" come to be the model or some variant in future parlance.
The author begins with a tour through 19th century Paris and Vienna and then moves chapter by chapter through different American cities or clusters of similar cities and their attempts to stave off decline or simply revitalize. Some will criticize the absence of sweeping praise or condemnation. For me, this is a pleasant aspect of the book. It is a completely readable text for all audiences, served up with fair critiques of the New Urbanists and the current American suburban mindset with all its contradictions.
The author's research is most fascinating with his projections about the make-up of the future vibrant cities. One would have suspected them to have been simply class oriented, but according to the author they will also be very skewed ethnically. This would be a significant and ground-shifting movement which will have implications on political systems, school systems, economics and the city as we have grown accustomed to it.
The author begins with a tour through 19th century Paris and Vienna and then moves chapter by chapter through different American cities or clusters of similar cities and their attempts to stave off decline or simply revitalize. Some will criticize the absence of sweeping praise or condemnation. For me, this is a pleasant aspect of the book. It is a completely readable text for all audiences, served up with fair critiques of the New Urbanists and the current American suburban mindset with all its contradictions.
The author's research is most fascinating with his projections about the make-up of the future vibrant cities. One would have suspected them to have been simply class oriented, but according to the author they will also be very skewed ethnically. This would be a significant and ground-shifting movement which will have implications on political systems, school systems, economics and the city as we have grown accustomed to it.
5 of 5 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase
I bought this book about five or six days ago and uploaded it to my Android, thinking I would read a few pages here and there over the next few months. I couldn't stop reading it, and finished it in days.
The dilemmas confronting cities over how to attract people to an urban core as well as how to urbanize suburban areas are very interesting, and as the other reviewer noted, the author is very even-handed in his treatment of life-style preferences regarding cars, density, etc. (In this sense he is unlike the suburban advocate Joel Kotkin, who often writes with a sneer about the urbanists he disagrees with.)
I currently live in urban San Francisco with two small children, so the issues discussed here were very relevant. We can't afford to buy a house here, or at least one we would want in a neighborhood we would like. I'm going to be moving to Los Angeles soon, and this book helped me think about what I value in a future house, neighborhood, and commute down in that area.
Highly recommended!
The dilemmas confronting cities over how to attract people to an urban core as well as how to urbanize suburban areas are very interesting, and as the other reviewer noted, the author is very even-handed in his treatment of life-style preferences regarding cars, density, etc. (In this sense he is unlike the suburban advocate Joel Kotkin, who often writes with a sneer about the urbanists he disagrees with.)
I currently live in urban San Francisco with two small children, so the issues discussed here were very relevant. We can't afford to buy a house here, or at least one we would want in a neighborhood we would like. I'm going to be moving to Los Angeles soon, and this book helped me think about what I value in a future house, neighborhood, and commute down in that area.
Highly recommended!
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
By jem
Format:Hardcover
This a gem which has received far less attention than it deserves. Anyone who lives in or near a metropolitan area has been catching glimpses of the trend that Ehrenhalt explores with a magnifying glass. He begins by sketching the urban lifestyles of great European cities like Vienna and Paris during the late 19th century to illustrate the urban lifestyle he sees current American twenty and thirty-year-olds as well as retiring baby-boomers seeking. He uses the term inversion to describe the demographic trend away from suburban sprawl based on autos, highways, and strip malls to pedestrian-friendly urban landscapes encompassing residential, retail, and office space served by public transportation. "Inversion" describes the trend for the more affluent -- particularly singles and retirees -- to seek center city residences while the suburbs attract immigrants and lower middle class workers.
Ehrenhalt proceeds to examples of successes and failures across the country examining revitalized neighborhoods in cities like New York and Chicago; looking at the alternatives for inner suburbs in Cleveland, Atlanta, Denver, and Washington, D.C.; analyzing attempts by sprawl cities like Houston and Phoenix to define a central city; looking at the realities of New Urbanists to create models from Seaside, Florida to Tyson's Corner, Maryland.
This book is a delight to read because it feels like it is written by a realist rather than a dreamer -- someone who enjoys a cup of coffee on the sidewalk outside a cafe while observing the street scene and talking to people passing by. He doesn't criticize or advocate, he describes and raises questions about what it means.
Ehrenhalt proceeds to examples of successes and failures across the country examining revitalized neighborhoods in cities like New York and Chicago; looking at the alternatives for inner suburbs in Cleveland, Atlanta, Denver, and Washington, D.C.; analyzing attempts by sprawl cities like Houston and Phoenix to define a central city; looking at the realities of New Urbanists to create models from Seaside, Florida to Tyson's Corner, Maryland.
This book is a delight to read because it feels like it is written by a realist rather than a dreamer -- someone who enjoys a cup of coffee on the sidewalk outside a cafe while observing the street scene and talking to people passing by. He doesn't criticize or advocate, he describes and raises questions about what it means.
Most Recent Customer Reviews
5.0 out of 5 stars
Insights for the future
People are looking for ways to connect. The American way of life of isolating to your own plot of land and keeping people off your lawn is a changing life choice. Read more
Published 24 days ago by Stanley Szostek
5.0 out of 5 stars
Insightful, intriguing, and well researched!
I'm so happy I read this book! I was personally interested in the subject before reading, so admittedly it wasn't hard to convince me of the validity of the central thesis. Read more
Published 3 months ago by Colin J. Parker
5.0 out of 5 stars
No Easy Answers
Writers describing urban planning issues usually write polemics. X is the problem and Y is the solution. Read more
Published 6 months ago by las cosas
5.0 out of 5 stars
Splendid, and Squares with Local Observables
Alan Ehrenhalt has written a fascinating account what he calls a recent "demographic inversion" - not, thank you, "gentrification" - in which immigrants now tend to enter American... Read more
Published 7 months ago by Paul Frandano
3.0 out of 5 stars
Read with a keen eye
I'm halfway through the book. It's engaging and insightful, sure. There is one thing, perhaps an editing error, perhaps more, has left a bad taste in my mouth: a substantial error... Read more
Published 8 months ago by G. Jacobsen
5.0 out of 5 stars
Fascinating & Engaging Book on Demographic Shifts
I can't recommend this book highly enough. Each chapter explores a different city or suburb to illustrate trends in urban development and population migration. Read more
Published 10 months ago by James Ross Curley
5.0 out of 5 stars
The Future of American Cities
This is an excellent, well-organized book which feels surprisingly comprehensive given its low page count. Read more
Published 11 months ago by Samuel J. Sharp
What Other Items Do Customers Buy After Viewing This Item?
So You'd Like to...
|
|
Look for Similar Items by Category
- Books > Politics & Social Sciences > Politics & Government > Public Affairs & Policy > City Planning & Urban Development
- Books > Politics & Social Sciences > Politics & Government > Public Affairs & Policy > Public Affairs & Administration
- Books > Politics & Social Sciences > Social Sciences > Urban Planning & Development
- Books > Politics & Social Sciences > Sociology > Urban
