Re-Creating the American City

As part of my background reading for our class project on the construction of I-496 through Lansing, I read the book Breakthroughs: Re-Creating the American City by Neal Peirce and Robert Guskind. Breakthroughs focuses on 6 urban cities which were all rebuilt by their community members who took matters into their own hands to save their neighborhoods. These cities include New York, Portland, Boston, Lincoln, Cabrillo Village and Vermont's Stowe Recreation Path. These are all stories of the uncommon turnarounds urban communities can acheieve when faced with government decisions that destroy urban communities.

The introduction of the book discusses the importance of communities to work together and for local governments to give the people a chance to voice what they want. The introduction discusses as quite length why urban cities are thought of the way they are and why some neighborhoods are avoided. They discuss the drugs, murders, muggings, gangs and other frightful aspects of "city living" that draws people away from the city. Quite frankly, this was scary and made me afraid to want to go into an urban city. They discussed how even though parts of big cities are tourist attractions with upscale shopping centers and beautiful parks, they are still very dangerous. While it is important not to ignore the reasons people avoid big cities, this part of the introduction did not do too much to make me want to go to a big city.

The proceeding chapters of the book discussed each case study at length, describing the community's involvement to stop the deterioration of the neighborhoods and to rebuild them. In every story the community is very actively involved and the book highlights specific community member's stories and gives the emotions that were in play at the time. I felt that by the end of the book you really got to know each of the community member's stories.

While the community was highlighted and you got to know the people involved and what they did and how their individual story fit into the larger story of the rebuilding of the city, it is always important to ask what is left out? What isn't being talked about? I felt the book did little to look at the side of government or the city leaders and tell any of that side of the story. I would have been interested to find out why these neighborhoods in these cities were either chosen to be abandoned, as in the case of the New York neighborhoods, or why the highway was chosen to go through certain neighborhoods, as in the case of Lincoln and Boston.