Why Don`t American Cities Burn?: The City in the Twenty-First Century

"Katz brings together demographic, economic, and political evidence to form a new narrative of the modern city centered on the experience of the urban poor. He not only reveals what happened in inner cities in the last decade but writes convincingly about why it matters. And he gives hope that the long decline of urban places can be reversed, even neighborhoods like North Philadelphia."-American Journal of Sociology "Katz's work begins to move us away from a story of inevitable urban crisis and decline to a more balanced interpretation that incorporates structural inequities and human agency, as well as policy failures and successes. Indeed, Katz is working toward nothing less than a revision of our understanding of urban America in the late twentieth century."-Journal of American History "In June 2006, distinguished urban historian Michael Katz served as a juror in a murder trial in his hometown of Philadelphia. That case propelled Katz on a fascinating journey to understand the social conditions that lay behind the fates of murderer, victim, and the city where they both struggled to survive. With Katz as sage guide, we revisit urban America over the last half century as well as the public policy successes and failures that are an inseparable part of that story."-Lizabeth Cohen, author of A Consumers' Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America "Brilliantly conceived and beautifully written, Why Don't American Cities Burn? is a terrific read that is difficult to put down. Katz considers changes over the past half-century through the lenses of urban geography and population demographics, institutional structures, the public's ossified view of the deserving and undeserving urban poor, and how the zeal for market-based solutions has led towards new poverty technologies that recast the poor as entrepreneurial actors. Most important, Katz introduces his book with a story that humanizes the field of social sciences that-paradoxically-appears at times to have forgotten the people in the sea of quantitative analyses."-Peter Hendee Brown, University of Minnesota

Prologue: The Death of Shorty Chapter 1. What Is an American City? Chapter 2. The New African American Inequality Chapter 3. Why Don't American Cities Burn Very Often? Chapter 4. From Underclass to Entrepreneur: New Technologies of Poverty Work in Urban America Epilogue: The Existential Problem of Urban Studies Notes Index Acknowledgments