Steel Towns, Motor Cities, and Cuban Refugees: Part III of the 2012 UHA Conference

Welcome to the third installment of ToM's four part coverage of the 2012 UHAs.  You'll detect a clear bias in favor of aged/renewed rust belt cities with a flourish of transnationalism at the end via the Cuban Revolution and post WWII Miami.  If you missed Part I click here and for Part II here. Panel – Rust Belt Cosmopolitanism Joshua Akers – Settling the City: Urban Homesteading and the Construction of Markets in Detroit “It stands out on the highway like a creature from another time/ It inspires the babies’ questions for their mothers as they ride/ But no one stopped to think about the babies or how they would survive/ We almost lost Detroit, this time.” - …

Did the Broken Windows Theory Work?

Political scientist James Q. Wilson died last week at the age of 80.  The Ronald Reagan Professor of Public Policy at Pepperdine University, Wilson was friend to politicians like Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan (D-NY) and a contributor to journals such as Public Interest, which promoted the notion that well-intentioned policies often have “unintended consequences.”  This idea was popular among conservatives and ex-liberals, who had grown skeptical when the once dominant philosophy of liberalism floundered in the face of inflation, crime and joblessness in the 1970s and 1980s. The idea for which Wilson is most famous, of course, is the “broken windows theory.”  It proposes that …

Civil Society and Mass Incarceration

From 1980 to 2007, the number of prisoners held in the United States quadrupled to 2.3 million, with an additional 5 million on probation or parole. What Ayn Rand once called the “freest, noblest country in the history of the world” is now the most incarcerated, and the second-most incarcerated country in history, just barely edged out by Stalin’s Soviet Union. We’re used to hearing about the widening chasm between the haves and have-nots; we’re less accustomed to contemplating a more fundamental gap: the abyss that separates the fortunate majority, who control their own bodies, from the luckless minority, whose bodies are controlled, and defiled, by the state. Christopher …

Whither the US Welfare Regime?

In the throes of the second greatest economic crisis in the country’s history, the U.S. welfare regime is under systematic attack from those purportedly aiming to put the United States’ fiscal house in order. As poverty rates and unemployment rise and the country’s infrastructure and education system are slowly decaying, the limited social safety nets the United States provides—particularly compared with its peers in Western Europe—are being dismantled at an ever quickening, seemingly quotidian, pace. Political leaders from both parties frequently pillory anyone who calls for expanding welfare benefits and propose privatization or draconian reforms of entitlement programs that keep …

Pocketing Diversity: San Diego’s 21st Century Tribalism

And my old friends, we were so different then Before your war against the suburbs began Before it began And now the music divides Us into tribes You grew your hair so I grew mine They said the past won't rest Until we jump the fence and leave it behind. -- Arcade Fire, “Suburban War” Springsteen-like "indie rock" ingenues the Arcade Fire released The Suburbs last year to great fanfare. Win Butler and crew looked past easy generalizations, suggesting that the suburban experience is more complicated than it has been given credit. As Pitchfork noted approvingly The Suburbs proved "a generously paced collection of meditations on familial responsibility, private disappointments, …