Responding to Joel Kotkin's critique of cities who woo "creative class" over the middle class, Jerold Kayden, director of urban planning at Harvard Graduate School of Design, argues that revitalizing cities isn't as simple as copying sunbelt cities.
In the Winter 2007 issue of Democracy, Kayden responds to Kotkin's article featured in the previous issue of the quarterly journal.
"There is much to like in Joel Kotkin's well-written polemic against the latest fashion in urban revitalization circles ["Urban Legend," Issue #2]...Powered by an admirable belief in cities as places for 'a broad spectrum of people to improve their lives and that of their families,' rather than places increasingly populated by extreme haves and have-nots, Kotkin dismisses urban vogue and stresses a back-to-basics approach to city governance."
"Like Kotkin, I would like contemporary U.S. cities to be places that accommodate all people rather than only the very rich and the serving poor...However, the principal problem today is not a myopic addiction of certain mayors and governors to the seductive calls of "boutique" pushers. The distressing downward drift of mostly Northeast and Midwest Rust-Belt American cities has a decades-long and far more complicated pedigree than that. By introducing the proverbial straw city of the boutique, Kotkin misrepresents today's urban policy environment and unnecessarily trivializes his legitimate back-to-basics reminder."
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