Cities withour Suburbs or Bay of Pigs Declassified

Cities withour Suburbs: Census 2000

Author: David Rusk

Cities without Suburbs, first published in 1993, has become an influential analysis of America's cities among city planners, scholars, and citizens alike. In it, David Rusk, the former mayor of Albuquerque, argues that America must end the isolation of the central city from its suburbs in order to attack its urban problems.

Rusk's analysis, extending back to 1950, covers 522 central cities in 320 metro areas of the United States. He finds that cities trapped within old boundaries have suffered severe racial segregation and the emergence of an urban underclass. But cities with annexation powers -- -- termed "elastic" by Rusk -- -- have shared in area-wide development.

This third edition is among the first books of any kind to employ information from the 2000 U.S. census. While refining his argument with this new data, Rusk assesses the major trends of the 1990s, including the perceived rebound of central cities, the impact of Hispanic and Asian migration, the growing similarities of older "inner-ring" suburbs to central cities, and the emerging influence of faith-based movements. New recommendations take account of growing restrictions on cities' annexation powers, even in the Southwestern United States, and of new opportunities for federal shaping of home mortgage programs and urban planning processes. Rusk's conclusion stresses cities' growing experience with building political coalitions in pursuit of development and growth.

Table of Contents:

	Boxes
	Preface
	Acknowledgments
	Introduction: Framing the Issue	1
I	Lessons from Urban America	5
Lesson 1	The real city is the total metropolitan area - city and suburb	5
Lesson 2	Most of America's blacks, Hispanics, and Asians live in urban areas	7
Lesson 3	Since World War II, urban growth has been low-density, suburban style	7
Lesson 4	For a city's population to grow, the city must be elastic	9
Lesson 5	Almost all metro areas have grown	14
Lesson 6	Low-density cities can grow through in-fill; high-density cities cannot	16
Lesson 7	Elastic cities expand their city limits; inelastic cities do not	17
Lesson 8	Bad state laws can hobble cities	17
Lesson 9	Neighbors can trap cities	19
Lesson 10	Old cities are complacent; young cities are ambitious	22
Lesson 11	Racial prejudice has shaped growth patterns	23
Lesson 12	Elastic cities capture suburban growth; inelastic cities contribute to suburban growth	25
Lesson 13	Elastic cities gain population; inelastic cities lose population	28
Lesson 14	When a city stops growing, it starts shrinking	30
Lesson 15	Inelastic areas are more segregated than elastic areas	30
Lesson 16	Major immigration increases Hispanic segregation	33
Lesson 17	Highly racially segregated regions are also highly economically segregated regions	33
Lesson 18	Inelastic cities have wide income gaps with their suburbs; elastic cities maintain greater city-suburb balance	34
Lesson 19	Poverty is more disproportionately concentrated in inelastic cities than in elastic cities	36
Lesson 20	Little boxes regions foster segregation; Big Box regions facilitate integration	38
Lesson 21	Little boxes school districts foster segregation; Big Box school districts facilitate integration	40
Lesson 22	Inelastic areas were harder hit by deindustrialization of the American labor market	42
Lesson 23	Elastic areas had faster rates of nonfactory job creation than inelastic areas	43
Lesson 24	Elastic areas showed greater real income gains than inelastic areas	44
Lesson 25	Elastic cities have better bond ratings than inelastic cities	45
Lesson 26	Elastic areas have a higher educated workforce than inelastic areas	46
	Conclusion	48
II	Characteristics of Metropolitan Areas	51
	The Point of (Almost) No Return	78
	Cities without Suburbs	83
III	Strategies for Stretching Cities	89
	Three Essential Regional Policies	89
	Metro Government: A Definition	91
	State Government's Crucial Role	93
	Federal Government: Leveling the Playing Field	114
IV	Conclusions	129
App	Central Cities and Metro Areas by Elasticity Category	139
	Sources	147
	Index	149
	Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars	155

Interesting book: Leader in You or The Memory Jogger II

Bay of Pigs Declassified: The Secret CIA Report

Author: Peter Kornbluh

Including the complete report and a wealth of supplementary materials, this volume provides a fascinating picture of the operation and of the secret world of the espionage establishment, with elements of plots, counterplots, and intra-agency power struggles worthy of a Le Carre novel.

Library Journal

If the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis was the most dire event of the Cold War, then the Bay of Pigs invasion of April 1961 was the most absurd. Kornbluh (director, Cuban Documentation Ctr. Project of the National Security Archive; Politics of Illusion: The Bay of Pigs Invasion Reexamined, Lynne Rienner, 1997) includes the tedious but informative report of Inspector General Lyman Kirkpatrick, which largely blames the CIA for misleading President Kennedy. Richard Bissell, the CIA's deputy director for plans, responds with a similarly oppressive rebuttal that attributes the failure to Kennedy's need to ensure plausible deniability--to hide America's obvious role by committing limited, insufficient air support and troops. Additional supporting documents and an interview with the invasion planners show the Bay of Pigs fiasco to be what historian Theodore Draper calls "a perfect failure." For a narrative overview, see Ale Fursenko's One Hell of a Gamble (LJ 3/15/97). Primarily for specialists in the era.--Karl Helicher, Upper Merion Twp. Lib., King of Prussia, PA

Evan Thomas

One of the most brutally frank, important - and unusual - government documents ever written, Bay of Pigs Declassified should be required reading for citizens, as well as for CIA officials as a 'how-to' guide on how not to conduct a covert operation.
-- Newsweek

Kirkus Reviews

A look at spooks in action that does not resemble a Tom Clancy novel.

A lingering question about the Bay of Pigs operation has always been how anyone could ever have thought it would work. Somehow presidents Eisenhower and Kennedy, with the input of their military and intelligence advisers, approved an invasion plan that projected the victory of a 1,400-man exile force over the 25,000-man Cuban army. Moreover, they did so while implausibly insisting that the action must not be traced back to the US. Until recently, the cloak of secrecy has restricted efforts to explain this planning and decision-making process to idle speculation; with the publication of this volume, somewhat informed speculation is now possible. Through the Freedom of Information Act, the National Security Archive (a public-interest group), with which Kornbluh is affiliated, has obtained the CIA's internal and very critical report on the Bay of Pigs and a lengthy response from the CIA officer in charge of the operation.

Edited by Kornbluh (Nicarauga, 1987), the volume includes an analytical introduction, an interview with two CIA men involved in the planning of the operation and a detailed timeline of events. This mass of information provides insight into shifting objectives, ambiguity over responsibility and accountability, and the momentum that precluded halting or even seriously reconsidering the operation. Most striking, however, is the vigor with which those involved seek to hide behind presidential cancellation of an air strike in explaining the failure. The impulse to deflect blame clearly overrides any self-analysis that could lead to institutional learning from the experience despite the absurdity of claiming that one decision was the turning point in an operation riddled with problems. What remains unexplained is the failure of American political leadership, a puzzle that may be beyond the potential of historical documents to solve.

An eye-opening account, regardless of one's political convictions.