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The American Metropolis: Image and Inspiration. Ed. by Hans Krabbendam, Marja Roholl, and Tity de Vries. (Amsterdam: VU University Press, 2001. 253 pp. Paper, $46.95, ISBN 90-5383-694-2.)
The American Metropolis is a collection of conference papers edited into book form. In 1999, the Netherlands American Studies Association (NASA) put out the call to scholars in Europe and the United States to consider the contemporary condition of the American city. The conference organizers (editors of the collection under review) were consciously reviving a famous issue of Fortune magazine and the subsequent book, The Exploding Metropolis: A Study of the Assault on Urbanism and How Our Cities Can Resist It (1958). In them Jane Jacobs and William H. Whyte, among other prominent urban critics, sounded the alarm against unrestrained urban renewal. The metropolis had, in fact, been "exploding" for over a decade. Major cities such as New York, Detroit, and Cleveland had already been...