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Confronting Urban Legacy: Rediscovering Hartford and New England's Forgotten Cities. Edited by Xiangming Chen and Nick Bacon. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2013. 324 pages. $46.97 (paperback).
Confronting Urban Legacy is a dense but extremely worthwhile book. It is relevant to HJM readers because of Hartford's proximity and position in the "Pioneer Valley" corridor. It is essential reading to understand the city's contemporary dynamics, the historical roots of its urban problems, and possible solutions to those problems within today's globalized world. Although eleven of the chapters focus on the Hartford metropolitan region, three offer perspectives on other small New England cities: Lawrence (MA), Springfield (MA), and Portland (ME).
As the book's publisher's synopsis notes, Confronting Urban Legacy: Rediscovering Hartford and New England's Forgotten Cities "fills a critical lacuna in urban scholarship." Most of the literature in urban history focuses on global cities. As a result:
smaller, secondary cities, which actually hold the majority of the world's population, are either critically misunderstood or unexamined in their entirety. This neglect not only biases scholars' understanding of social and spatial dynamics toward very large global cities but also maintains a void in students' learning. This book specifically explores the transformative relationship between globalization and urban transition in Hartford, . . . Hartford's transformation carries a striking imprint of globalization that has been largely missed: from its 17th century roots as New England first inland colonial settlement, to its emergence as one of the world's most prosperous manufacturing and insurance metropolises, to its present configuration as one of America's poorest post-industrial cities . . .
Using the lessons from this book on Hartford and other underappreciated secondary cities in New England, urban scholars, leaders, and residents alike can gain a number of essential insights-both theoretical and practical.
Hartford's rise and fall has been dramatic. After the Civil War it was the wealthiest city in the U.S. in per capita terms. Today Hartford is one of the nation's most impoverished cities, despite serving as the capital of one of the nation's wealthiest states. In their introduction the editors ask: "What happened to the city that invented the revolver, the pay telephone, the gas-pump counter, gold fillings, air-cooled airplane engines, and the first American dictionary? What is happening to the city that...