| Book Review | Indiana Magazine of History, 100.3

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| Book Review | Indiana Magazine of History, 100.3 | The History Cooperative

Reviews

America's New Downtowns Revitalization or Reinvention?

By Larry R. Ford

(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003. Pp. vii, 340. Illustrations, maps, notes, bibliography, index. $45.00.)


This is a book with a purpose that succeeds admirably in not becoming partisan. It is a serviceable book that does what it sets out to do, which is to create a vocabulary of comparative terms for assessing American downtowns. Is it fun to read? Not particularly. Is it useful? That depends on what you want as a reader. This is a book of information, not big ideas. And if it is information about downtowns you are after, then this may be the book for you.	1
Ford's work enters a field already well established, which might be referred to loosely as contemporary city studies. It is a field that starts, maybe, with Jane Jacobs and The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961), and proceeds through the work of, among others, William H. Whyte in City: Rediscovering the Center (1988), Richard Sennett's philosophizing in The Conscience of the Eye: the Design and Social Life of Cities (1990, 1992), and on to the postmodernist Mike Davis's City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles (1990, 1992), and more recent works such as Thomas Bender's The Unfinished City: New York and the Metropolitan Idea (2002), and Robert M. Fogelson's Downtown: Its Rise and Fall, 1880–1950 (2001), to which Ford's book bears an immediate resemblance.	. . .

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