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Book Reviews
| Gail Satler. Two Tales of a City: Rebuilding Chicago's Architectural and Social Landscape, 1986–2005. DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2006. Pp. 256. Bibliography. Illustrations. Index. Notes. Cloth, $39.95.
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By almost anyone's standards, downtown Chicago is thriving. In recent years the city has seen the emergence (or reemergence) of State Street as a hub of retail, entertainment, and educational activity; the birth of new projects treating the Chicago River as an urban asset; and the introduction of Millennium Park along the lakefront. These ongoing enterprises appear to have made an already lively downtown area even livelier. |
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Sociologist Gail Satler explores these developments, along with a handful of others, in her book Two Tales of a City: Rebuilding Chicago's Architectural and Social Landscape, 1986–2005. Casting the city's changes on the one hand within the empirical constructs of the Chicago school of sociology's search for community under massive urbanization, and on the other with reference to theories of globalization and information flow emerging from contemporary scholars such as Manuel Castells and Saskia Sassen, Satler essentially argues that recent urban ventures have kept the city focused on the needs of its local residents while simultaneously ushering it into a wider global sphere. The dichotomy—or perhaps the dialectic—between the local and the global, between center and periphery, between resident and visitor, one presumes, relates to the "dual city" that Satler describes (although she is never completely clear as to what constitutes the "dual city"). It is rather early to speculate how exactly Chicago's transformation is reverberating either locally or globally, yet Satler seems convinced that the city as a whole is better for these changes. |
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The book is divided into four parts, the first three of which zero in on specific areas (State Street, the Chicago River, and Millennium Park), and the last of which discusses scattered developments around both the city and the metropolitan region. Satler sprinkles in enough historical information to put recent projects in some context, but she exerts her greatest energy discussing the current projects themselves, noting who was involved, what public and private agencies created frameworks for development, and what design philosophies guided the physical alteration of the landscape. She weaves together interviews; quotations from notable architects, sociologists, and critics; and personal observations from periodic visits to navigate readers through the city streets and out to its waterways. As a guide to Chicago's recent urban transformation, Satler's book is indispensable. |
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Yet too often the book does read like a guidebook or something more suitable for the travel section of the Sunday paper. Criticism or opposing viewpoints are muted, absent, or buried; only a seven-page section near the book's end raises the possibility that Chicago's downtown changes essentially ignore much of its underrepresented or "nondominant" population (pp. 205–11). For all of Satler's stress on how urban alterations galvanize the community, one finds little comment from the community members themselves. Perhaps the notion of a "dual city" exists in the minds of planners, developers, sociologists, or Satler herself, but how locals conceive of these changes is never entirely clear. |
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Still, Satler should be commended for attempting to assess a variety of recently completed and ongoing interventions into the city's downtown landscape—major works that typically require some historical distance for a proper perspective. If, in fifty years, Chicago has emerged as a global force while also fulfilling Mayor Richard Daley's desire to be "America's most livable city," this book might become a classic. |
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| J. Philip Gruen
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| Washington State University |
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