Urbanism = democratic society?

Douglas Rae’s characterization of Urbanism and its decline is insightful and thought-provoking, however, I found parts of his argument to be tenuous. Towards the end of the reading, Rae argues that urbanism embodies some of the important ideals of democratic society-“one in which people are engaged with one another, where an individual who is a drill press operator by day may be a civic potentate by evening, where trust is earned through lifelong engagement.” He elaborates that the end of urbanism marks the evolution of regional hierarchies and promotes a social homogenizing process. “In such regional hierarchies, or ladders, the bottom rung more often than not lies in the formally working-class neighborhoods of central cities, where opportunity is scarce, danger is commonplace, and democracy in any plausible sense seems out of reach.”

Rae overlooks the fact that these homogenizing mechanisms were present during the era of urbanism to the same degree that they are even with the advent of the automobile and AC electricity. Racism, classism, and all other “-isms” have the same potential to exist in urban environments than in all other environments. New York City is a classic example- if we obtained the demographics of Chinatown, the Upper East Side, Spanish Harlem, and Greenwich Village, we would find a very unequal distribution of people in different social and economic classes. Such “purified communities” can and often do exist in cities, and they did during the period of urbanism that Rae describes. The racialization of space is not historically a new concept, and it is not isolated to any one phenomenon, as he argues in his piece.