PositiveSlateIn addition to outlining the forces that encouraged early manufacturing to be concentrated in megastructures—such as limited transportation networks, isolated power sources, economies of scale, quality and production control, and the protection of trade secrets—Freeman devotes much of the book to the giant factory’s socializing role ... The book’s parade of names and places can be overwhelming, as the narrative moves from cotton to steel to cars to electronics. And yet the focus on megafactories keeps things tight. Their world is surprisingly small, with each one influenced by the last. (American manufacturers, for example, were heavily involved in the Soviet Union’s early industrialization.) Freeman has an eye for the anecdotes that tie factory policy to everyday life...
Jeremiah Moss
MixedSlate...[a] passionate, sprawling, and often frustrating new book ... This book is not a memoir, and Moss himself is as reticent a portraitist as his beloved Edward Hopper. He eulogizes a universal concept of the city, a palimpsest of Ashcan painters and stevedores and jazz and punks. Selling the reader on the appeal of that shared New York past is the challenge he sets for himself. In that, he largely succeeds. At his best, Moss is a shoe-leather reporter, always looking, listening, and taking notes ... He holds people under 30 in particular contempt, convinced that their aching suburban souls account for the city’s increasing number of chain stores...That generational contempt tends to overshadow the people who ought to be the real villains of a book about how money ruined Manhattan: landlords. Residential landlords are to blame for the evictions, high rents, and population turnover that Moss decries ... Sometimes I wonder if Moss loves the local, the exotic, and the irreverent or just the old. He can be nostalgic for the comfort food of a bygone chain restaurant or offended by a kid mooning a Catholic street parade. In chronicling the sudden impact of astounding sums of money on the commerce and social fabric of a city, Moss has done a service to history. As an analysis, the book suffers from its author’s stubbornness.
Richard Florida
MixedSlateFlorida’s latest brings some new data into a competent synthesis of contemporary thinking on cities and inequality. As you might expect from a book that aims to diagnose and solve the problems of global urbanization in a little more than 200 pages (with 100 more of appendices and endnotes), its content falls short of its ambition. Florida devotes just 18 pages to the megacities of the developing world ... heavy on studies from sociologists and economists, but addresses history only in short anecdotes, and politics hardly at all. This blindness to the perversity of American politics (which Florida otherwise follows closely) weighs heavily on the book ... a disjointed finish to a book that otherwise stresses that rental affordability, segregation, infrastructure, and inequality are in fact national problems. Despite it all, Florida remains cheerful. But he has elucidated the very bleak paradox of American urban policy.
