Metropolitanism and How I Went Down the Rabbit Hole, or Why Wikipedia is Awesome

I have been doing a little research for my papers, and one of the subtopics that I was considering was sprawl and McMansions. I thought to myself, hmm, I wonder if anyone has written about those on Wikipedia? If Panic! at the Disco had a page before I realized how much they suck then someone must have written about McMansions.

Sure enough, someone had written about it and they had also thoughtfully provided links to several very good sources that I will probably utilize for my paper(s).

One of the topics was from the Atlantic Monthly, which had an article from 1999, (yikes! 10 years!?) called, "Divided We Sprawl," Bruce Katz and Jennifer Bradley, Atlantic, December 1999

It introduced a concept called "metropolitanism," which I'd never heard of, but I guess would now fall under the blanket term of sustainability as its concepts are very similar, if not identical. See below-

"The idea that cities and suburbs are related, rather than antithetical, and make up a single social and economic reality, is called metropolitanism." (Katz and Bradley)

"THE metropolitanist policy agenda has four basic elements: changing the rules of the development game, pooling resources, giving people access to all parts of a metropolitan area, and reforming governance. These are interlocking aspects of how to create good places to live; they are closely related and can be hard to distinguish. To understand the cascade of consequences that policies can have, consider the policy chain reaction that would begin if the rules of the development game were changed to fit the metropolitanist paradigm. Those rules are mainly the policies that guide transportation investments, land use, and governance decisions, all of which are themselves entangled." (Katz and Bradley)

To expound on the movement's basic tenants would probably tax the attention span of the average reader, but I highly encourage one to check out the article. It is written in a very accessible manner, it is admittedly though, a little on the long side. But very good reading nonetheless.

The authors don't reveal the origin of the concept of metropolitanism and Wikipedia didn't come up with a page on metropolitanism, but the authors of the Atlantic article may have borrowed the phrase from Friedrich Ulfers and his work, "Times Square as an Exemplar of Postmodern Urban Space. Toward a New Metropolitanism: Reconstituting Public Culture, Urban Citizenship, and the Multicultural Imaginary in New York and Berlin." Ed. Friedrich Ulfers, Gunter Lenz, and Antje Dallmann. Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag

Regardless of the provenance of the word it is an interesting and exciting concept, which deserves more attention. I'd always seen the Atlantic on the newsstands, but I didn't know that they wrote anything that would be of particular interest to me. Yay!