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Alan Mallach on ‘The Divided City’

November 19, 2018

Who really benefits from urban revival? Cities, from trendy coastal areas to the nation’s heartland, are seeing levels of growth beyond the wildest visions of only a few decades ago. But vast areas in the same cities house thousands of people living in poverty who see little or no new hope or opportunity. Even as cities revive, they are becoming more unequal and more segregated. What does this mean for these cities — and the people who live in them?

“The Divided City” offers strategies to foster greater equality and opportunity. Mallach makes a compelling case that these strategies must be local in addition to being concrete and focusing on people’s needs — education, jobs, housing and quality of life. Change, he argues, will come city by city, not via national plans or utopian schemes. “The Divided City” is imperative for anyone who cares about cities and who wants to understand how to make today’s urban revival work for everyone.

Mallach is a senior fellow at the Center for Community Progress in Washington, DC. He is the author of many works on housing and planning, including “Bringing Buildings Back” and “Building a Better Urban Future: New Directions for Housing Policies in Weak Market Cities.” He has served as director of housing and economic development for Trenton, New Jersey, as a visiting scholar at the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia, and as a non-resident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution.