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The Unheavenly City

Edward C. Banfield

3.57 · Rating details · 23 ratings · 4 reviews

A discussion of the nature and fture of the urban crisis focusing on a class analysis and concluding that most conventiona responses to the problem would have little effect and could even make things worse.

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Unknown Binding, 308 pages

Published 1970 by Little Brown and Co.

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Jul 04, 2008 Bap rated it liked it

Shelves: politics

Banfield is a Harvard political science who wrote this book in 1970 in despair about the prospects for urban areas. He identifies the ills as one of class (not race), with the working class and especially the lower classes possessing no ability to plan or focus on the future leading to a nilistic existance where poverty, violence and crime are endemic.

Banfield was a patron saint of the conservatism that would arise in reaction to the excesses of the 60's. Banfield feels that the liberal impulse Banfield is a Harvard political science who wrote this book in 1970 in despair about the prospects for urban areas. He identifies the ills as one of class (not race), with the working class and especially the lower classes possessing no ability to plan or focus on the future leading to a nilistic existance where poverty, violence and crime are endemic.

Banfield was a patron saint of the conservatism that would arise in reaction to the excesses of the 60's. Banfield feels that the liberal impulse to ameliorate lower class neurosis was useless and even wosened the problem by creating a culture of victims who blamed others for their plight.

Some of Banfield observations border on the absurd. Why not allow lower class individuals to sell their children, since they are so clearly unable to raise--he asks. then he allows that this would just encourage them to have more children and was politically a non-starter. He would eliminate the minimum wage and disallow the monopoly power of unions so that the lower classes and working class could be paid "what they are worth", As for school, he would abolish compusory attendence after the ninth grade since it is so clearly a waste of time and resources for those unable and unwillling to learn.

Banfield sees cities going through a cycle of continuing riots for the next 20 years and did not see any way to change this.

He correctly observes that one of the biggest problems of cities was the use of resources to build roads out of urban areas to encourage flight and that GI loans and tax breaks for home owners, not renters pushed the middle class out of the city.

You can find copies of this book in used bookstores. He also published the Unheavenly city Revisited, but I recommend this book if you can get it to get Banfield in his unvarnished form.

Banfield did not anticipate New Urbanism, that roads would become clogged and suburbia a wasteland, or that the price of fuel would reverse the trend to the outer suburbs in favor of returning to the urban core and the close in suburbs.

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Mar 05, 2012 Bob Costello rated it it was amazing

Great book - opened my eyes to the problems of the underclass. Read this book in college for a class in Urban Politics at GWU.

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Nov 25, 2020 Kevin Kosar rated it really liked it

Fifty years ago, Edward C. Banfield published The Unheavenly City: The Nature and Future of Our Urban Crisis at a time much like our own, with poverty, crime, and racial unrest seemingly ascendant. It was also a time in which both Left and Right engaged in a great deal of hyperbolic commentary about these problems—a tendency Banfield’s book sought to address.

The Unheavenly City is one of those rare academic books that became a bestseller, marked by Banfield’s characteristic straight talk and sat ...more

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