The Ever-Changing American City

The Ever-Changing American City seeks to help readers understand the marked changes since 1945 in what constitutes a city in the United States and who lives and works in them. The story of the postwar American city is not a simple tale of decline and rebirth. Nor is it a straightforward account of the struggle between the central business district and the suburbs on the urban periphery. In the decades that followed World War II, the cityscape was altered to better accommodate the automobile transforming the city from a place of production to a place of consumption. During the 1980s, city neighborhoods once occupied by migrants from the American South and immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe began to house newcomers from Asia, Africa, and Central and South America. The economic, environmental, and social issues now facing American cities from Portland, Maine to Portland, Oregon, will require the continual reinvention of the American city.