Will the major changes in domestic economic policies enacted during the Reagan administration change the fact that Americans have always been among the best housed populations in the world? The authors address two key issues: 1) Will all Americans living in urban areas be as well housed at the end of the 1980s as they were at the beginning of the period? 2) Will they be as well housed under Reagan policies as they might have been under those enacted by a second Carter administration? Nineteen tables illustrate and support the authors' findings.

PART ONE: THE POLITICS AND ECONOMICS OF THE NEW RIGHT - Ivan Szelenyi Introduction: Urban Policies of the New Right -- Critical Responses The New Class War in the United States - Frances Fox Piven and Richard A Cloward Business Rationality and Barriers to Recapitalization - Donald Tomaskovic-Devy and S M Miller PART TWO: LEFT RESPONSES TO THE DECLINE OF PUBLIC HOUSING, PUBLIC TRANSPORTATION AND URBAN JOBS The Decollectivization of Consumption - Michael Harloe and Chris Paris Housing and Local Government Finance in England and Wales, 1979-1981 Urban Transportation for Whom? Determinants and Consequences of Transit Change in the United States and Germany - Glenn Yago Transnational Capitalism and Urban Crisis - Richard Child Hill The Case of the Auto Industry and Detroit PART THREE: LEFT RESPONSES TO THE POLICIES OF URBAN AUSTERITY The Social Democratic State in a Radical Region - Philip Cooke and Gareth Rees Development Agencies, Industrial Change and Class Relations in South Wales Austerity and the Politics of Resistance - Brian Elliott and David McCrone The Working Class and the State - Jean Lojkine The French Experience in Socialist and Communist Municipalities The Turn to the Left among Italian Cities and Urban Public Policy - Michael Aiken and Guido Martinotti PART FOUR: A THIRD PARADIGM FOR URBAN SOCIOLOGY American Urban Theories and Urban Areas - Herbert J Gans Some Observations on Contemporary Ecological and Marxist Paradigms

I Introduction.- 1 Images, Themes, and Urbanography.- II Urban Images and Themes in Specific Fields.- 2 Geography: Descriptive, Scientific, Subjective, and Radical Images of the City.- 3 Economics: Invisible, Productive, and Problem Cities.- 4 Images of the City in Political Science: Communities, Administrative Entities, Competitive Markets, and Seats of Chaos.- 5 Anthropological Approaches to the City.- 6 Sociology-Four Images of Organized Diversity: Bazaar, Jungle, Organism, and Machine.- 7 History: Notes on Urban Images of Historians.- 8 City Planning: Images of the Ideal and the Existing City.- III Reflections on Context and the Interpretation of Urban Images.- 9 Reconsidering The Image of the City.- 10 The Puzzle of Antiurbanism in Classic American Literature.- 11 Slums and Skyscrapers: Urban Images, Symbols, and Ideology.- 12 Urban Political Images in Search of a Historical Context.- 13 The City as a Legal Concept.- 14 Cities and Countryside in Anthropology.- 15 Ex Uno Plures: A Walk through Marxist Urban Studies.- Note on Sociological Images of the City.- Notes on Contributors.

The contributors discuss alternative methods of financing state and local economic development, including the role of venture capital in urban development, the role of banking institutions in encouraging the growth of small business, and the place of pension funds in economic growth.

Six revised and edited papers from a conference held by the Brookings Institute in 1981 assess the effects of higher energy costs on various aspects of urban development and housing, including industrial location and regional development. Comments and discussion from public-agency participants follow each of the papers. Following an introductory summary of the policy findings and the conference papers, the six papers are: Home Energy Costs and the Housing of the Poor and Elderly, Energy Prices and Urban Decentralization, Energy and the Existing Stock of Housing, New Residential Construction and Energy Costs, Energy and the Location of Industry, and Energy and Regional Development. Separate abstracts were prepared for the seven chapters selected for the Energy Data Base (EDB) and Energy Abstracts for Policy Analysis (EAPA), and one was processed separately.