Urban Choices: the city and the critics by Roger Starr

Urban choices deals with the ultimate questions of city life in the United States; it attempts to establish a set of values by which the decisions of urban governments can be judged. 

Roger Starr insists that social values must be related to the ways in which urban residents actually behave. He is impatient with over-simplified or Utopian solutions to city problems and contends that even the best-intentioned, most sensitive of cities’ critics - critics as diverse and distinguished as Lew Mumford, Jane Jacobs, Herbert Gans, Victor Gruen, Maria Mannes and Peter Blake - are severely limited in their approach to the predicament of America’s urban centers in this time of unprecedented social and economic change. Mr. Starr strips away the folklore that has obscured the real issues. Drawing on his experience as Executive Director of New York’s Citizens’ Housing and Planning Council, he sets forth his views in several major areas which require immediate, difficult, perhaps unpopular choices. Among the problems he deals with are housing, unemployment, racial tensions, poverty, transportation, architectural planning, air and water pollution, and urban politics. 

Trenchant, relentless, asking the hard questions and demanding the hard decisions, Urban Choices presents a clear assessment of the nation’s urban ills and makes specific and sound suggestions for their cure.