How Cities Won the West: Four Centuries of Urban Change in Western North America (review)

Reviewed by: How Cities Won the West: Four Centuries of Urban Change in Western North America David Wrobel (bio) How Cities Won the West: Four Centuries of Urban Change in Western North America. By Carl Abbott. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2008. Pp. x+347. $34.95. Carl Abbott's tenth book (excluding several textbooks) is a bold, broad, synthetic study that draws on his monographic studies on urban boosterism, Sunbelt cities, Pacific Northwest cities, and the twentieth-century western urban experience. Well-illustrated with promotional maps and posters, photographs, and charts (for example, of "Tall Buildings in North Plains Cities"), How Cities Won the West is Abbott's biggest book in terms of sweep, scope, synthetic power, and significance. This is both a macro-scale and highly detailed work, a study that scholars of the modern urban West sorely need, just as they needed Walter Nugent's study of migration, Into the West (1999), and Elliott Barkan's study of how immigration has shaped the West, From All Points (2007). And, while comparisons with such people-centered studies might seem out of place for an urban history, Abbott's book is very much concerned with what cities mean to the people who live in them and to those who visit them. The urban horizons of the American West have not before been painted with such clarity and complexity and I'm not sure that anyone who reads this work can ever think of the West's wide-open spaces the same way again. To the Edward Abbey types who love a good sojourn with nature and measure quality of experience in terms of the absence of people, those spaces may seem like the heart and soul of the western macro region. But as Abbott reminds us again and again in this book—not directly, and certainly not in preachy or pedantic fashion—those open spaces lie between urban places, and it is those urban places that have shaped the history, the culture, the economics, and the politics of the West; they are the Wests that really matter. Abbott emphasizes three themes: first, that western cities grew as central and centralizing points; second, that the cumulative rebalancing of western North America has been ongoing and vital, that the U.S. population has been tilting westward—more specifically, tilting into western urban centers—for centuries; and third, that western cities have transitioned from their roles as "imitators of eastern culture and outposts of eastern capital to innovators that compete with [East Coast cities and Chicago] as centers of economic, social, and intellectual change" (p. 10). Abbott examines three phases of city development—preindustrial, industrial, and postindustrial—and his keyword, in addition to metropolis and region, is connections. Readers are introduced to a truly thorough and inspired exploration of the connective tissue that ties western urban North America and the rest of the world together. [End Page 508] Abbott's book is marked by none of the lingering inferiority complexes that have characterized much scholarship on the urban West. Quite the contrary, he is careful to avoid untrammeled boosterism and to illuminate examples of that phenomenon in the last two centuries. His introductory chapter is "All Roads Lead to Fresno"—Fresno's boosters in 1901 imagined it as the urban nerve center of the nation and the world, just as those of Boise, Idaho, did a generation earlier, and those of Casper, Wyoming, did two generations later. Abbott thus subtly connects Fresno and Boise and Casper to Edmonton and Winnipeg and Calgary in a process that seems uncannily organic, never forced. Each chapter is marked by this thematic coherence and by an impressive web of connections. The end result is the most comprehensive and sophisticated study of the modern urban West to date and one that is marked by an approach we might label urban anthropomorphization. Perhaps it's the familial-structure metaphors that are used to connect cities: "Victoria, perched at the tip of an island with access to an expansive range of straits and bays, was a conifer-encircled cousin of Singapore" (p. 58); or Abbott's propensity for quoting those descriptions of cities that seem to best capture...

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