TY - JOUR
AU - Abbott,, Carl
AB - Metropolitan Denver is the tenth entry in the Metropolitan Portraits series, compact books that introduce major urban regions through the perspectives of history, spatial patterns, and culture. The series was conceived by the urban geographer Judith A. Martin, and the authors have come equally from geography, history, and urban planning. Cities in the series range from San Diego to Miami to Toronto and include nontraditional urban regions such as northern New Jersey and the North Carolina Research Triangle. Andrew R. Goetz and E. Eric Boschmann use six chapters to cover physical landscape and resources, economic history, population growth, the changing image and promotion of Denver, metropolitan politics, and current environmental issues. The authors are geographers, and the book is strongest when dealing with questions where spatial relations or patterns are prominent. Chapter 2, “Historical Development,” traces the city's changing economic base through booms and busts, with immigration and ethnicity separately treated in the next chapter, and both chapters making the good decision to rely heavily on Stephen Leonard and Thomas J. Noel's, Denver: From Mining Camp to Metropolis (1990). In each chapter, the authors include substantial stand-alone discussions of specific places, policies, and events that are important in their own right and emblematic of larger trends. If you ever wondered why Denver International Airport seems so far out in the boonies, were curious about the development of the Denver Tech Center “edge city” driving south on I-25, or wanted background on the city's 2012 homeless camping ban, this is the place to turn. Metropolitan Portraits volumes have varied in the prominence of an interpretive argument, with George Galster on Detroit, Edward Relph on Toronto, and Sam Bass Warner Jr. on Boston as standouts. Goetz and Boschmann structure their discussion around two broad stages in Denver's development, contrasting a first eighty years as Queen City of the Plains with a second eighty as the Mile High City. In the first, from 1859 to 1940, Denver developed in tandem with the exploitation of the resources of the Rockies and Great Plains as a transportation, processing, and service center. Although the authors do not draw the comparison, it resembled other “inland empire cities” such as El Paso, Spokane, and Salt Lake City. In the second period, starting with World War II, Denver joined the sun belt with federal and defense industry jobs, an energy boom and bust, tourism, and sophisticated communications industries, and an amenities-oriented downtown. In addition, the chapters on metropolitan politics and environmental sustainability usefully utilize stages specific to each. The authors cover a lot of ground, and the many subsections may jump quickly among cases and examples. In addition, for this reviewer, Metropolitan Denver does not draw as thoroughly on historical scholarship as it might. That said, one of the goals of the series has been to bring specialists from different disciplines into conversation from their own theoretical starting points. Readers interested in contemporary urban American will find many useful comparisons to their own city, and the solid treatment of recent policy and planning choices will make newcomers to Denver much more informed citizens. © The Author 2019. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Organization of American Historians. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oup.com. This article is published and distributed under the terms of the Oxford University Press, Standard Journals Publication Model (https://academic.oup.com/journals/pages/open_access/funder_policies/chorus/standard_publication_model)
TI - Metropolitan Denver: Growth and Change in the Mile High City
JO - The Journal of American History
DO - 10.1093/jahist/jaz522
DA - 2019-12-01
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/metropolitan-denver-growth-and-change-in-the-mile-high-city-fQZLswEWd4
SP - 723
VL - 106
IS - 3
DP - DeepDyve
ER -