David Rusk

Rusk compared the trajectories of almost two hundred American metropolitan areas and found a very clear pattern. «Elastic» cities, able to extend their municipal boundaries as the urban area grew, kept their tax base, their middle class and the quality of their services. «Inelastic» ones, ringed by independent municipalities that blocked any annexation, lost population and income and concentrated poverty in the centre.

His explanation is purely institutional, and that is its force. When every suburb is a municipality with its own tax and its own school district, the family that moves fifteen minutes away stops paying for the city where it works. Detroit, Cleveland and St. Louis were caught in that mechanism, while Houston, Charlotte and Albuquerque, legally able to annex, kept growing with their regions.

Born in 1940, Rusk was mayor of Albuquerque from 1977 to 1981 and before that a member of the New Mexico legislature, and he writes out of that experience of governing. Cities Without Suburbs (1993) became a set text for the metropolitan regionalism movement and has been reissued and updated several times with new census data.

Inside Game/Outside Game (1999) completes the argument: the inside game, investment in the poor neighbourhood, is necessary but insufficient without the outside game, which means changing metropolitan rules on housing, taxes and land. His most concrete proposal is mandatory affordable housing across the whole metropolitan area, with Montgomery County, Maryland, as the success story.