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Cities today are celebrated for their diversity, but they are also places of steep inequalities, including growing divides between middle- and upper-class neighborhoods and areas of extreme disadvantage. Chicago epitomizes this pattern, with its upscale, gentrified neighborhoods near downtown and along the lakefront, and its mostly Black, impoverished communities on the South and West Sides. More than ever, Chicago is a dual city, a condition that many of its residents and political leaders have come to take for granted. In The Origins of the Dual City, Joel Rast reveals today’s tacit acceptance of rising urban inequality as a stark departure from the past. For much of the twentieth century, civic leaders, convinced that the city’s survival depended on the elimination of slums and blight, made this goal a key policy priority. More recently, however, this attitude has shifted in favor of a much different approach aimed at managing economically distressed areas and mitigating their most harmful effects, while promoting downtown development and gentrification of select neighborhoods. The book shows how changing ideas about how problems of inequality should best be addressed shaped the behavior of the political and economic elites who led the city’s revitalization efforts.

This book explores how public policies change over time. Its central argument is that when lawmakers can process information more comprehensively, then they can react more smoothly to environmental stimuli, reducing the prevalence of incremental policy changes and the magnitude of sudden policy disruptions. The book suggests that information processing depends heavily on three factors: issue complexity, institutional capacity, and the procedures that govern decision making. Highly complex issues make information processing more difficult, so we observe more disruptions in policies addressing areas of great complexity, such as climate change, than we do from conceptually simple areas. Institutional capacity can mitigate the complexity problem by providing policymakers with the resources to engage meaningfully with new information. Finally, the book looks at how decisions are actually made and draws a distinction between deliberative mechanisms, in which policies are developed by means of debate among a small group of lawmakers, and collective mechanisms, in which the opinions of many people are aggregated, as with the stock market. When conditions are right, collective mechanisms can harness the “wisdom of crowds” to process information at very high levels. The book explores policy areas where collective mechanisms for decision making have some application and finds that major policy disruptions are remarkably rare.