ancient cities

30 Apartheid
the growth of Los Angeles was approved by its suburbs,
their consent was generated by enormous pressure
to get access to water. The consolidation of the
city of New York in the late nineteenth century illustrates
the opposite phenomenon. The decision to
create the enlarged city of New York was made by
the state legislature. But the legislature had previously
sought to determine the attitudes of the
affected jurisdictions by authorizing a nonbinding,
advisory vote to be held in each area. All of the areas
voted in favor of the consolidation, although the
most important city, Brooklyn, did so only by the
narrowest of margins (64,744 for, 64,467 against).
Given the closeness of that vote, the state legislature
did not immediately create the new city. Negotiations
were undertaken to determine the appropriate process
for writing the new city charter, and only after
these negotiations had progressed did the state legislature,
notwithstanding the objection of Brooklyn’s
mayor, approve the consolidation in 1898.
Many people concerned about the racial and
class segregation of metropolitan areas support
annexation as a solution. David Rusk made a
forceful argument for this position in his book
Cities without Suburbs by outlining the virtues of
what he calls “elastic cities.” These days, however,
annexation will not solve the problems generated
by metropolitan fragmentation. Metropolitan
areas have simply grown too big. Indeed, the history
of annexation demonstrates that city expansion
has never adequately captured the entire
regional population for long. Those concerned
about metropolitan growth are thus exploring
alternative solutions to metropolitan fragmentation
ranging from regional government to urban
growth boundaries to modifying the legal structure
of school financing and exclusionary zoning.
Still, at least in some parts of the United States,
annexation continues—as do the attempts to resist
it. Sometimes annexation fights occur, pitting one
possible annexing city against another, with each
seeking to absorb a small but valuable portion of
land into its borders. Even when annexations do
not take place, the legal rules that make annexation
easy or difficult can substantially affect interlocal
relations. If central cities could annex their suburbs
easily, the suburbs might well have an incentive to
be more open to negotiations with the central city
about issues such as revenue sharing. The suburbs
might well think that revenue sharing is a better
choice than annexation if both alternatives are
available; they might oppose revenue sharing, on
the other hand, if annexation were not an option.
The arguments for and against annexation, and the
alternative legal structures that enable or restrict it,
thus continue to affect the future of cities in the
United States.
Gerald E. Frug
See also Local Government; Patchwork Urbanism;
Regional Governance; Suburbanization
Further Readings
Jackson, Kenneth T. 1985. Crabgrass Frontier: The
Suburbanization of the United States. New York:
Oxford University Press.
Reynolds, Laurie. 1992. “Rethinking Municipal
Annexation Powers.” Urban Lawyer 24:247–303.
Rusk, David. 1993. Cities without Suburbs. Washington,
DC: The Woodrow Wilson Center Press.
Teaford, Jon C. 1979. City and Suburb: The Political
Fragmentation of Metropolitan America, 1850–1970.
Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Ap A r t H e i d
Apartheid refers to a formal, legally defined systematic
attempt by a White supremacy government
in the mid-twentieth century to organize all
aspects of economic, social, cultural, and political
life along racially defined lines with a view to promoting
an ideology of separateness between race
groups in South Africa. It had a particularly virulent
expression in urban areas where the greatest
likelihood of race mixing and “contamination”
was likely to occur. In the contemporary era of
rising intraurban and interurban inequality and
segregation in many cities of the world as asymmetrical
economic globalization impacts on citybuilding,
the ideal and practice of urban apartheid
in South Africa has become a powerful metaphor
and precedent for understanding the dangers of
unchecked urban inequality based on various
forms of discrimination. This entry first explains
the colonial origins of formal apartheid as introduced
in 1948, in order to contextualize the key
tenets of the system when it became enshrined in
various pieces of legislation until its formal demise