By TODD VOLKER

Daniel J. Elazar, with Rozann Rothman, Stephen L. Schechter, Maren Allen Stein and Joseph Zikmund II, Cities of the Prairie Revisited: The Closing of the Metropolitan Frontier. Lincoln, Neb.: University of Nebraska Press, 1986, 252 pp. $25.00.

Newspaper stories in the 1980s reflect the profound changes underway in American life. Smokestack industries are replaced by technological corridors. The South and the West become more significant politically, and questions about economic management become increasingly troublesome. Following trends and reading the future has become an industry in itself, and national bestsellers underscore the tensions of the changing times. Not since the years after World War II has the nation changed so much in so short a time.

Daniel J. Elazar's Cities of the Prairie Revisited carefully examines these aspects of change, especially as they relate to life in middle-sized cities. His thesis is that these cities, with populations between 40,000 and 200,000, have become the dominant residence for the bulk of the population and that for this reason they must be carefully studied and rightly understood.

Writing a sequel to Elazar's 1970 Cities of the Prairie is necessarily a difficult task. That volume won instant recognition as a substantial contribution to contemporary political science. Its thorough and insightful look at the complex political structure in medium-sized American cities became the theoretical framework for a generation of political scientists.

Elazar, once a professor of political science at the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana and current director of the Center for the Study of Federalism at Temple University, investigated the political culture of several cities, including Belleville, Champaign-Urbana, Decatur, Joliet, Moline, Peoria, Rockford, Rock Island and Springfield, in research begun in 1959. The conceptual basis of his study is an essentially Weberian argument:

". . .a central premise of this study is that it is neither possible nor desirable to study local political systems apart from their larger geohistorical, cultural, economic, and political settings. Communities are located not only in space, but also in time (history) and culture."

The central finding of Revisited is that the cities examined in Elazar's first work have subsequently made progress in opening the political process and in working toward civic development.

The first half of Revisited is Elazar's overview of the cities, economically sketching his criteria for analyzing midsized communities. The reader quickly becomes familiar with the structural characteristics of small cities, with the national economy and with generational shifts in governmental structure.

Along the way substantial evidence points out the simple reason for the importance of medium-sized communities: they grow because their residents by and large feel satisfied with the quality of life the small city can afford them. They offer the best of both urban and rural lifestyles.

Elazar's chapter on Federalism vs. Manageralism is in many ways the most intriguing because he carefully examines how publicly held ideas of governmental organization have affected local government. Conflict between an inappropriate hierarchical model and the managerial model has been especially seen in the successes and failures of the Great Society. The federal model, the governing inspiration for small cities, has been recently reaffirmed; there has been "a clear repudiation of the presumed businesslike neutrality of council-manager government and the rediscovery of the political dimensions of governing." Local government is at heart a matter of politics and not rational decisionmaking.

The future of the small city is the future of the country. We are now poised before a citybelt-cybernetic ("rurban") frontier of mid-sized cities where great changes will occur in American life. Elazer reports an urgent need for a renewed sense of citizenship and of civil community, since only on this basis can there be effective interaction between levels of government. The issues of the new rurban frontier in America are only barely discernable: a new East-West political and economic sectionalism, lifestyle issues, and issues arising from a high-tech future.

The second half of Revisited is less speculative. Case studies of Champaign-Urbana, Decatur and Joliet in Illinois and of Pueblo, Colo., each by a different author, bring us back to the small city and its culture. Generally these studies review local history and political and economic change since 1970, show how global transformations affect and in turn are affected by small cities.

The collaborating authors used a combination of research techniques, including interviews and observations, reviews of local media reports, analysis of sociological data and voting patterns, and information from public documents and surveys. Revisited's fine statistical tables provide quick reference to such things as government expenditures, political preferences and citizen opinion, and help a reader appraise the authors' conclusions. The bibliography of related materials is extensive.

Compared to its predecessor. Revisited is less concerned with scholarly argument and more with presenting concrete evidence showing the direction of change in the small city since the original study. Revisited focuses on contemporary issues like local response to the "New Federalism" and to other recent ideas about government, as well as topics like intergovernmental cooperation, economic development, recent technological and economic change and the cities' responses to these changes. It fits the cities which it studies and other small cities into a broader perspective, and officials in state and local government may read it with profit.

Todd Volker is a graduate student in philosophy at the University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana, interested in political theory and social philosophy.

30/May 1987/Illinois Issues