The New Republic has a fascinating story up on the supposed “demographic inversion” happening in America’s urban cores.  The piece starts — as many articles on the future of urbanism do — with a little allegory about Chicago. As a former denizen of that fair city (and a former newspaper reporter in the southern suburbs that are on the receiving end of much of the changing demographics), I have to say many of Alan Ehrenhalt’s observations ring perfectly true.

In the past three decades, Chicago has undergone changes that are routinely described as gentrification, but are in fact more complicated and more profound than the process that term suggests. A better description would be “demographic inversion.” Chicago is gradually coming to resemble a traditional European city–Vienna or Paris in the nineteenth century, or, for that matter, Paris today. The poor and the newcomers are living on the outskirts. The people who live near the center–some of them black or Hispanic but most of them white–are those who can afford to do so.

Developments like this rarely occur in one city at a time, and indeed demographic inversion is taking place, albeit more slowly than in Chicago, in metropolitan areas throughout the country. The national press has paid very little attention to it. While we have been focusing on Baghdad and Kabul, our own cities have been changing right in front of us.

Ehrenhalt, the executive editor of Governing Magazine, wants to call this dramatic shift in urban-vs-suburban populations something other than gentrification. It seems to me that calling it “demographic inversion” could be seen as a nice linguistic trick to make the phenomenon seem natural and inevitable, without having to deal with all those icky reprecussions associated with gentrification.

That said, though, the piece offers a interesting glimpse into the emerging debate on the re-urbanization of America, particularly as housing values plummet, exurbs tumble under the weight of foreclosures and energy prices settle in the stratosphere.

Along those lines, it’s worth checking out the recent PolicyLink report on reviving smaller industrial cities, “To Be Strong Again.” The report highlights many best practices on how to equitably and fairly renew the promise of urban downtowns.