Saving America's Cities

Saving America's Cities
Author: Lizabeth Cohen
Publisher: Macmillan + ORM
Total Pages: 331
Release: 2019-10-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 0374721602

Winner of the Bancroft Prize In twenty-first-century America, some cities are flourishing and others are struggling, but they all must contend with deteriorating infrastructure, economic inequality, and unaffordable housing. Cities have limited tools to address these problems, and many must rely on the private market to support the public good. It wasn’t always this way. For almost three decades after World War II, even as national policies promoted suburban sprawl, the federal government underwrote renewal efforts for cities that had suffered during the Great Depression and the war and were now bleeding residents into the suburbs. In Saving America’s Cities, the prizewinning historian Lizabeth Cohen follows the career of Edward J. Logue, whose shifting approach to the urban crisis tracked the changing balance between government-funded public programs and private interests that would culminate in the neoliberal rush to privatize efforts to solve entrenched social problems. A Yale-trained lawyer, rival of Robert Moses, and sometime critic of Jane Jacobs, Logue saw renewing cities as an extension of the liberal New Deal. He worked to revive a declining New Haven, became the architect of the “New Boston” of the 1960s, and, later, led New York State’s Urban Development Corporation, which built entire new towns, including Roosevelt Island in New York City. Logue’s era of urban renewal has a complicated legacy: Neighborhoods were demolished and residents dislocated, but there were also genuine successes and progressive goals. Saving America’s Cities is a dramatic story of heartbreak and destruction but also of human idealism and resourcefulness, opening up possibilities for our own time.

Redevelopment and Race

Redevelopment and Race
Author: June Manning Thomas
Publisher: Wayne State University Press
Total Pages: 314
Release: 2013-04-15
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0814339085

In the decades following World War II, professional city planners in Detroit made a concerted effort to halt the city's physical and economic decline. Their successes included an award-winning master plan, a number of laudable redevelopment projects, and exemplary planning leadership in the city and the nation. Yet despite their efforts, Detroit was rapidly transforming into a notorious symbol of urban decay. In Redevelopment and Race: Planning a Finer City in Postwar Detroit, June Manning Thomas takes a look at what went wrong, demonstrating how and why government programs were ineffective and even destructive to community needs. In confronting issues like housing shortages, blight in older areas, and changing economic conditions, Detroit's city planners worked during the urban renewal era without much consideration for low-income and African American residents, and their efforts to stabilize racially mixed neighborhoods faltered as well. Steady declines in industrial prowess and the constant decentralization of white residents counteracted planners' efforts to rebuild the city. Among the issues Thomas discusses in this volume are the harmful impacts of Detroit's highways, the mixed record of urban renewal projects like Lafayette Park, the effects of the 1967 riots on Detroit's ability to plan, the city-building strategies of Coleman Young (the city's first black mayor) and his mayoral successors, and the evolution of Detroit's federally designated Empowerment Zone. Examining the city she knew first as an undergraduate student at Michigan State University and later as a scholar and planner, Thomas ultimately argues for a different approach to traditional planning that places social justice, equity, and community ahead of purely physical and economic objectives. Redevelopment and Race was originally published in 1997 and was given the Paul Davidoff Award from the Association of Collegiate Schools of Planning in 1999. Students and teachers of urban planning will be grateful for this re-release. A new postscript offers insights into changes since 1997.

Building A New Boston

Building A New Boston
Author: Thomas H. O'Connor
Publisher: UPNE
Total Pages: 372
Release: 1995-08-10
Genre: History
ISBN: 9781555532468

"Here is one of the great stories in American urban history told by a great historian. In 1949, Boston was 'a hopeless backwater' . . . by 1970, a 'New Boston' had been created . . . Thomas O'Connor, the dean of Boston historians, brings to this tale of transformation rich learning, intimate familiarity with his subject, and a lucid sometimes witty pen." -- Jack Beatty, Senior Editor, Atlantic Monthly

Urban Planning and Renewal

Urban Planning and Renewal
Author: Maddison Wolfe
Publisher: Nova Science Publishers
Total Pages: 193
Release: 2017
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 9781536124255

Urban planning professionals around the globe are confronted with a multitude of challenges and problems as a result of economic, environmental and social issues impacting growing cities. With the effects of urbanization and the resultant pressure on neighbourhood infrastructure and amenities, urban planners and other public officials are being called to address sustainable community development. Chapter One examines the availability and quality of neighbourhood infrastructure in Jamaica, and discusses the implications for public health and urban planning in a Small Island Developing State (SIDS) at the Low/Middle Income Country (LMIC) stage of development. Chapter Two discusses the role of ESs as factors that improve the effectiveness of Strategic Environmental Assessment (SEA)-based processes; more precisely, it investigates how the integration of ESs into SEA-based processes can benefit Management Plans (MPs) of sites that belong to the Natura 2000 network and lead to higher levels of environmental quality. Chapter Three will provide an introduction to the history of sustainable urban development in England and the concept of urban extensions. Chapter Four utilizes a conceptual mechanism of place, non-place and placelessness to discuss some of the most recent transformations in three of Phoenix's inner-ring suburbs: Maryvale, East Van Buren, and South Phoenix. Chapter Five illustrates the application of social force theory. Chapter Six advocates a self-organized LR model in which villagers' committees (VCs) are empowered to initiate, plan and execute urban village renewal projects on their own. Some suggestions are given for pursuing a more workable and fairer way to design and implement the self-organized LR model in the future. Chapter Seven evaluates the impact of sense of community on Macau residents' choice of urban renewal mode.

The New Urban Renewal

The New Urban Renewal
Author: Derek S. Hyra
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 233
Release: 2008-09
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 0226366049

Two of the most celebrated black neighborhoods in the United States—Harlem in New York City and Bronzeville in Chicago—were once plagued by crime, drugs, and abject poverty. But now both have transformed into increasingly trendy and desirable neighborhoods with old buildings being rehabbed, new luxury condos being built, and banks opening branches in areas that were once redlined. In The New Urban Renewal, Derek S. Hyra offers an illuminating exploration of the complicated web of factors—local, national, and global—driving the remarkable revitalization of these two iconic black communities. How did these formerly notorious ghettos become dotted with expensive restaurants, health spas, and chic boutiques? And, given that urban renewal in the past often meant displacing African Americans, how have both neighborhoods remained black enclaves? Hyra combines his personal experiences as a resident of both communities with deft historical analysis to investigate who has won and who has lost in the new urban renewal. He discovers that today’s redevelopment affects African Americans differentially: the middle class benefits while lower-income residents are priced out. Federal policies affecting this process also come under scrutiny, and Hyra breaks new ground with his penetrating investigation into the ways that economic globalization interacts with local political forces to massively reshape metropolitan areas. As public housing is torn down and money floods back into cities across the United States, countless neighborhoods are being monumentally altered. The New Urban Renewal is a compelling study of the shifting dynamics of class and race at work in the contemporary urban landscape.

Urban Renewal and School Reform in Baltimore

Urban Renewal and School Reform in Baltimore
Author: Erkin Özay
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 199
Release: 2020-08-11
Genre: Architecture
ISBN: 1000093352

Urban Renewal and School Reform in Baltimore examines the role of the contemporary public school as an instrument of urban design. The central case study in this book, Henderson-Hopkins, is a PK-8 campus serving as the civic centerpiece of the East Baltimore Development Initiative. This study reflects on the persistent notions of urban renewal and their effectiveness for addressing the needs of disadvantaged neighborhoods and vulnerable communities. Situating the master plan and school project in the history and contemporary landscape of urban development and education debates, this book provides a detailed account of how Henderson-Hopkins sought to address several reformist objectives, such as improvement of the urban context, pedagogic outcomes, and holistic well-being of students. Bridging facets of urban design, development, and education policy, this book contributes to an expanded agenda for understanding the spatial implications of school-led redevelopment and school reform.

The City Creative

The City Creative
Author: Michael H. Carriere
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 336
Release: 2021-04-18
Genre: Architecture
ISBN: 022672722X

Introduction : a brief history of the recent past -- The (near) death and life of postwar American cities : the roots of contemporary placemaking -- The roaring '90s -- Into the twenty-first century -- Growing place : toward a counterhistory of contemporary placemaking -- Producing place -- Creating place -- Conclusion : Placemaking is for people.

Urban Renewal, Community and Participation

Urban Renewal, Community and Participation
Author: Julie Clark
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 251
Release: 2018-05-02
Genre: Science
ISBN: 3319723111

This edited collection investigates the human dimension of urban renewal, using a range of case studies from Africa, Asia, Europe, India and North America, to explore how the conception and delivery of regeneration initiatives can strengthen or undermine local communities. Ultimately aiming to understand how urban residents can successfully influence or manage change in their own communities, contributing authors interrogate the complex relationships between policy, planning, economic development, governance systems, history and urban morphology. Alongside more conventional methods, analytical approaches include built form analysis, participant observation, photographic analysis and urban labs. Appealing to upper level undergraduate and masters' students, academics and others involved in urban renewal, the book offers a rich combination of theoretical insight and empirical analysis, contributing to literature on gentrification, the right to the city, and community participation in neighbourhood change.