Introduction

The last few years have seen a surge of new interest in the history of urban renewal in the United States. A new generation of historians have begun to tackle the various consequences of the 1949 and 1954 United States Housing Acts, the laws that directed federal monies to efforts by cities to attract private interests to clear and rehabilitate “slums” and “blight” and build new modern housing, commercial, and institutional complexes in postwar central cities. This is not a little surprising. Not so long ago, urban renewal was thought to be a more or less settled issue, put to bed in the 1960s and 1970s by social scientists, activists, and crusading journalists as an unfortunate and backward attempt to remake cities as bulldozed, lifeless tower and plaza moonscapes. Historians seemed to see little reason to retrieve it from where Jane Jacobs and other “advocacy planners” had deposited it: the proverbial dustbin of history.

Now, though, historians have begun to investigate the local histories of urban redevelopment efforts in cities across the country. By and large, these new studies have proceeded from the perspective of social and political history, and they have placed urban renewal in important new contexts. Their accounts nest urban renewal in the broader story of the postwar metropolis. Concerned with politics, policy, and social movements, they show how urban renewal was a crucial episode in the larger histories of deindustrialization, class and racial struggle, community formation, downtown commerce, suburbanization, highway building, civil rights, Black Power, and the rise and fall of the liberal state that shaped urban America in the postwar era. They see urban renewal as an instrument of political economy, as one site of struggle in which the “broadly conceived political spaces” of postwar cities were made and remade by economic transformation, the state, and social movements. ¹

As powerful as this new wave of urban histories has been, it has done little to challenge our fundamental understanding of urban renewal. Historians have deepened, but also more or less confirmed, the judgments of the previous generation of urban renewal antagonists. The first group of histories in the 1970s and 1980s noted urban renewal’s troubled relations with the linked history of public housing and white resistance to black mobility, and charged it with a leading role in what Arnold Hirsch called the “making of the second ghetto.” ² Since then, whether they see it as part of a postwar “politics of growth,” a public–private effort to try to keep downtown property profitable in a regional competition with booming suburbs, or a social campaign to preserve white, middle-class residential and commercial life in the center city, the lesson is clear: postwar urban renewal was a process in which private real estate interests enjoyed public sanction and subsidy in a campaign that destroyed working-class neighborhoods, uprooted and dislocated communities, reinforced racial segregation, spurred suburbanization, and furthered deindustrialization. ³

By these lights, urban renewal accompanied and even propelled the great tectonic shifts that remade racial and gender ideology over the middle third of the twentieth century. With its need to separate and define discrete social uses of urban space, it reinforced the consolidation of a spatial understanding of race, whereby cities came to be seen as black spaces and suburbs as white ones, each severed from the other socially, physically, and economically. Given renewal’s drive to purify urban space, it dovetailed nicely with postwar attempts to reinstate the doctrine of “separate spheres” by which women were encouraged to embrace domestic life and leave the public realm to men, for whom the city was a place of toil to be mastered but simultaneously kept at a distance—by commuter rail line or freeway—from suburban home, wife, and family. Overall, it has seemed one more in a list of postwar phenomena that have underwritten the rise of a new conservative political culture. As Eric Avila has written in his work on the “age of white flight” in Los Angeles, “In his thirty-year ascent to the White House, [Ronald] Reagan espoused patriarchy, privatization, patriotism, law and order, hard work, and self-help, modeling a new political subjectivity set against the tenets of New Deal liberalism and personifying the values incubated within the spaces wrought by suburbanization, urban renewal, and highway construction.” ⁴

Such accounts of Sunbelt urbanism go beyond contextualizing renewal policies in the history of the postwar metropolis and make them adjuncts to larger programs of regional development, social segregation, and political transformation. In Avila’s Los Angeles—where a conservative establishment used urban renewal funds to remake Bunker Hill— or Matthew Lassiter’s Atlanta and Charlotte—where business-friendly moderate Democrats uprooted black neighborhoods for freeways, sports arenas, and other white collar uses as they charted a path between Jim Crow and Civil Rights—urban renewal was another tool of a business-friendly municipal elite little different, in effect if not intent, from the New Deal Democrats and liberal Republicans who championed it in the East and Midwest. By this account, postwar metropolitan consensus gathered not so much around liberalism as around a bipartisan, cross-regional interest in erecting what Lassiter calls “the national model of spatial apartheid through urban renewal and suburban development.” ⁵

And yet, true as all this seems in the aggregate and in terms of long-term effects, it is not clear that urban renewal always fits so neatly into this grand pattern. Further research on the way urban renewal came to be included in those right marching Sunbelt coalitions might reveal it to be less instrumental and more an occasional or troubled partner in the making of new suburban cities. As Robert Fairbanks has shown, many elites in places like Dallas, Phoenix, and Albuquerque resisted renewal as an unacceptable government intervention on “individual rights.” And we shouldn’t forget that as a candidate for Governor of California, Ronald Reagan was far from a proponent of federally backed urban intervention, blasting renewal as “an assault on freedom.” ⁶

None of this is meant to undermine recent accounts of postwar political transformation and spatial segregation. Avila, for instance, is quite right to suggest that urban renewal, by enlisting the federal government in a campaign that harmed rather than saved cities, turned out to be a fitting complement to conservative ascendance. Like the Federal Housing Administration and other federal housing policy instruments that encouraged racial and economic segregation and the rise of “conservative localism,” it was a liberal policy that helped to both underwrite exceptions to liberalism’s putative universalism and undo the fabled “New Deal order.” A policy with roots in attempts to guide and curb the market ended up one in which public power served those who sought to set the market “free.”

But this irony, or tragedy perhaps, should only redouble our determination to see anew the further complexities of urban renewal’s history. Even as it shares the historical stage with suburbanization, white flight, and freeways, its remakings of urban space issue from more complex and less ideologically pure origins. After all, urban renewal policies often sought to undo social and economic decentralization and turn back the tides of white flight. Some backers of renewal sought to help working class residents—black, Latino, and white—escape substandard housing. Even those who, as Alison Isenberg has argued, attempted to keep urban space racially segregated also sought to bring white women shoppers back downtown and into the old, eroding public realm. ⁷ Urban renewal may have sought a clean, ordered city of austere open plazas, modern facades, and readily navigable spaces where goods, information, and white and white-collar people could all flow freely, but its history resembles more the messy city it looked to displace, with all the requisite dead-ends, one-way streets, blind corners, unpredictable turns, and paradoxical juxtapositions of public life.

The intervention we propose is a rather simple one. What happens if we bring the history of ideas back into the history of urban renewal? How might the ambiguous and flexible realm of meaning transform our understanding of this conventional urban renewal history? Our intention is not to suggest that the judgments we have inherited should be overturned. We ask, instead, if the history of urban renewal’s failures should be understood as less foreordained. We wonder if looking at the ideas offered by its backers, opponents, and observers might reveal a less uniform set of origins, practices, and motivating impulses and a more ambiguous legacy of aims, intentions, and results.

Zipp’s recent book Manhattan Projects: The Rise and Fall of Urban Renewal in Cold War New York has argued that we see urban renewal as a part of postwar cultural history, as an episode in the struggle to determine and understand what it meant to live in cities during the postwar era of Cold War and modernity. ⁸ The essays collected here suggest that to understand how urban renewal becomes a part of the nation’s cultural history, as much as its social and political history, we must attend to the ideas that motivated and propelled urban renewal in the first place. For before it was a policy, urban renewal was fundamentally a set of contested ideas, a complex of various and argued-over visions for how to remake cities in the face of economic decline, “slum” conditions, and residential and industrial decentralization. We believe the motivations, intentions, and interpretive world views of renewal’s early backers have too often been taken for granted; the idealism and excessive optimism of these early supporters and the program’s failures have encouraged historians to see only the blindnesses and hidden agendas of its sponsors. These clearly existed, but focusing on them has obscured some of the conflicted texture of the program’s history. We seek to recover the way it evolved out of and not simply into conflict. And we hope to begin to chart how, over the course of its checkered history, urban renewal changed, taking on new shapes and forms as ideas about its failures and occasional successes made their way into federal and local policy.

Elements of such an intellectual history already exist. From architectural historians, for instance, comes the by now conventional association of urban renewal’s architectural and planning profile with the aesthetics and ideals of modernism. ⁹ From the realm of cultural theory comes the idea that these shifts in aesthetics can be seen as indicators of more profound cultural transformations. For instance, most who have dipped into the literature surrounding modernism and architecture are familiar with the much-repeated idea that the demolition of the Pruitt-Igoe Houses in St. Louis in 1972 symbolizes the transformation from modernism to postmodernism. But along with the ability to chart such grand movements of culture comes also a tendency to collapse complex histories into schematic linkages or oppositions. ¹⁰

For David Harvey, to take just one instance of this way of thinking, the modern architectural visions of Le Corbusier and his ilk translate seamlessly into the realized urban renewal projects of the postwar United States—each of them evidence of the way that some forms of modernism, in their attempts to come to grips with the flux and change of urban life under capitalism, slip into a high-handed search for order and control. To visually demonstrate this, he opens his seminal work, The Condition of Postmodernity, with a pair of linked images equating Corbusier’s Plan Voisin from the 1920s and Metropolitan Life’s proto-urban renewal project Stuyvesant Town of the late 1940s. Like many other accounts of urban renewal, Harvey’s builds upon the critique of modern planning associated with Jane Jacobs, but ups the ante considerably. As a product of the “celebration of corporate bureaucratic power and rationality” at the heart of modernism and modernization, the architecture and planning ideals that undergirded urban renewal reveal “the totalitarianism of planners, bureaucrats, and corporate elites.” ¹¹

Whatever one makes of Harvey’s overall theory of postmodernity—it should not be forgotten that his mapping of the shift from modernism to postmodernism alongside the economic shift from Fordism to post-Fordism represents a pathbreaking attempt to periodize the relations between late twentieth-century political economy and culture—his account of the visions that propelled urban renewal operate at a level of generalization so lofty as to render them useful only for such long-scale historical meditations. For it is only theoretically or abstractly that the planners and bureaucrats, whatever their sins, resemble the true totalitarians of twentieth-century history. These sorts of equivalences, while helpful in identifying the field of ideas to be surveyed, overlook the essential action of paradox, compromise, negotiation, contestation, and change that necessarily mark the evolution of ideas in time. Indeed, as Samuel Zipp’s essay here shows, the link between Le Corbusier and the “red brick modernism” of Stuyvesant Town is neither direct nor entirely straightforward.

Of course, there is something to the idea of a link between a totalitarian political ideology and the “totalitarianism” of modern planning, if only because it has not been just cultural theorists who have advanced the idea of the similarity. Ordinary people, looking to explain the impact of urban renewal plans on their cities and neighborhoods, have also suggested similar resemblances. This does not make the connection “true,” necessarily, but it shows how attention to the ideas at play in the history of urban renewal can suggest, for instance, how its overarching, rational vision can simultaneously encompass its idealism, its pragmatic propensity for compromise, and its eventual undoing when people affected by the program came to see it in a very different light than those who backed it. Nevertheless, these intricacies can only be understood if we bring to the study of urban renewal’s intellectual lineaments the same attention to particularity and contestation that historians have dedicated to its role in the political and social transformations of the postwar era.

To take another instance of this distinction, the media scholar Eric Gordon has suggested that renewal was an urban equivalent to the systems theory of cybernetics. Offering the “abstraction and dissemination of an ideal urban form,” renewal projects created an “operative city” that was decontextualized from its previous urban identity and “tasked with the function of representing urban function.” Meanwhile, the historian Jennifer Light has shown how actual computer methods for “analysis of large-scale social systems” were brought to bear on what we might call “late urban renewal”: those Community Renewal Program campaigns of the 1960s in which planners and officials, turning to social issues and community development, sought to remedy some of the problems of a program dominated by slum clearance. Light has also demonstrated how the “renewal” in urban renewal was derived from a long history of ecological thinking among planners and urbanists who saw cities as renewable resources that could be subjected to a campaign of scientifically managed “conservation.” ¹² The essays collected here, while appreciative of the large-scale theorizing of a Gordon or Harvey, follow Light into the thicket of actual practice in order to tease out the ways that big ideas were put into practice in their time, thereby revealing the role ideas play not only in locating urban renewal in large-scale cultural change but in the more precise history of urban renewal’s own formation, realization, and undoing.

Almost thirty years ago, Arnold Hirsch argued that all histories of urban renewal had to be local. Focus on national legislation and policy making made too much of struggles between “reformers” and “conservatives.” In truth, he demonstrated, private enterprise in Chicago had insisted on a more aggressive government clearance and renewal campaign. ¹³ We agree on both points, and much of the action here is drawn from local histories. However, like Christopher Klemek’s recent The Transatlantic Collapse of Urban Renewal, which traces the undoing of urban renewal in North America and Europe, the essays here also suggest that local activity was bound together—unevenly, perhaps, and in discontinuous ways across place and time—by a common and evolving body of intellectual theory that helped practitioners frame, advance, sell, and propel urban renewal campaigns. Likewise, a corresponding—and related—group of ideas provided opponents of renewal with language, arguments, and visions of city remaking beyond renewal. These ideas have not been absent from previous histories, but neither have they been as central to the story as they are here. ¹⁴

What currents of American intellectual history carried the various eddies of thought that combined to make and unmake urban renewal? Contributors to this volume delve into the history of city and urban planning and the history of social science and liberal reform efforts, from the Progressive Era and New Deal into the postwar era, as well as the thinking of community-based social movements, from social workers to neighborhood activists. This is familiar and well trod ground for urban historians. The contributors to this special issue mine it again for new insights into the way that these currents of American thought informed the development of the ideas that would launch urban renewal and for the critiques that would bring it before the bar of history and judge it wanting. Samuel Zipp’s article, “The Roots and Routes of Urban Renewal,” is a synthetic and interpretive essay that serves as a frame for the other articles. Revisiting the debates over the early ancestry of urban renewal ideals, he suggests that we not accept too hastily the familiar judgment that urban renewal be understood as simply a scheme for turning public power over to private real estate interests. He argues instead for seeing a more contingent process of transatlantic development that gave rise to an “ethic of city rebuilding” that sought to give public and private power ways to bring modern planning and architecture to bear on the old cityscape. Jamin Rowan shows that at least part of urban renewal’s intellectual infrastructure is rooted in the urban narratives crafted by settlement house writers and other reformers during the Progressive Era. These narratives, Rowan suggests, motivated and sustained settlement workers’ critical involvement in the physical and figurative processes of both remaking and preserving city neighborhoods in the New Deal and postwar periods that followed. Focusing on the narratives underpinning urban renewal not only pushes back the timeline within which the history of urban renewal is typically discussed but also encourages us to think more broadly about who was involved in promoting and repressing this brand of urbanism and about the complex nature of that involvement. Michael Carriere investigates the history of the South Side Planning Board (SSPB)—an organization committed to battling urban blight in postwar Chicago—to show how SSPB leaders and their allies used the concepts of social organization and disorganization, as developed by noted sociologists like Louis Wirth, to address the social ills of the city’s African American neighborhoods, to bolster the legitimacy of the urban renewal programs meant to address such conditions, and to inform the architectural and planning vision undergirding such programs. The SSPB, however, stripped the work of Wirth and others of any nuance, and drew from earlier sociological understandings of urban disorganization to posit that individual behavior, rather than structural realities, created disordered cities that cried out for large-scale renewal efforts. Finally, Jennifer Hock investigates the politics of renewal and redevelopment within Boston’s black community in the 1960s, focusing on the rise and fall of local support for a single renewal project in the neighborhood of Roxbury, where the politics of race and renewal were more complex than we might expect. Liberal advocates of racial integration embraced renewal as a means of breaking up the ghetto, promoting open housing across the city, and developing modern, racially integrated model housing projects and schools. More radical advocates of self-determination and community control, on the other hand, were quicker to understand renewal’s devastating impact on the poor and formulated a devastating critique of the city’s renewal practices that helped slow completion of the project. In the end, Roxbury’s experiences with renewal demonstrate the larger point of all of these essays: ideas and motivations matter. Pairing meaning with movements and policy is critical to understanding the way urban renewal unfolded and local communities responded.