Abstract
Samuel Zipp offers a refreshingly nuanced analysis of urban renewal. Too many historians in his view have reduced urban renewal in the United States to a thoughtless land grab by downtown business elites. While he does not downplay the negative effects of downtown redevelopment on the poor or deny that many cities built drab and economically unsuccessful projects, Zipp challenges us to place urban renewal in a longer transnational intellectual and cultural context. Rather than concentrating solely on the details of policy and bureaucracy, Zipp draws on an impressive array of cultural sources ranging from Cubist painting to the architecture of grain silos to locate the often well-intentioned “ideas” behind urban renewal. I agree with his argument that urban renewal has a “long history” that is transnational, predates 1949 and perhaps even runs longer than 1974. I am also convinced by his point that urban renewal was shaped by a complex web of ideas beyond simply a search for profits. Furthermore, I applaud Zipp for a richly interdisciplinary and humanistic approach to the history of urban planning. I do have a few questions about the main argument of the essay—that two distinct “ideas” (“slum clearance” and “modern housing”) underlay an ethic of urban renewal and that these ideas can be traced to different origins in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. My goal is not to challenge Zipp’s project, however, but to encourage him to flesh it out even further.
My first question is about the essay’s “history of ideas” approach. I worry it presents too strict a dichotomy—a Cartesian Dualism almost—between “ideas” produced by a handful of intellectuals and “policies and politics” championed by a downtown business establishment concerned solely with materialistic matters. Tracing the “history of an idea” that traverses almost a century is tough to pull off and will always raise questions about the impact of changing economic, social, and political contexts. 1 At the same time, it goes without saying that business leaders such as Richard King Mellon and David Rockefeller, power brokers such as Robert Moses and Ed Logue, developers such as William Zeckendorf and Samuel LeFrak, retail developers such as Victor Gruen and James Rouse, and figures ranging from Abraham Kazan to Robert Weaver each articulated distinct urban visions that were shaped by a plethora of ideas about power, organizational management, the role of the state, modernity, consumption, gender, race, and technology. 2
My second reservation is that after a tantalizing introduction that invokes the hybrid “routes” of James Clifford, the essay abruptly reduces the complex network of ideas that undergirded urban renewal to two reified concepts—“slum clearance” and “modern housing.” I wonder if this is necessary. Historically, these two terms were never used consistently by either proponents or detractors and they always connoted shifting and contested constellations of overlapping ideas. In the essay, however, they appear as distinct and clearly bounded concepts that can be traced neatly from their origins in specific locations and times (New York City in the late nineteenth century; Europe in the 1920s) to their eventual culmination decades later in a unified ideal of urban renewal. Without questioning the historical details of the essay, I worry that such an unyielding framework will simply open the argument to an annoying chorus of “what about’s?” What about first- and second-generation white ethnic architects, such as Herman Jessor and Benjamin Braunstein, who with modest architectural pedigrees built 1920s garden apartments and later designed much of NYC’s urban renewal–era high-rise housing? What about technological advances that may have sparked paradigm shifts in attitudes towards slums—the aerial views provided by the airplane, for example. 3 I am not suggesting that Zipp abandon the two terms. But I do think the framework could be more fluid.
One notable omission from the essay’s two-category framework is the subject of race. I’m not suggesting that Zipp should have resorted to a reductionist argument that urban renewal in the United States was solely a product of racism. But as Jennifer Hock’s article illustrates, “ideas” about race played too crucial a role in the trajectory of postwar redevelopment in American cities to leave it out of the story. Race often disappears as an object of analysis in transnational urban history, particularly as the lens expands from local U.S. case studies to include international cities where race was presumably not an issue. This need not be the case. It would be interesting, for example, to see more comparative studies of race and redevelopment in U.S. cities and Afro-Caribbean enclaves of London, North African areas of Paris, or Turkish guest worker neighborhoods in West Berlin. It would also be fascinating to see how United States’ discourses about race and urban renewal may have shaped or been shaped by cities that were largely racially homogeneous. How did planners and residents in the struggling high-rise Ballymun Towers in Dublin, Ireland, for example adopt, appropriate, reject, or contest American discourses about race and modernist public housing? 4