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In “Thinking through Urban Renewal” and in the accompanying articles, Samuel Zipp, Michael Carriere, and fellow contributors have offered readers of the Journal of Urban History a clear and concise proposal for new directions in the historiography of urban renewal. While praising the recent work of scholars who have situated renewal in its social and political contexts as an advance on the earliest historical studies of this important midcentury policy, they nonetheless argue that a history of ideas approach would supply a more robust perspective on important questions in the field. The contributors’ essays deliver on the introductory paper’s explicit promise to infuse studies of renewal with new and important connections to diverse currents in the history of ideas.
Yet the editors’ explicit separation of social and political history from intellectual history, and suggestion that the latter take priority, strikes me as unnecessarily simplifying what is a much more complex and tangled terrain. The two books of mine cited in the introduction, for example, though historical in focus, are less projects in intellectual history than in the sociology of knowledge. Both were motivated not merely by the desire to document that certain ideas amassed substantial cultural currency among planners and other actors in the urban context in particular historical periods (e.g., ecological thinking in the early twentieth century, systems thinking at the middle part of the century) but equally by the question of why these ideas became common wisdom when they did. With such a sociology of knowledge framework, it is impossible to separate the history of ideas from their social and political context (e.g., the conservation movement and the Cold War). These connections lurk in the editors’ and fellow contributors’ essays as well, suggesting that the introductory essay’s call to prioritize the history of ideas undersells the synthetic work they actually do.
I also wonder about how such a refocusing of renewal scholarship engages with the broader fields of inquiry that the Journal of Urban History represents. The authors’ citation lists and biographical descriptions indicate that they all are well acquainted with scholarship on urban history in earlier and later periods as well as in places outside the United States—in other words, the subjects that have preoccupied colleagues in the field. Yet in calling for new directions in renewal historiography, the authors are silent about the origins of this proposal and the implications that it might have for readers of this journal who work on other topics. Does the call to refocus renewal scholarship build on exemplary studies of other subjects in urban history? How can the approach they propose inform the work of scholars less interested in renewal than in uncovering the historiographic blinders they might wear? In other words, What are the “roots” and “routes” of their own historiographic claims?