Journal of Planning History

This article critically examines the Bayou Greenways Initiative (BGI), a public-private partnership in Houston, Texas, through its claimed goal of completing city planner Arthur Comey’s 1913 park plan. It argues that by uncritically reproducing Comey’s envisioned threadlike bayou parks, the BGI risks perpetuating the plan’s profit-driven, racist, and classist inequities. The analysis identifies three key problems: prioritizing property values through design, privileging wealthier white neighborhoods through inequitable allocation and phasing, and misunderstanding transportation needs by emphasizing recreation that primarily benefits affluent residents. The BGI’s reliance on private philanthropy and profit-oriented design maintains a system where public park improvements are tied to financial gain, heightening the risk of gentrification and displacement for low-income communities. The article concludes that using historical planning documents for symbolic legitimization without socio-spatial reassessment perpetuates injustice, underscoring the need for critical historical engagement in contemporary planning.

This paper analyses the success of “towers in the park” in New York City by comparing cooperative and public housing’s physical aspects over the middle decades of the twentieth century through the work of two architectural firms that spent their careers designing affordable housing complexes: Herman Jessor and Frederick G. Frost. To do so, four pairs of projects were explored in more depth, belonging to four stages in the history of this typology. The analysis concludes that systemic differences between these types of housing were determined by funding and policy while showing that these architects’ design approaches were quite similar.

This article traces the spatial history of the Ulysses S. Grant Houses and Columbia University’s planning projects in Morningside Heights, New York City. In 2020, Grant Houses recorded one of the highest COVID-19 death rates in public housing in the city. The paper focuses on two key moments: mid-century urban renewal and Columbia’s twenty-first-century Manhattanville expansion. It examines how Columbia has used planning tools, health discourses, and policing to secure land and displace or contain neighboring Black communities. Drawing on archival materials, the article introduces the concept of the split city to describe a form of racialized urbanism shaped not by complete separation but by selective and conditional inclusion. The split city is not a stable or totalizing formation. It is shaped by ongoing struggle, as residents have continually resisted erasure and asserted their right to the spaces and futures of Morningside Heights.