Journal of Urban History

Prompted by the 2005 urban riots in France, this article asks why, with very few exceptions, American cities have not experienced widespread civil disorders since the late 1970s, especially when many of the conditions underlying the earlier disorders persist or have worsened. The answer lies in three factors: the changing ecology of power, techniques for managing marginalization, and distinctive U.S. approaches to the incorporation and control of immigrants.

Authors of articles in this issue identify two themes in American urban history. First, between 1950 and 1980, politicians including St. Louis mayors as well as New York Governor Nelson A. Rockefeller and Robert A. Weaver (Secretary of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development), fostered an upward shift in the locus of authority for directing the urban-political economy. By the 1980s, however, small-city mayors around San Francisco as well as President Richard M. Nixon joined with policy activists including Jane Jacobs and Irving Kristol to affect a downward shift of authority. Unlikely allies, Jacobs, Kristol, and Nixon sought to return power to the hands of local leaders. Second, authors show that political elites shaped the conceptual, legal, and institutional frameworks within which they worked to foster economic growth, reduce crime, structure the economic and social geography of cities and regions, and deal with the challenges of race and class at a moment of social upheaval.

The case of St. Louis in the 1940s demonstrates the central importance of this decade in American urban history. To understand how planners and elected officials made such extensive use of federal funds in the 1950s and 1960s for public housing and urban renewal, we have to recast the 1940s as a critical period in the formation both of a new urban vision and of a political coalition emboldened to carry it out. Frustrated in their attempts to rebuild in brick and mortar, slum clearance advocates in St. Louis set about redefining the terms of debate over the future of the city itself. They mobilized behind a vision of the city at a crossroads, poised between progress and decay. Yet despite such stark rhetoric, slum clearance was not so much a technological or economic imperative, but a carefully assembled political agenda to remake the urban landscape.

Over the course of the 1960s and early 1970s, the nature and public perception of racial and environmental crises in American metropolitan areas shifted dramatically. In response to emboldened and expanding numbers of activists, urban politicians both re-doubled old efforts and adopted new approaches. But how and to what extent did policymaking change? This article focuses on a New York powerfully shaped by Governor Nelson A. Rockefeller, a pragmatic and ambitious man who forthrightly embodied a liberal approach to governing that placed confidence in the state's ability to solve social problems. The complex storm of 1960s era activism and the Rockefeller administration's attempts to adapt to the times revealed important contours of postwar American liberalism—its internal tensions and evolutions and its potential and limitations.

During the 1960s and 1970s, Congress and policymakers engaged in a heated debate over the proper role of the federal government in urban America enacted several initiatives to deal with the problems facing older cities, including creating the Department of Housing and Urban Development. However, throughout these years, federal officials, members of Congress, and other interested parties remained divided over the extent and nature of the “urban crisis.” During the early 1960s, much of the debate about urban areas focused on the problems of “metropolitan growth,” but in late 1960s, urban problems became increasingly identified with issues of racial conflict. By the early 1970s, policymakers had concluded that federal programs had generally failed to improve the state of urban America, and they oversaw a devolution of power back to local governments.

In 1958, John F. McCarthy and Edgar F. Kaiser proposed the Golden Gate Authority to coordinate, plan for, and develop regional transportation in the San Francisco Bay Area. This agency would have incorporated all Bay Area bridges, seaports, and airports and would have provided the foundation for general regional planning and metropolitan area government, with capacity to expand its jurisdiction and functions. As such, the proposal threatened the autonomy of local governments, whose officials rallied against it, evoking the principle of federalism under the rubric of “home rule.” In accounting for the defeat of the authority, this article describes local government officials as an independent interest group engaged in the decision-making process. It also considers some of the long-term implications of the defeat, including the reinforcement of a fragmented, federalist governmental structure at the local level.

Beyond her well-known writings against urban renewal, Jane Jacobs guided the design and implementation of a pair of housing projects while she was a resident of New York in the 1960s and then Toronto in the 1970s. These two firsthand attempts to apply Jacobs's influential ideas on urbanism not only demonstrate her skills as a political activist but also illustrate how some Canadians forged powerful new urban coalitions just as U.S. city politics was becoming increasingly fragmented and incapacitated.

This article discusses the founding of the Manhattan Institute as part of a wider mobilization of conservative ideology and activism in 1970s New York. Important to the success of this mobilization was the concerted effort to reframe the “urban crisis” as a problem of values and culture and to construct a narrative of moral decline—and ultimately of conservative redemption—based in liberal New York.