Journal of Urban History

Powerful computing technologies and theoretical advances have empowered historians to follow the spatial turn in their work. Yet despite new technological and conceptual innovations, narrating spatial histories remains an ongoing challenge. The authors of three essays in this section apply spatial analysis in their narratives of politics, culture, and environmental change within three iconic U.S. cities—New York City, San Francisco, and Pittsburgh—from the eighteenth century to the late-twentieth century.

With an eye to urban branding campaigns in global cities such as New York, in the 1970s and 1980s, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania’s public officials worked with local corporations and media outlets to market “dynamic” Pittsburgh to a national audience. This article examines the relationship between the “imagined space” of boosters’ urban branding campaigns and their decades-long efforts to physically and economically reorganize the region’s “material space” around service and finance industries, and medical and educational institutions. Through urban branding, local elites’ efforts created new mental maps of the region that excluded its mill towns and manufacturing workers and emphasized, instead, the relationship between the city and its well-heeled suburbs.

In the mid-nineteenth century, San Franciscans transformed a muddy cove and trading outpost into an American town and then global port. In their rush to build a port and a city, they created a socially, politically, and materially unstable foundation for their rapidly growing urban waterfront. This article argues that the development and growth of early San Francisco cannot be understood apart from its waterfront in general and its role as a port in particular, contributing to a relatively small literature on the relationship between cities and their ports in urban history. Tracing the legal contests over the tidelands, material construction of piers, rise of a vice district, and clashes with vigilante justice, this article examines the creation of San Francisco as a gateway city. It suggests how historians might recover the dynamic, entangled, and at times violent histories hidden beneath the sediments of time along all urban commercial waterfronts.

Drawing on the literature of public space and military geography, this article explores the martial and civilian places of New York City on the eve of the American Revolution. Whereas martial and civilian places were largely undistinguished in New York before 1750, the arrival of British troops and the repositioning of New York as the center of British military power in North America initiated a process whereby New Yorkers debated if these two should be separated. While military commanders and local officials attempted to protect private spaces like the home through a joint martial-civilian occupation of public spaces with the construction of barracks, the Sons of Liberty contested this use of space and sought to evict the British soldiers. Ultimately, the Battle of Golden Hill and other clashes between soldiers and civilians forced leaders to segregate the city’s places, thereby removing all military geography from the city.

In the post–World War II period, the police department emerged as one of the most problematic municipal agencies in New York City. Patrolmen and their superiors did not pay much attention to crime; instead they looked the other way, received payoffs from organized crime, performed haphazardly, and tolerated conditions that were unacceptable in a modern city with global ambitions. At the same time, patrolmen demanded deference and respect from African American civilians and routinely demeaned and brutalized individuals who appeared to be challenging their authority. The antagonism between African Americans and the New York Police Department (NYPD) intensified as local and national black freedom organizations paid more attention to police behavior and made police reform one of their main goals.

In the 1960s, a new and popular theory of “new careers” proposed to address urban poverty and deindustrialization by growing the human services sector and hiring so-called nonprofessional workers to aid the delivery of those services. This strategy gained traction in social scientific, philanthropic, and bureaucratic circles and shaped Great Society legislation, which allocated federal grants to create entry-level jobs and professionalizing career ladders in the fields of health, education, and welfare. The implementation of this strategy had consequences for the human service organizations that received federal funds, as well as for the people hired into the new positions. Instead of building ladders to professional employment, efforts produced dead-end positions that left the predominantly African American women hired as aides in poverty. Even as the new careers experiment helped usher in a post-industrial economy, it reinforced the stratification of the labor market along lines of race, gender, and credentials.

Beginning in the late 1890s, battles erupted along Baltimore’s racial frontiers as African Americans moved into predominately white neighborhoods. This article analyzes the fight to impose residential segregation by focusing on events on the streets. This vantage point reveals a fuller picture of the movement to impose legalized segregation in Baltimore. Attempts to maintain racially exclusive neighborhoods in Baltimore began years before the passage of the West Segregation Ordinances in 1910. A street-level examination emphasizes the violence and racism—often elided in top-down analyses—that were central to the push for legalized segregation. It also demonstrates the significance of grassroots activists in this story. The movement to impose residential segregation was both promulgated and opposed at the grassroots.

In 1949, the colonial government of Tanganyika began clearing land for a model urban landscape in a remote district. This city was built as one facet of the Tanganyika Groundnut Scheme, a development debacle that cost the British taxpayer £36 million and yielded few benefits. The most significant outcome of the Scheme was the development of the port city of Mtwara, which held some promise as a model colonial space. As such, the urban development of Mtwara reveals how colonial officials used urban planning to alter a region’s economic productivity from a pre-industrial system to one directly linked to state power. Town planning was a strategic device to marginalize existing African communities and reconfigure power dynamics in an African landscape. This article examines how segregation was performed late in the colonial project, how social economies were reconfigured, and how housing development was rooted in entrenched views about rights and citizenship.

Recently, derelict artifacts of the industrial age such as railroad tracks and gantry cranes have emerged as prominent aesthetic features in New York City’s newest parks. This article documents and analyzes this new practice of historic preservation in three new parks, including the internationally acclaimed High Line. Socioeconomic data confirm that these industrial-themed parks exist in neighborhoods marked by dramatic postindustrial change. I argue that the trends are interrelated: that is, the injection of industrial remains into the city’s cultural and symbolic landscape not only represents the decline of the city’s industrial sector but also reinterprets and legitimizes this decline. The analysis highlights the political nature of historic preservation, which in this case helps nurture support for an elite-led postindustrial agenda in the face of recurring political challenges from progressives.

This article describes a squatter settlement that arose in Belgrade between the two world wars and the communities that lived in it and fought for their right to housing. At the end of the war in 1918, a completely new phenomenon appeared in Belgrade—the squatter settlement. Jatagan-mala was the largest and best known among them. It is used as a case in point to analyze the municipal authorities’ attitude toward squatter settlements and their residents. It is shown how Belgrade Municipality threatened to demolish Jatagan-mala and then partially tore it down, and how it dealt with those who, as a result, were left without a roof over their head. The article also describes the residents’ battle not to lose their homes. Organized and strong in the beginning, over time, their efforts flagged, and in the end, they haggled over monetary compensation for their demolished homes.

This article addresses urbanists in various fields—history, the social sciences, planning, and more—who are interested in incorporating literary works into their teaching and research and may be looking for critical approaches that connect such work to their own expertise. It begins from the premise that the traits that make a city a city present writers with opportunities to tell stories, experiment with form, make meaning, and otherwise exercise the literary imagination. When we use “urban literature” as a category of analysis, when we try to identify relationships between cities and the writing produced in and about them, we are asserting that this writing takes shape around confronting the city as a formal, social, and conceptual challenge. This article explores examples of texts ranging from Sister Carrie to I Am Legend and beyond that engage signature urban processes such as urbanization, development, and the dense overlap of orders.