Journal of Urban History

This paper provides a historical analysis of an urban services district through its examination of the Melbourne wool trade precinct in the 1920s. It is a study of both a local and global community whose social and spatial interaction facilitated large-scale trade of a complex commodity that has rarely been examined. Geographic mapping of the local and global connections of the precinct has been combined with archival evidence. It reveals the “buzz” of the Melbourne precinct, created by local social and professional connections among wool brokers and buyers. “Pipelines” to wool growing and textile regions were developed through overseas branches of firms, with global knowledge exchanged through correspondence, telegraph, and migration. These features shaped the progress of the trade, facilitating improvements in its infrastructure and in the ability of Melbourne’s wool brokers and buyers to fulfill their role as intermediaries in the global supply chain for this complex commodity.

Few postwar cities grew as quickly as Phoenix, as suburban, pro-growth policies created a sprawling metropolitan area, but also problems like acute traffic congestion, which policymakers attempted to solve with an urban freeway. The Papago Freeway revolt highlights that transportation policy, like other aspects of suburbanization, had deep roots in intentional and incidental race and class discrimination at all levels of government and private decisions. Moreover, the debate reveals the changing relationship between the federal government and cities under President Nixon and the incendiary political, social, and cultural forces fracturing metropolitan America. The revolt led to design changes that mitigated some of the negative impacts of the freeway, but the Papago still resulted in inequitable outcomes for minorities and low-income populations in the inner city. Most important, it shows that ignoring historical inequities in policy decisions runs the risk of continuing or, worse, exacerbating them.

This article details the origin and passage of the Boggs Act of 1951, as well as a similar drug law passed at the state level in Louisiana. Both laws featured strict mandatory minimum sentences for drug crimes, which led to a demographic transformation of New Orleans’ heroin markets in the early 1950s: As New Orleans’ Italian-American Mafiosi retreated from the lower echelons of the heroin economy, entrepreneurial African Americans took their place. In turn, many black leaders came to support both stricter drug laws and increased police focus on crime in black neighborhoods. This demand was rooted in African Americans’ frustration with the New Orleans Police Department and its Jim Crow practice of ignoring intra-racial black crime. It also became important for black leaders to distance themselves from the “criminal element”—an otherwise potent political symbol for white segregationists.

This article observes how the concept of power and national identity produced space in 1960’s Islamabad, the new capital city of Pakistan. In World War II’s aftermath, many capital cities emerged which were seen as their nation’s representation by negating or reinforcing ties with sovereign or imperial power. Pakistan is one such nation that gained independence from the British in 1947. Islamabad designed by Constantinos A. Doxiadis in 1959 aimed to construct its identity in a postcolonial paradigm. This article studies the urban layout and pattern of the city and emphasizes the relation of power and identity on its social constructs and making.

In the late 1870s, the American District Telegraph (ADT) in San Francisco introduced an intra-urban telegraph network, marketed to businesses and upper-class homes. Subscribers, needing no knowledge of telegraphy, used dial-to-order preset services, such as messengers, police, and coal delivery. One of the service’s most noted innovations was the ability to summon hired carriages through the call box. To provide hack service through its network, the ADT bought up many of the city’s carriages and consolidated them into the United Carriage Company (UCC), one of the first dispatch-oriented cab fleets anywhere. By controlling cab dispatch, the UCC also promised to reform the unruly occupation of hackdrivers. Although the telegraph box was soon supplanted by the telephone, it had put in motion a reorganization of the city’s cab industry, which quickly became intricated with the politics of class and control in public space.

In the 1950s, Toronto ratepayer associations inserted themselves into debates about property relations and the appropriate use of the City’s new redevelopment authority as then being tested by elected officials and developers. Two case studies are presented: a designated redevelopment area where the City failed to close a deal with development firms, and a request, ultimately denied, by a developer group to to have the City establish another area to acquire the properties they had failed to. In both cases, ratepayer associations did not question City expropriation of private property if done for a sufficiently public purpose but argued vehemently against City expropriation of land from one set of private owners to benefit another. Although it is not possible to fully know the effect ratepayer associations had on these failed attempts of using redevelopment authority, they should be seen as urban social movements organized to protect local property rights from developers and a new interventionist local state.

This article traces the history of Edina, Minnesota, a community just outside of Minneapolis, following its transformation from an interracial farming village in the late nineteenth century to a racially exclusive and prejudice-ridden “streetcar” suburb by the 1930s. It also looks at the ordeal experienced by the first black family to move to the area, in 1960, demonstrating the challenges faced by the “open housing” movement in what is known as a racially “progressive” state. As a history of demographic change, the article suggests the need for a slightly revised Great Migration narrative, particularly when African Americans moved north and when and why some of the first migrants moved to cities. Likewise, it contributes to a literature showing how northern suburban communities became and remained all white for nearly a century and, more generally, how pervasive and intransigent racism was even among well-mannered, middle-class white Americans in the Deep North.

This study interprets the transformation of a European clock tower that was built in British Hong Kong. By examining its purpose and life in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, I focus on the voices that spoke for the clock tower in times of crisis and change. Through a combination of government documents, newspaper articles, editorial letters, historical narratives, travel guides, and photographs, this study aims to show the transitions of the clock tower in line with the development of local identity in Hong Kong during the colonial era. It highlights the shift in colonial society from a racially segregated city to a cosmopolitan city shared, to a certain extent, by urban elites, foreign settlers, and local Chinese residents.

When federal policymakers created Model Cities in 1966, they envisioned it as an innovative approach to urban renewal. Part of the War on Poverty, Model Cities combined slum redevelopment, an expansion of social services, and citizen participation. Understanding community action as a critique of and attempt to reorient decades of failed urban policy, this article spotlights efforts by residents to seize and maintain control of urban improvement programs. Residents claimed expertise in urban planning by virtue of their experience living in impoverished neighborhoods. Their vision for their community suggested an alternate path for city planning that supported poor residents’ influence to achieve a more democratic society. This article traces how community leaders in St. Louis, Missouri, briefly achieved resident-controlled urban planning within Model Cities. Although residents’ ideas were never implemented as they hoped, these plans expose the opportunities and constraints of neighborhood activism in the War on Poverty.

Reflecting a commitment to public service and an interest in abiding investments, life insurance companies after the Second World War were responsible for the construction of an unprecedented number of housing developments across the United States. They were able to help alleviate housing shortages, elevate the standards of postwar housing, and offer new forms of modern living. This article examines the practices of the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company and its developing of Parklabrea (now Park La Brea) in Los Angeles during the 1940s. As the largest housing community west of the Mississippi River, Parklabrea stands prominently in the center of the city, though it is elided in histories of California housing. Against the backdrop of postwar public housing, which failed in part due to a disregard for urban context, Parklabrea’s history reveals how life insurance companies were increasingly attuned to the social, physical, and economic contexts of postwar cities.