Authored by prominent scholars, the twelve essays in this volume use the historical perspective to explore American urban housing policy as it unfolded from the late nineteenth through the twentieth centuries. Focusing on the enduring quest of policy makers to restore urban community, the essays examine such topics as the war against the slums, planned suburbs for workers, the rise of government-aided and built housing during the Great Depression, the impact of post–World War II renewal policies, and the retreat from public housing in the Nixon, Carter, and Reagan years.
In The Environment and the People in American Cities, Dorceta E. Taylor provides an in-depth examination of the development of urban environments, and urban environmentalism, in the United States. Taylor focuses on the evolution of the city, the emergence of elite reformers, the framing of environmental problems, and the perceptions of and responses to breakdowns in social order, from the seventeenth century through the twentieth. She demonstrates how social inequalities repeatedly informed the adjudication of questions related to health, safety, and land access and use. While many accounts of environmental history begin and end with wildlife and wilderness, Taylor shows that the city offers important clues to understanding the evolution of American environmental activism. Taylor traces the progression of several major thrusts in urban environmental activism, including the alleviation of poverty; sanitary reform and public health; safe, affordable, and adequate housing; parks, playgrounds, and open space; occupational health and safety; consumer protection (food and product safety); and land use and urban planning. At the same time, she presents a historical analysis of the ways race, class, and gender shaped experiences and perceptions of the environment as well as environmental activism and the construction of environmental discourses. Throughout her analysis, Taylor illuminates connections between the social and environmental conflicts of the past and those of the present. She describes the displacement of people of color for the production of natural open space for the white and wealthy, the close proximity between garbage and communities of color in early America, the cozy relationship between middle-class environmentalists and the business community, and the continuous resistance against environmental inequalities on the part of ordinary residents from marginal communities.
An "analysis of deeper meaning behind the string of deaths of unarmed citizens like Michael Brown, Eric Garner, and Freddie Gray, providing ... [commentary] on the intersection of race and class in America today"--
"Suburban Steel chronicles the rise and fall of the Lustron Corporation, once the largest and most completely industrialized housing company in U.S. history. Beginning in 1947, Lustron manufactured porcelain-enameled steel houses in a one-million-square-foot plant in Columbus, Ohio. With forty million dollars in federal funds and support from the highest levels of the Truman administration, the company planned to produce one hundred houses per day, each neatly arranged on specially designed tractor-trailers for delivery throughout the country. Lustron's unprecedented size and scope of operations attracted intense scrutiny. The efficiencies of uninterrupted production, integrated manufacturing, and economies of scale promised to lead the American housing industry away from its decentralized, undercapitalized, and inefficient past toward a level of rationalization and organization found in other sectors of the industrial economy." "The company's failure marked a watershed in the history of the American housing industry. Although people did not quit talking about industrialized housing, enthusiasm for its role in the transformation of the housing industry at large markedly waned. Suburban Steel considers Lustron's magnificent failure in the context of historical approaches to the nation's perpetual shortage of affordable housing, arguing that had Lustron's path not been interrupted, affordable and desirable housing for America's masses would be far more prevalent today."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved
In an effort to explain why housing remains among the United States’ most enduring social problems, Housing America explores five of the U.S.’s most fundamental, recurrent issues in housing its population: affordability of housing, homelessness, segregation and discrimination in the housing market, homeownership and home financing, and planning. It describes these issues in detail, why they should be considered problems, the history and fundamental social debates surrounding them, and the past, current, and possible policy solutions to address them. While this book focuses on the major problems we face as a society in housing our population, it is also about the choices we make about what is valued in our society in our attempts to solve them. Housing America is appropriate for courses in urban studies, urban planning, and housing policy.
The first major comprehensive treatment of urban revitalization in 35 years. Examines the federal government's relationship with urban America from the Truman through the Clinton administrations. Provides a telling critique of how, in the long run, government turned a blind eye to the fate of cities.
The concept of community development is often misunderstood, holding different meanings across different academic disciplines. Moreover, the concept of community development has been historically abstracted, not only in the way the concept has been conceptualized in academic studies, but also by the way in which practitioners use the term in the vernacular. Departing from traditional definitions of community development, this volume applies the New Public Service (NPS) perspective of Public Administration to community development to illustrate how public administrators and public managers can engage in community development planning and implementation that results in more equitable and sustainable long-term outcomes. This book will be of interest to practitioners and researchers in public administration/management, public administration theory, community development, economic development, urban sociology, urban politics, and urban planning.
This historical study looks at how reformers have used urban planning and architecture to improve the health of urban residents of the United States. It begins in the nineteenth century, when problems in rapidly urbanizing cities threatened to overwhelm cities, and then traces the development and impact of reform movements up through the First World War, including discussions of model tenements, the 'city beautiful' movement, tenement laws, and zoning and building codes. Midcentury design movements, such as new efforts to plan suburbs and Modernism, along with outlines of the impacts of public housing, highway building, and urban renewal, are the focus of the middle chapters of the book. The final third examines the revival of cities and the reconnection of public health with urban planning that occurred as the twentieth century ended.
This major work provides the first comprehensive history of one of modernism's most defining and controversial architectural legacies: the 20th-century drive to provide 'homes for the people'. Vast programmes of mass housing – high-rise, low-rise, state-funded, and built in the modernist style – became a truly global phenomenon, leaving a legacy which has suffered waves of disillusionment in the West but which is now seeing a dramatic, 21st-century renaissance in the booming, crowded cities of East Asia. Providing a global approach to the history of Modernist mass-housing production, this authoritative study combines architectural history with the broader social, political, cultural aspects of mass housing – particularly the 'mass' politics of power and state-building throughout the 20th century. Exploring the relationship between built form, ideology, and political intervention, it shows how mass housing not only reflected the transnational ideals of the Modernist project, but also became a central legitimizing pillar of nation-states worldwide. In a compelling narrative which likens the spread of mass housing to a 'Hundred Years War' of successive campaigns and retreats, it traces the history around the globe from Europe via the USA, Soviet Union and a network of international outposts, to its ultimate, optimistic resurgence in China and the East – where it asks: Are we facing a new dawn for mass housing, or another 'great housing failure' in the making?
A history of Black urban placemaking and politics in Philadelphia from the Great Migration to the era of Black Power In this book, author J.T. Roane shows how working-class Black communities cultivated two interdependent modes of insurgent assembly—dark agoras—in twentieth century Philadelphia. He investigates the ways they transposed rural imaginaries about and practices of place as part of their spatial resistances and efforts to contour industrial neighborhoods. In acts that ranged from the mundane acts of refashioning intimate spaces to expressly confrontational and liberatory efforts to transform the city’s social and ecological arrangement, these communities challenged the imposition of Progressive and post-Progressive visions for urban order seeking to enclose or displace them. Under the rubric of dark agoras Roane brings together two formulations of collectivity and belonging associated with working-class Black life. While on their surface diametrically opposed, the city’s underground—its illicit markets, taverns, pool halls, unlicensed bars, as well as spaces housing illicit sex and informal sites like corners associated with the economically and socially disreputable--constituted a spatial and experiential continuum with the city’s set apart—its house meetings, storefronts, temples, and masjid, as well as the extensive spiritually appropriated architectures of the interwar mass movements that included rural land experiments as well as urban housing, hotels, and recreational facilities. Together these sites incubated Black queer urbanism, or dissident visions for urban life challenging dominant urban reform efforts and their modes of producing race, gender, and ultimately the city itself. Roane shows how Black communities built a significant if underappreciated terrain of geographic struggle shaping Philadelphia between the Great Migration and Black Power. This fascinating book will help readers appreciate the importance of Black spatial imaginaries and worldmaking in shaping matters of urban place and politics.
