Refers, on one level, to a specific series of federal acts and programs enabling radical replanning of the physical fabric of American cities. In a broader cultural sense, urban renewal stands for a political movement and cultural attitude towards the redevelopment of old, dense cities and their new, predominantly African American inhabitants after the Second World War. It was one of the more cataclysmic eruptions of a longstanding American fear and hatred of the big city. Urban renewal was the planning end of modern architecture that despised the nineteenth-century city—its crowds and historic buildings, its dirt and disease—and sought to replace it with a new, logical and planned system of urban living.
The “origin” of urban renewal is often tied to the passing of the 1949 Housing Act, which authorized the radical demolition of whole areas of central cities to make way for highways and new housing. In fact, fifty years previously, the City Beautiful movement, Progressive Era slum clearance and urban park reforms had created precedents. Federal and state powers were harnessed to demolish aging and crowded housing stock, creating a cleaner and more efficient place for business (which widely endorsed the remaking of downtowns), and making the city more amenable to the increasingly dominant automobile. Urban renewal was also put to a distinct social purpose: establishing de facto walls, in the form of highways and public buildings, between growing African American districts and white neighborhoods and downtowns. Despite its messianic overtones, urban renewal was also a code word for “Negro removal.”
Urban renewal’s destructive impact on cities quickly led to a counter-movement, most articulately presented in two seminal works. Jane Jacobs’ Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961) celebrated the very old, complex neighborhoods which urbanrenewal planners sought to eradicate. Against the aerial view of cities, which urban renewal presupposed, Jacobs looked at the view from the street and found something remarkable: the “blighted” (the favorite term of urban renewal) neighborhoods were in fact good places in which to live. Robert Caro, in his massive The Powerbroker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York (1974), portrayed urban renewal, as embodied in Robert Moses, the primary builder of every public work in postwar New York City and region, as anti-democratic, destructive of good communities and racist. The demolition of the massive Pruitt-Igoe housing complex in St. Louis, MO in 1973, only eighteen years after it was built along orthodox urbanrenewal models, has become a convenient date to mark the end of the movement.
