Conserving Americas Neighborhoods

Over the years I have conducted numerous neighborhood studies, alternately focusing on specific geographic areas, public programs, and types of citizen actions. Because most of these efforts were done on a project-by-project basiS, it did not readily occur to me that these separate investigations also represented an aggregate statement about American neighborhoods: the con tinuing and complex relationship between public policy and neighborhood life. A suggestion by Lloyd Rodwin, the senior editor for this series, prOvided the opportunity to reexamine the various manuscripts, and to select (and in some cases, conSiderably edit) those bearing most on this overall theme. Thus each of the chapters in this book is a commentary on the potential uses of public policy for preserving the most cherished aspect of contemporary neigh borhoods-the social life within them. In some cases the policy actions may have only an indirect effect on neighborhoods. For instance, a whole portion of the book is devoted to the role of research in understanding neighborhood conditions; public policy is relevant because research, these days, has itself become a public policy enterprise. In other cases the policy effects are direct and pervasive-the support of citizen organizations, the delivery of neigh borhood services, and the provision of timely and relevant information to residents. I do not know whether the relationship between public policy and neigh borhoods is the same or as intimate outside the United States.

Over the years I have conducted numerous neighborhood studies, alternately focusing on specific geographic areas, public programs, and types of citizen actions. Because most of these efforts were done on a project-by-project basiS, it did not readily occur to me that these separate investigations also represented an aggregate statement about American neighborhoods: the con tinuing and complex relationship between public policy and neighborhood life. A suggestion by Lloyd Rodwin, the senior editor for this series, prOvided the opportunity to reexamine the various manuscripts, and to select (and in some cases, conSiderably edit) those bearing most on this overall theme. Thus each of the chapters in this book is a commentary on the potential uses of public policy for preserving the most cherished aspect of contemporary neigh borhoods-the social life within them. In some cases the policy actions may have only an indirect effect on neighborhoods. For instance, a whole portion of the book is devoted to the role of research in understanding neighborhood conditions; public policy is relevant because research, these days, has itself become a public policy enterprise. In other cases the policy effects are direct and pervasive-the support of citizen organizations, the delivery of neigh borhood services, and the provision of timely and relevant information to residents. I do not know whether the relationship between public policy and neigh borhoods is the same or as intimate outside the United States.

Winner of the Bancroft Prize In twenty-first-century America, some cities are flourishing and others are struggling, but they all must contend with deteriorating infrastructure, economic inequality, and unaffordable housing. Cities have limited tools to address these problems, and many must rely on the private market to support the public good. It wasn’t always this way. For almost three decades after World War II, even as national policies promoted suburban sprawl, the federal government underwrote renewal efforts for cities that had suffered during the Great Depression and the war and were now bleeding residents into the suburbs. In Saving America’s Cities, the prizewinning historian Lizabeth Cohen follows the career of Edward J. Logue, whose shifting approach to the urban crisis tracked the changing balance between government-funded public programs and private interests that would culminate in the neoliberal rush to privatize efforts to solve entrenched social problems. A Yale-trained lawyer, rival of Robert Moses, and sometime critic of Jane Jacobs, Logue saw renewing cities as an extension of the liberal New Deal. He worked to revive a declining New Haven, became the architect of the “New Boston” of the 1960s, and, later, led New York State’s Urban Development Corporation, which built entire new towns, including Roosevelt Island in New York City. Logue’s era of urban renewal has a complicated legacy: Neighborhoods were demolished and residents dislocated, but there were also genuine successes and progressive goals. Saving America’s Cities is a dramatic story of heartbreak and destruction but also of human idealism and resourcefulness, opening up possibilities for our own time.

In recent years, the conservation of neighborhoods in American cities has risen to a high priority on the national agenda. The policy of demolishing whole neighborhoods in the inner city, whether to replace them with luxury apartments or massive public housing projects, has been largely abandoned, and the return of the middle class, seeking housing bargains in the neighborhoods they fled years ago, has hastened the process. Europe has much to teach the United States about urban conservation: it was a pressing public concern there when in this country conservation was mainly a matter of protecting wildlife and wilderness areas. The twenty-two essays in this volume—while discussing the conservation experiences of major European cities that are of considerable interest in their own right—present a preview of some of the struggles and solutions that are emerging on this side of the Atlantic as the conservation movement grows and extends into more and more urban districts. "Urban pioneering" and "gentrification" are becoming increasingly common in this country as the middle class seeks—in the face of energy shortages and slower growth, especially in housing—to reclaim the core cities that so many had once abandoned for suburbia. The first part of the book is concerned with the conflicts and struggles that have occurred over urban redevelopment in such cities as Venice, Brussels and Bath. The essays in the second part of the book describe a number of conservation efforts and strategies in cities such as Bologna, Stockholm and London which have attempted integration of social and physical conservation. The emphasis throughout is on conservation in specific neighborhoods—some historic districts, others humble working-class residential areas, a few both at once—rather than on conservation at the metropolitan scale. The separate essays range over such diverse topics as the impact of large-scale development projects on the existing city, the conservation of city centers and historic neighborhoods, the protection of monuments, the eviction of low-income migrants, examples of gentrification, amenity and conservation legislation, participatory action groups, social conservation strategies, and the education of children in urban conservation. The editor, in his extensive introduction, brings all these themes together setting them in the postwar history of European planning, and discussing issues such as the effects of tourism on old cities, the current crisis for modern architecture and planning, conflicting views and styles of conservation, the processes of pioneering and gentrification, and the relevance of this experience to the United States. The illustrated case studies center on the cities of London, Bolton, Bath, Elsinore, Stockholm, Utrecht, Amsterdam, Brussels, Grenoble, Bologna, Rome, Venice, Split, Athens, and Istanbul.

Carved out of century-old farmland near Chicago, the Prairie Crossing development is a novel experiment in urban public policy that preserves 69 percent of the land as open space. The for-profit project has set out to do nothing less than use access to nature as a means to challenge America's failed culture of suburban sprawl. The first comprehensive look at an American conservation community, Prairie Crossing goes beyond windmills and nest boxes to examine an effort to connect adults to the land while creating a healthy and humane setting for raising a new generation attuned to nature. John Scott Watson places Prairie Crossing within the wider context of suburban planning, revealing how two first-time developers implemented a visionary new land ethic that saved green space by building on it. The remarkable achievements include a high rate of resident civic participation, the reestablishment of a thriving prairie ecosystem, the reintroduction of endangered and threatened species, and improved water and air quality. Yet, as Watson shows, considerations like economic uncertainty, lack of racial and class diversity, and politics have challenged, and continue to challenge, Prairie Crossing and its residents.