Rebuilding American Cities After The War

In 1945 Germany's cities lay in ruins, destroyed by Allied bombers `hat left major architectural monuments badly damaged and much of the housing stock reduced to rubble. At the war's end, observers thought that it would take forty years to rebuild, but by the late 1950s West Germany's cities had risen anew. The housing crisis had been overcome and virtually all important monuments reconstructed, and the cities had reclaimed their characteristic identities. Everywhere there was a mixture of old and new: historic churches and town halls stood alongside new housing and department stores; ancient street layouts were crossed or encircled by wide arteries; old city centers were balanced by garden suburbs laid out according to modern planning principles. In this book, Diefendorf examines the questions raised by this remarkable feat of urban reconstruction. He explains who was primarily responsible, what accounted for the speed of rebuilding, and how priorities were set and decisions acted upon. He argues that in such crucial areas as architectural style, urban planning, historic preservation, and housing policy, the Germans drew upon personnel, ideas, institutions, and practical experiences from the Nazi and pre-Nazi periods. Diefendorf shows how the rebuilding of West Germany's cities after 1945 can only be understood in terms of long-term continuities in urban development.

A growing cooperation between the public and private sectors indicates that the tasks of redevelopment are too large and complex for either sector to accomplish alone. Some people maintain that government can do few things right; others are equally distrustful of the private sector. As used here, the private sector is considered to be all that is not government. Each of the success stories illustrated is, in part, a ""road to recovery,"" although none appear to have been influenced by a purpose that broad.Paul R. Porter and David C. Sweet present stories of progress in self-reliance that concern neighborhood and downtown recoveries, school improvement, job generation, a regained fiscal solvency, novel financing techniques, helping tenants to become homeowners, and a successful venture in self-help and tenant management in crime-infested neighborhoods. The successes stem from the diverse community roles of Yale University, a medical center, the world's largest research organization, the Clorox Company, a gas company, an insurance company, a newspaper, neighborhood and downtown organizations, city governments and two religious organizations - the Mormon Church and the tiny Church of the Savior.These stories are located throughout the United States, including Akron, Baltimore, Brooklyn, Cincinnati, Cleveland, Columbus, Fort Wayne, Indianapolis, Milwaukee, New Haven, Oakland, Pittsburgh, St. Louis, St. Paul, Salt Lake City, Springfield, Mass., Tampa, and Washington, D.C. The editors have gathered the work of professionals known in the field of urban studies: James W. Rouse, Donald E. Lasater, Rolf Goetze, Dale F. Bertsch, Joel Lieske, Eugene H. Methvin, James E. Kunde, T. Michael Smith, Robert Mier, Carol Davidow, Jay Chatterjee, June Manning Thomas, Norman Krumholz, Larry C. Ledebur, and Robert C. Holland.

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.

This book explores the definition of what constitutes a city in the U.S. and how who lives and works in them has changed markedly since 1945. After World War II, the cityscape was altered to better accommodate the automobile and the city transformed from a place of production to a place of consumption. During the 1980s, city neighborhoods once occupied by migrants from the American South and immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe began to house newcomers from Asia, Africa, and Central and South America. The economic, environmental, and social issues now facing America cities, will require them to continue the process of remaking or reinventing themselves.

Discusses America's retreat from the cities, back to Thomas Jeferson's vision of an agrarian utopia, and the economic and social consequences at the beginning of a new millennium.

Three Cities after Hitler compares how three prewar German cities shared decades of postwar development under three competing post-Nazi regimes: Frankfurt in capitalist West Germany, Leipzig in communist East Germany, and Wrocław (formerly Breslau) in communist Poland. Each city was rebuilt according to two intertwined modern trends. First, certain local edifices were chosen to be resurrected as “sacred sites” to redeem the national story after Nazism. Second, these tokens of a reimagined past were staged against the hegemony of modernist architecture and planning, which wiped out much of whatever was left of the urban landscape that had survived the war. All three cities thus emerged with simplified architectural narratives, whose historically layered complexities only survived in fragments where this twofold “redemptive reconstruction” after Nazism had proven less vigorous, sometimes because local citizens took action to save and appropriate them. Transcending both the Iron Curtain and freshly homogenized nation-states, three cities under three rival regimes shared a surprisingly common history before, during, and after Hitler—in terms of both top-down planning policies and residents’ spontaneous efforts to make home out of their city as its shape shifted around them.

A new way forward for sustainable quality of life in cities of all sizes Strong Towns: A Bottom-Up Revolution to Build American Prosperity is a book of forward-thinking ideas that breaks with modern wisdom to present a new vision of urban development in the United States. Presenting the foundational ideas of the Strong Towns movement he co-founded, Charles Marohn explains why cities of all sizes continue to struggle to meet their basic needs, and reveals the new paradigm that can solve this longstanding problem. Inside, you’ll learn why inducing growth and development has been the conventional response to urban financial struggles—and why it just doesn’t work. New development and high-risk investing don’t generate enough wealth to support itself, and cities continue to struggle. Read this book to find out how cities large and small can focus on bottom-up investments to minimize risk and maximize their ability to strengthen the community financially and improve citizens’ quality of life. Develop in-depth knowledge of the underlying logic behind the “traditional” search for never-ending urban growth Learn practical solutions for ameliorating financial struggles through low-risk investment and a grassroots focus Gain insights and tools that can stop the vicious cycle of budget shortfalls and unexpected downturns Become a part of the Strong Towns revolution by shifting the focus away from top-down growth toward rebuilding American prosperity Strong Towns acknowledges that there is a problem with the American approach to growth and shows community leaders a new way forward. The Strong Towns response is a revolution in how we assemble the places we live.