Renewing Cities

Community developer and urban activist Robert D. Lupton looks to the Old Testament example of Nehemiah as a role model for community transformation and renewal.

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.

Based on eight years of hands-on experience and more than 300 interviews, Street Saints is both a book of motivational stories about unsung heroes and a sociological study of the "faith factor," documenting faith-based programs that are treating social maladies in America. This book takes readers on a tour of communities and institutions in America where faith-based initiatives are making a difference. It offers inspiration, role models, and guidelines for people who would like to give back to their own communities.

The cities of Lowell and New Bedford in Massachusetts, Jamestown in New York, and McKeesport in Pennsylvania have all undergone years of adversity and decline, their economic bases having been badly damaged by structural changes in the national economy, particularly in the manufacturing sector. In situations like these, can local development efforts make a difference? Ross Gittell answers in the affirmative. This interdisciplinary work focuses on comparative case studies of the four cities. The book reveals how public, private, and community-based local economic development initiatives affect local economic performance: what works and what does not work. City leaders and institutions can help reorganize and "reshuffle" local resources, with results that include increased investment, greater effort by local individuals and institutions, more cooperation among different development interests, and improvement in city economic positioning relative to the regional economy and local development cycles. Gittell emphasizes the possibility of shifting from a "zero-sum game" (attracting jobs from elsewhere) toward the goal of converting underutilized local resources to higher-value uses through alternative forms of economic and political organization. Originally published in 1992. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Both epic and intimate, this is the story of the fight to save the world’s architectural and cultural heritage as it is embodied in the extraordinary buildings and urban spaces of the great cities of Asia, the Americas, and Europe. Never before have the complexities and dramas of urban preservation been as keenly documented as inPreserving the World’s Great Cities. In researching this important work, Anthony Tung traveled throughout the world to visit remarkable buildings and districts in China, Italy, Greece, the U.S., Japan, and elsewhere. Everywhere he found both the devastating legacy of war, economics, and indifference and the accomplishments of people who have worked and sometimes risked their lives to preserve and renew the most meaningful urban expressions of the human spirit. From Singapore’s blind rush to become the most modern city of the East to Warsaw’s poignant and heroic effort to resurrect itself from the Nazis’ systematic campaign of physical and cultural obliteration, from New York and Rome to Kyoto and Cairo, we see the city as an expression of the best and worst within us. This is essential reading for fans of Jane Jacobs and Witold Rybczynski and everyone who is concerned about urban preservation.

The book offers a model for city development and renewal based on land value capture (called ‘value capture’). Firstly, a review is presented of cities around the world that are currently using value capture. From these city examples the author shows how any state, city or regional government can adopt value capture policies. Looking at recent events the author reviews the implications of the coronavirus pandemic (2020) for future planning (including value capture) of cities and regions (particularly noting healthy cities planning). The development of a value capture planning (VCP) model is then outlined. The basis of the model is reflected in its planning components, being: Housing (affordable, social and market housing); Public and Open Spaces (natural areas, open spaces and public spaces); and, Sustainable Transport (rail, bus, and active transport). The VCP model is devised to provide an economic and planning tool that can be utilised in addressing each of these planning components. This tool includes data entry tables and explanations of how these tables are applied. Four case study cities (within Australia) currently undergoing renewal are selected for the model to be applied to. The areas were chosen to represent contrasting urban settings and types of development and renewal, including: inner city, middle ring city; growth centre city; and, regional capital city. The current (2020) active renewal programs within these areas include (city in brackets): Central to Eveleigh Renewal Area (CERA) (City of Sydney); Sydenham to Bankstown Urban Renewal Corridor (SBURC) (Canterbury Bankstown City); Gosford City Centre Revitalisation (GCCR) area (Gosford City); and, Newcastle City Renewal Area (NCRA) (Newcastle City). The reader is walked through (graphically) the backgrounds of these case study cities, including geography, development trends and details of renewal plans. Conclusions on the VCP model application are outlined for each study area (within that chapter) and for the cumulative results across all study areas (final chapter). With these conclusions, the application of the model to any city or region anywhere in the world is outlined. Finally, on a practical level the reader would be interested in how value capture is administered through programs (including the roles of government, developers and the community). Summing up, the book offers the reader an understanding of current city planning and the tools (like value capture) that will be required for future planning.

Layered SPURA -- Walking the neighborhood -- In practice #1: crisis and teaching -- Three words: community, collaboration, and public -- In practice #2: alternative space -- The next fifty

In the decades following World War II, a movement of clergy and laity sought to restore liberal Protestantism to the center of American urban life. Chastened by their failure to avert war and the Holocaust, and troubled by missionaries’ complicity with colonial regimes, they redirected their energies back home. Renewal explores the rise and fall of this movement, which began as an effort to restore the church’s standing but wound up as nothing less than an openhearted crusade to remake our nation’s cities. These campaigns reached beyond church walls to build or lend a hand to scores of organizations fighting for welfare, social justice, and community empowerment among the increasingly nonwhite urban working class. Church leaders extended their efforts far beyond traditional evangelicalism, often dovetailing with many of the contemporaneous social currents coursing through the nation, including black freedom movements and the War on Poverty. Renewal illuminates the overlooked story of how religious institutions both shaped and were shaped by postwar urban America.