Domenic Vitiello

From Farm to Nuisance Animal Agriculture and the Rise of Planning Regulation

Municipal ordinances to remove farm animals from city limits played a central part in defining city planning’s role in urban ecosystems, economies, and public health. This article examines the regulation of animal agriculture since the eighteenth century in four cities: Baltimore, Boston, Philadelphia, and New York. Across the nineteenth century, municipal ordinances to remove farm animals from city limits set the tone for the planning profession, aligning it with the field of public health in creating a hygienic city. In the efforts to untangle animal agriculture from waste management, public space, and urban food supply, urban authorities employed some of the first land-use regulations in the United States, shaping new planning powers. Ordinances banning slaughterhouses, piggeries, and dairies culminated with zoning as planning became a profession. These regulations ultimately allowed planners to transform cities and their food environments by dismantling a system in which animals and their caretakers among the urban poor had played integral parts in food production, processing, and municipal waste management. Unpacking the objectives, debates, and impacts of these early regulations reveals enduring tensions and challenges as planners today seek to reweave animal agriculture into cities.

Re-Forming Schools and Cities: Placing Education on the Landscape of Planning History

Schools are among the most ubiquitous institutions shaping city and regional ecology, policy, and everyday experience. In recent decades, planning historians have come to define planning ever more broadly, focusing on a great diversity of urban activities. But the design, development, and administration of public and private schools, from the preschool to university level, have yet to be incorporated into our disciplines debates and discussions to a significant degree. This introductory article frames the articles that follow within the broader history of American education and posits a variety of opportunities and questions to explore as we incorporate the history of schools into planning history.

Who owns Chinatown: Neighbourhood preservation and change in Boston and Philadelphia:

The survival of Chinatowns and other ethnic enclaves in cities is largely determined by who owns property. Ethnic enclaves such as Chinatowns have traditionally played important economic, social and cultural functions as places for recent immigrants to live and work, though Chinatowns have long faced redevelopment pressures. In North America, as Chinese immigrants and their descendants settle in the suburbs, and as historic Chinatowns’ locations close to revitalising downtowns attract increasing investment, the future of these historic enclaves is shaped by various, often intense and divergent, forces. This article describes changes in the patterns of property ownership in Boston and Philadelphia’s downtown Chinatowns over the last decade (2003–2013) and relates them to changes and continuities in these neighbourhoods’ population, commercial activities and building stock. The trends we observe simultaneously reinforce and complicate debates about gentrification and longstanding efforts to preserve these Chinatowns as ethnic Chinese residential, commercial, and cultural centres.

THE POLITICS OF IMMIGRATION AND SUBURBAN REVITALIZATION: DIVERGENT RESPONSES IN ADJACENT PENNSYLVANIA TOWNS

ABSTRACT: Amidst debates over the impacts of immigration, cities and towns across the United States have alternately opposed or welcomed unauthorized immigrants. Although their “illegal immigration relief acts” and “sanctuary laws” are typically justified in terms of law and order, they also grow from divergent hopes, concerns, and assumptions about newcomers’ integration and effects on local revitalization. These issues have gained importance beyond central cities with the suburbanization of immigration and the economic decline of older suburbs in recent decades. This article explores the case of two adjacent, formerly industrial towns in suburban Philadelphia, examining local leaders’ respective rationale for seeking to incorporate unauthorized immigrants in Norristown and to restrict their settlement and employment in neighboring Bridgeport. Despite their obvious similarities, these towns’ distinct experiences of race, migration, and revitalization explain much of their divergent responses.

The planned destruction of Chinatowns in the United States and Canada since c.1900

ABSTRACT Unlike virtually all other old immigrant enclaves in North American cities, the historic downtown Chinatowns of big cities in the United States and Canada largely survive, though not for lack of plans to destroy them. City Beautiful era plans, development projects, and other public and private interventions displaced or sought to eradicate Chinatowns, from Los Angeles to Victoria to Chicago, New York, and Philadelphia. Urban renewal era projects destroyed large portions of many Chinatowns, and some entirely. This article traces these broad patterns and trends of planned and realized destruction and preservation across 15 of the major cities in twentieth-century Canada and the United States.

Institutional Ecosystems of Housing Support in Chinese, Southeast Asian, and African Philadelphia

How has the diversity of post-1965 immigration to the United States influenced newcomers’ housing experiences and civil society’s housing support systems? Planning scholars have shown immigration’s role in revitalizing cities and housing markets, but we have done less to parse the variety of housing problems that immigrants experience and the ways civil society addresses them. This article examines the recent history of civil society organizations’ housing support strategies in Chinese, Southeast Asian, and African communities in Philadelphia. We find that the diversity within and between groups has shaped largely distinct “institutional ecosystems” and approaches to housing support.

Past as guide to sustainable futures: 16th IPHS conference report

The 16th biennial conference of the International Planning History Society took place in St. Augustine, Florida, USA, from 20 to 23 July 2014. Chris Silver, FAICP, from the University of Florida and Leslee F. Keys from Flagler College co-chaired the conference. The programme included 45 paper and roundtable sessions, with 167 papers, plus 3 plenary sessions.

De/Industrialization and Sub/Urbanization: New Perspectives on Industrial Place-Making in North America:

“Whenever the subject of pre-1950 industrial suburbs . . comes up in discussion,” writes Robert Lewis in his introduction to Manufacturing Suburbs, “the almost inevitable response from urban history scholars is, ‘everyone knows about those.’” The growth and decline of industrial cities, suburbs, and towns have been studied extensively. What more is there to learn? Moreover, for historians interested in informing planning and public policy in a “postindustrial” era, what should motivate us to reexamine these old topics? Part of the answer to this last question lies in the problem that “postindustrial” is something of a misnomer. North America’s metropolitan geography remains a product of industrial economies, technologies, and social institutions, even if we no longer see many working factories among us. The