Mark H. Rose

Race, Culture, Politics, and Urban Renewal An Introduction

When historians refer to “urban renewal,” they are not describing one singular policy. After 1945, as Andrew Highsmith, Irene Holliman, and Guian McKee show, leaders of renewal efforts in Flint, Atlanta, and Philadelphia assumed that a combination of slum clearance, office towers, and expressways would bring white, middle-class people back to downtown. Surprisingly, African American leaders in Flint and Atlanta often cooperated in these plans. In Philadelphia, however, Mayor Frank Rizzo, known as a racist, used renewal funds to create jobs for African American and Puerto Rican women. Federal officials also financed suburbanization, thus channeling resources away from the nations inner cities and leaving behind a wake of dilapidated infrastructure and racialized poverty. White Americans attributed renewal and suburbanization to the work of markets, overlooking the decisive hand of politicians and public policy. The skewed effects of these renewal and suburbanization programs denote a time “when affirmative action was white.”

STREET SMARTS: THE POLITICS OF TRANSPORTATION STATISTICS IN THE AMERICAN CITY, 1900-1990

Most historians would agree in affirming the importance of transportation in facilitating urban decentralization. However, less is known about the important role of transportation experts in constructing and managing each citys transportation network. This paper explores the role of engineering experts in guiding development of 3 forms of urban transportation facilities and networks: streetcars, highways, and airports. The evolution of the statistical approach to transport decisionmaking, the types of biases that those statistics concealed, and the varying degrees of success achieved by engineers as proponents of a statistical approach are discussed.

The Post-Interstate Era Planning, Politics, and Policy since the 1970s

This essay highlights key themes of the five essays that comprise this special issue of the Journal of Planning History on the post-Interstate Era. It outlines in broad strokes the role of highway engineers and politicians in planning and financing the Interstate Highway System. The Interstates had a positive impact on economic growth and automobility, yet citizens groups in many cities challenged route decisions that destroyed neighborhoods and damaged sensitive environments. By the early 1970s, when the Interstate System was mostly completed, Congress opened up the Highway Trust Fund for mass transit alternatives. However, our authors emphasize the persistence of conflict over transportation planning and policy. Construction of late-developing Interstate segments in cities such as St. Paul, Minnesota and Huntsville, Alabama revived the freeway revolt, but unsuccessfully. Highway planners and policy experts developed controversial new strategies for moving traffic, as in Boston’s “Big Dig,” or for creative transportation financing, as with the Chicago Skyway and the Pennsylvania Turnpike. By the end of the twentieth century, planners and politicians in some cities sought to reverse poor route decisions of an earlier era by tearing down elevated freeway segments most judged ugly, onerous, and unnecessary. In the twenty-first century, the engineers, planners, and politicians who control the Interstate Highway System face new challenges as the aging highway infrastructure requires rebuilding and retrofitting in an era of economic decline and political cost cutting.

Introduction: Technology, Politics, and the Structuring of the City

The writing of history, somewhat like the realm of fashion, often seems to cycle back and forth between different areas of focus. These cycles are clearly reflected in the manner in which historians have shaped and reshaped their approach to the study of technology and the city during the past quarter century as is seen in four special issues on this subject. In May 1979, when Joel Tarr edited the first special issue focusing on technology and the city, he used the introduction to talk about the neglect of technology in the study of urban history and the “impact of technology on society and the environment.” Although the previous decade and a half had seen considerable attention paid to urban politics, in that first issue, politics, politicians, and especially public policy were largely absent. Thus, the approach taken in that issue, however driven to correct the neglect of technology in urban history, smacked of a type of technological determinism. In November 1987, with publication of the second special issue, Tarr and coeditor Mark Rose described a newfound “vitality” in the area of technology and the city as reflected in the writings of historians such as Martin Melosi, Clay McShane, Christine M. Rosen, and Harold L. Platt. In that special issue, only a little more than a decade after the formal coming together of practitioners in the field of urban and technological history, Rose and Tarr found that the field had “matured to the point” that essays in that special issue “primarily fill gaps.” Social and cultural, as well as technological factors, now marked several of the essays as they explored the development of lighting, telegraphy, and elite suburbs between about 1880 and 1920. Politics, however, continued to be relatively neglected, as only one article, that by Paul Barrett on airport planning, included politics and politicians as a major part of the analysis. With publication in March 1999 of the third special issue, however, more than half the authors included politics and political choice among the factors

Revisiting the Urban Interstates Politics, Policy, and Culture since World War II

Authors of the five essays published in this special section of the Journal of Urban History highlight the Interstate’s harsh and mostly unyielding consequences for urban residents, for their neighborhoods, and for their livelihoods. Politics and policy have shaped the Interstate Highway System from its beginning in 1939 up to the present day.

Introduction Politics and the American City, 1940–1990

Authors of articles in this issue identify two themes in American urban history. First, between 1950 and 1980, politicians including St. Louis mayors as well as New York Governor Nelson A. Rockefeller and Robert A. Weaver (Secretary of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development), fostered an upward shift in the locus of authority for directing the urban-political economy. By the 1980s, however, small-city mayors around San Francisco as well as President Richard M. Nixon joined with policy activists including Jane Jacobs and Irving Kristol to affect a downward shift of authority. Unlikely allies, Jacobs, Kristol, and Nixon sought to return power to the hands of local leaders. Second, authors show that political elites shaped the conceptual, legal, and institutional frameworks within which they worked to foster economic growth, reduce crime, structure the economic and social geography of cities and regions, and deal with the challenges of race and class at a moment of social upheaval.Authors of articles in this issue identify two themes in American urban history. First, between 1950 and 1980, politicians including St. Louis mayors as well as New York Governor Nelson A. Rockefel...

Alfred DuPont Chandler, Jr., 1918–2007: An Introduction

Alfred DuPont Chandler, Jr. was born in 1918. On May 9, 2007, Professor Chandler died at Youville Hospital in Cambridge, Massachusetts. In the course of a remarkably productive career, Chandler’s ideas about corporate growth and the central role of managers rather than markets in fostering that growth helped shape the scholarship of generations of sociologists, political scientists, and business historians. In 1952, Harvard University awarded the PhD to Chandler. In 1956, he published Henry Varnum Poor, and in 1962, he published Strategy and Structure, one among several of his widely recognized and regularly cited books. In 2005, at age 87, Chandler published, Shaping the Industrial Century, his final book. In between those volumes, Chandler’s major books included The Visible Hand (1977), which in 1978 earned the Bancroft and Pulitzer Prizes, and Scale and Scope, published in 1990. Business executives around the world read Chandler, unlike most books by historians.

The evolution of American urban technology

This paper provides a general outline for understanding the origins and development of technological systems in their urban settings during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The paper is divided into three parts: 1790-1880; 1880-1920; and 1920 to the present. During the period 1790-1880, the emphasis is on the walking or pedestrian city; for the four decades between 1880 and 1920, the focus is on the networked or wired, piped, and tracked city; and for the period since 1920, it looks at the technologies of the automobile-oriented decentralized metropolis. The first period can be viewed as a period of foundations; the second as one of construction of the core infrastructure throughout an extended metropolitan area with a concomitant decline of the central city.

The Political Economy of American Transportation

David B. Sicilia suggested development of this special issue focused on the political economy of transportation. Thanks to James Cohen, Colin Divall, Gijs mom, and Richard Vahrenkamp for valuable bibliographic suggestions. For thoughtful comments on drafts of this Introduction, I am pleased to acknowledge Mansel Blackford, Albert J. Churella, Michael R. Fein, Shane Hamilton, Richard R. John, K. Austin Kerr, Pamela W. Laird, Marc Levinson, Marsha Lynn Shapiro Rose, and Philip Scranton.

The Sanitary City: Urban Infrastructure in America from Colonial Times to the Present. By Martin V. Melosi. Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999. xii + 578 pp. Illustrations, notes, bibliographic essay, index.

environmental history students appreciated this organizational strategy, noting that it helped keep the book’s arguments fresh in their minds. The book works well as a teaching tool: it reveals complex causation while maintaining clarity and readability. As environmental history, the book is extremely satisfying. As Native American history, however, it gives rise to a couple of concerns. First, Isenberg refers to the bison-hunting peoples of the Plains as “nomads.” In the introduction, he acknowledges that “nomad” carries negative connotations, but he tries to rehabilitate the term by correcting the misperception that nomadic equals primitive (9). Nevertheless, he might have been wiser to choose a more neutral (even if more cumbersome) phrase. Second, Isenberg generalizes about cultural and economic patterns on the Plains, oattening the experiences of diverse bison-hunting communities. In Chapter 2, the reader is left with the impression that Indians responded in unitary fashion to the opportunities provided by horses, the fur trade, and disease. However, Isenberg appreciates the dynamism of culture, economy, and environment on the Plains. His treatment of Indian experiences, though overgeneralized, is still subtle and complex. Is there a moral to the bison story? According to Isenberg, pursuit of wealth through bison was an exercise in futility (122, 163). Both Indians and Euroamericans ignored the unsustainability of bison hunting in an unpredictable environment. In the end, they undercut their own livelihoods rather than increasing their prosperity.