The Official Blog of the Urban History Association
By Avigail Oren On November 16, Pittsburgh NPR affiliate WESA dropped a five-part podcast called Land and Power, about a fight for housing in the city’s historically Black neighborhood of East Liberty. In 2015, residents of the Penn Plaza apartment buildings found out they’d have to leave their homes to make way for new development. […]
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Hertz, Daniel Kay. The Battle of Lincoln Park: Urban Renewal and Gentrification in Chicago. Cleveland: Belt Publishing, 2018. Reviewed by David J. Goodwin As COVID-19 swept across the United States, every news cycle seemed to carry stories of affluent residents fleeing big cities for rural hamlets. As many white-collar workers settled into working remotely, suburban […]
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East Lake Meadows: A Public Housing Story, directed by Sarah Burns and David McMahon (Washington, DC: Florentine Films and WETA, 2002). Review by Courtney Rawlings Following their Peabody Award-winning documentary The Central Park Five (2012), co-directors Sarah Burns and David McMahon’s newest film examines another depressing tale of race in America. East Lake Meadows: A Public Housing Story (2020), focuses […]
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By Fallon Samuels Aidoo Countless community economic development initiatives took place in New Orleans within a decade of Hurricane Katrina making landfall in August of 2005. Many foundation and charity funded organizations restored storm-damaged storefronts in high-income neighborhoods on high ground, where tourists, investors, and even city planners expected streetcars, shotguns, and short-term rentals to […]
Read MoreLizabeth Cohen, Saving America’s Cities: Ed Logue and the Struggle to Renew Urban America in the Suburban Age (New York: Farrar, Straus, & Giroux, 2019) Reviewed by Bob Carey Lizabeth Cohen has given us a big, tasty book about urban renewal and the career—successes and failures—of urban planner Ed Logue. Logue had, for many, the […]
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By Sara Patenaude Decade of Fire. Directed by Vivian Vázquez Irizarry and Gretchen Hildebran. Red Nut Films, 2018. Decade of Fire tells the story of the South Bronx in the 1970s, when 80% of the housing stock in the neighborhood was ravaged by fires and 250,000 residents lost their homes. Such wide-spread devastation could easily […]
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Gabrielle Bendiner-Viani, Contested City: Art and Public History as Mediation at New York’s Seward Park Urban Renewal Area (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2018). Reviewed by Barry Goldberg In 1965, the New York City Board of Estimate, an eight-member body that once had authority over the city’s budget and land-use matters, but has since […]
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In our fifth installment of the 2019 UHA/The Metropole Grad Student Blog contest, University of Mississippi PhD candidate Monica N. Campbell explores the role of white women in pushing through urban renewal and slum clearance, advancing the “life cycle” of their cities. Through her essay, Campbell suggests that historical tropes about urban renewal, often seen as […]
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Mark Wild. 2019. Renewal: Liberal Protestants and the American City After World War II. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 336 pp. $50. ISBN: 978-0226605234. Hardcover. In some ways, the idea for this book began during my childhood in 1970s-era San Francisco. The city in those years was much more dynamic, much more interesting, and […]
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Undoubtedly, one of the break out digital humanities projects of the last decade is Mapping Inequality: Redlining in America, the impressively ambitious and ultimately very successful work resulting from the collaboration of scholars at Virginia Tech, Johns Hopkins, and the University of Maryland including LaDale Winling, Nathan Connolly, Richard Marciano, Brent Cebul and directed by Robert K. […]
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