Two of the most celebrated black neighborhoods in the United States—Harlem in New York City and Bronzeville in Chicago—were once plagued by crime, drugs, and abject poverty. But now both have transformed into increasingly trendy and desirable neighborhoods with old buildings being rehabbed, new luxury condos being built, and banks opening branches in areas that were once redlined. In The New Urban Renewal, Derek S. Hyra offers an illuminating exploration of the complicated web of factors—local, national, and global—driving the remarkable revitalization of these two iconic black communities. How did these formerly notorious ghettos become dotted with expensive restaurants, health spas, and chic boutiques? And, given that urban renewal in the past often meant displacing African Americans, how have both neighborhoods remained black enclaves? Hyra combines his personal experiences as a resident of both communities with deft historical analysis to investigate who has won and who has lost in the new urban renewal. He discovers that today’s redevelopment affects African Americans differentially: the middle class benefits while lower-income residents are priced out. Federal policies affecting this process also come under scrutiny, and Hyra breaks new ground with his penetrating investigation into the ways that economic globalization interacts with local political forces to massively reshape metropolitan areas. As public housing is torn down and money floods back into cities across the United States, countless neighborhoods are being monumentally altered. The New Urban Renewal is a compelling study of the shifting dynamics of class and race at work in the contemporary urban landscape.

Why have so many central and inner cities in Europe, North America and Australia been so radically revamped in the last three decades, converting urban decay into new chic? Will the process continue in the twenty-first century or has it ended? What does this mean for the people who live there? Can they do anything about it? This book challenges conventional wisdom, which holds gentrification to be the simple outcome of new middle-class tastes and a demand for urban living. It reveals gentrification as part of a much larger shift in the political economy and culture of the late twentieth century. Documenting in gritty detail the conflicts that gentrification brings to the new urban 'frontiers', the author explores the interconnections of urban policy, patterns of investment, eviction, and homelessness. The failure of liberal urban policy and the end of the 1980s financial boom have made the end-of-the-century city a darker and more dangerous place. Public policy and the private market are conspiring against minorities, working people, the poor, and the homeless as never before. In the emerging revanchist city, gentrification has become part of this policy of revenge.

The Transatlantic Collapse of Urban Renewal examines how postwar thinkers from both sides of the Atlantic considered urban landscapes radically changed by the political and physical realities of sprawl, urban decay, and urban renewal. With a sweep that encompasses New York, London, Berlin, Philadelphia, and Toronto, among others, Christopher Klemek traces changing responses to the challenging issues that most affected the lives of the world’s cities. In the postwar decades, the principles of modernist planning came to be challenged—in the grassroots revolts against the building of freeways through urban neighborhoods, for instance, or by academic critiques of slum clearance policy agendas—and then began to collapse entirely. Over the 1960s, several alternative views of city life emerged among neighborhood activists, New Left social scientists, and neoconservative critics. Ultimately, while a pessimistic view of urban crisis may have won out in the United States and Great Britain, Klemek demonstrates that other countries more successfully harmonized urban renewal and its alternatives. Thismuch anticipated book provides one of the first truly international perspectives on issues central to historians and planners alike, making it essential reading for anyone engaged with either field.

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.

Urban redevelopment plays a major part in the growth strategy of the modern city, and the goal of this book is to examine the various aspects of redevelopment, its principles and practices in the North American context. Urban Redevelopment: A North American Reader seeks to shed light on the practice by looking at both its failures and successes, ideas that seemed to work in specific circumstances but not in others. The book aims to provide guidance to academics, practitioners and professionals on how, when, where and why, specific approaches worked and when they didn’t. While one has to deal with each case specifically, it is the interactions that are key. The contributors offer insight into how urban design affects behavior, how finance drives architectural choices, how social equity interacts with economic development, how demographical diversity drives cities’ growth, how politics determine land use decisions, how management deals with market choices, and how there are multiple influences and impacts of every decision. The book moves from the history of urban redevelopment, The City Beautiful movement, grand concourses and plazas, through urban renewal, superblocks and downtown pedestrian malls to today’s place-making: transit-oriented design, street quieting, new urbanism, publicly accessible, softer, waterfront design, funky small urban spaces and public-private megaprojects. This history also moves from grand masters such as Baron Haussmann and Robert Moses through community participation, to stakeholder involvement to creative local leadership. The increased importance of sustainability, high-energy performance, resilience and both pre- and post-catastrophe planning are also discussed in detail. Cities are acts of man, not nature; every street and building represents decisions made by people. Many of today’s best recognized urban theorists look for great forces; economic trends, technological shifts, political movements and try to analyze how they impact cities. One does not have to be a subscriber to the "great man" theory of history to see that in urban redevelopment, successful project champions use or sometimes overcome overall trends, using the tools and resources available to rebuild their community. This book is about how these projects are brought together, each somewhat differently, by the people who make them happen.

"A brief, cogent analysis of gentrification in Chicago ... an incisive and useful narrative on the puzzle of urban development."-- Kirkus Reviews In the years after World War II, a movement began to bring the m

"Here is one of the great stories in American urban history told by a great historian. In 1949, Boston was 'a hopeless backwater' . . . by 1970, a 'New Boston' had been created . . . Thomas O'Connor, the dean of Boston historians, brings to this tale of transformation rich learning, intimate familiarity with his subject, and a lucid sometimes witty pen." -- Jack Beatty, Senior Editor, Atlantic Monthly