Toward a New Historiography of Urban Renewal
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, USA
Since the mid-1970s, narratives of urban renewal (large-scale, state-sponsored clearance) in American cities have been mostly critical. One conservative perspective (e.g. Anderson 1964, Frieden and Sagalyn 1989) argues that state expenditures meshed badly with market needs. A second perspective (e.g. Caro 1974) argues that renewal caused more decline than it resolved by causing secondary social instability and dislocation. A third perspective (e.g. Hartman 1974) sees urban renewal as a capital-driven "land grab" intended to restructure the city for monied classes.
This paper, based in a larger study of urban design "after decline" (Ryan 2011), examines urban renewal in Detroit's Jefferson-Chalmers neighborhood in the early 1970s to argue that the above three critiques provide an incomplete perspective. In a city experiencing rapid economic shocks, social transitions, physical deterioration, and rapidly diminishing property values, urban renewal provided the best way to acquire property at the scale needed by private developers for rebuilding. It prevented rather than exacerbated social decline by providing for an orderly transferral of properties to a stable owner (i.e. the state) rather than permitting the pell-mell abandonment typical of the early 1970s. Lastly, in a diminishing property market, urban renewal was less a land grab than a life preserver that displaced no one and set the stage for the mixed-income housing that would stabilize the neighborhood in the 1980s and 1990s.
At the same time, Detroit's neighborhood urban renewal of the 1970s had several shortcomings: it failed to establish an urban design vision, it acted inconsistently and incompletely, and it was uncoodinated with a larger vision for the rest of the city. The urban renewal of the early 1970s did not save Detroit, but it permits us to see the potential benefits of this policy, and of large-scale state action in general, in an improved light.