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The rise & fall of new left urbanism.

Article Excerpt
The pillars of the "urban renewal order," shorthand for an interlocking set of social policies since the 1940s, were crumbling fast by the 1960s. Urban populations, especially in Western Europe, the United States, and Canada, suddenly no longer wanted the variety of once progressive-minded public programs it encompassed: highways through cities, demolitions aimed at clearing "blighted" or "gray" areas, redevelopment for public housing superblocks and other mega-projects. A slum in the eyes of a planner, it turned out, was often a resident's cherished homestead, and soon proponents of the City of Tomorrow ran up against increasing opposition. The fall of the urban renewal order was driven from below, to be sure; but the ideology of this grassroots uprising was not clearly drawn from the traditional left or right. Yet in its wake opened a fleeting conceptual space, where the fate of urban planning and policy - even urban life in general - could be debated and reconsidered, sometimes quite radically.

Striking experiments in citizen participation, or "advocacy planning," took root in Anglo-American urbanism in the 1960s and 1970s, often in the very neighborhoods that were threatened by "the federal bulldozer." In districts like London's Covent Garden, Toronto's St. Lawrence Neighborhood, and New York's West Village, citizens attempted to make city planning - and by extension urban life - more democratic and equitable, putting forward their own proposals to counter the sweeping urban renewal plans imposed by government or private developers. Each of the counterproposals, while not always successfully realized, experimented with alternative methods of meeting urban challenges - mobility, preservation, growth, afford-ability, and upgrading - and embodied the aspirations and ideals of residents who couldn't be easily ignored. Such residents rejected the authority of supposedly impartial experts and liberal policymakers, whose pursuit of modernization in the "public interest" seemed to come at the expense of urban neighborhoods.

Ad hoc grassroots organizing proved effective in stopping highway plans, "slum" clearance proposals, and redevelopment schemes. But such victories posed a follow-up question: must popular mobilization be only reactive? In other words, couldn't cities also be planned from the grassroots? At a time when the New Left was championing the idea that "the people with the problems are the people with the solutions," an emergent "New Left urbanism" embodied hopes (in the end fleeting) for urban renewal with a humane face.

Efforts to stop the construction of highways through cities formed the first significant wave of challenges to the urban renewal order. The second half of the 1950s saw successful grassroots opposition to plans for a freeway in San Francisco along the Embarcadero waterfront and a plan for a sunken artery through Washington Square in Manhattan, and by the 1960s, this "freeway revolt" had spread to many American cities. Robert Moses had predicted, during the policy discussions that preceded the national highway program, that the portions of the network in dense urban areas would be the most likely to stir resistance. After all, unlike rural and suburban ones, these urban freeways came at the expense of large numbers of residences and businesses, negatively impacting those least likely to use the new roads and igniting a cultural clash over an urban versus a suburban vision of American life. It, too, was a clash between those who saw themselves as needless victims - a contingent sometimes dismissed as NIMBY ("Not In My Backyard") obstructionists - and those who saw some local sacrifices as necessary for infrastructure meant to serve the larger public good. (1)

These sacrifices, however, weren't equitably distributed, with poor and minority urban communities facing disproportionately higher numbers of demolitions. In fact, Moses and other advocates didn't shy away from linking urban highway construction to another agenda within the urban renewal order: the eradication of areas planners deemed obsolete or "blighted." Slum clearance proposals frequently also were based upon the undesirability of an existing neighborhood, which was condemned for its inherent characteristics, and not simply as a casualty of some larger public works project. It took longer for residents to develop the conceptual and tactical resources to challenge slum clearance schemes and defend neighborhoods on their own terms, to affirm their worthiness in the face of a rhetoric of blight. Yet this did happen, and by the early 1960s, pressure from residents in New York neighborhoods like Gramercy, Bellevue, and the West Village forced a shift in rhetoric from public officials,...

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