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A tale of two cities: the failed urban renewal of downtown Tucson in the twentieth century.

Article Excerpt
There is no cultural crime more heinous than the wanton destruction of a city. Over the centuries, urban clearance has been used as harsh punishment during military campaigns where combatants trying to impose their will destroy their opponents' most cherished possessions. One recalls the Roman policy of plowing under the cities of those who dared resist their domination, or the horrific aerial bombardment campaigns by all sides during World War II that incinerated Coventry, Dresden, Berlin, and Hiroshima, among other important urban centers.

Throughout history, cities have provided the places where daily and ritual life unfolds. They are the repositories of human knowledge, memories, and artistic treasures. They are the source of opportunities for economic expansion and material betterment. They are a permanent witness to the spiritual values of every community and its individual members. Cities, in their collective form, have been the highest accomplishment of every human civilization. They represent the special identity of every society. Destroying a city robs its people of their future by denying them the setting and the images that their culture has evolved around continuously over time.

It is a historical fact that in a fit of violence and brutality, seeking retribution for similar acts of violence and brutality, human beings are capable of destroying each other's cities. But why would a political authority resort to destroying cities in peacetime? And why would this act of cultural erasure be perpetrated without significant cause on its own citizens?

Spared aerial bombardment in the 1940s, American cities were subsequently bombed by politicians and planners aided and abetted by the ideas and votes of millions of citizens who had been exposed to the horrors of destruction in both the European and American theaters of war. Massive leveling, in normal times a consequence of combat, became in the late 1950s and throughout 1960s a normal experience in this country, during peaceful times. The stated political objective of this avowed process of urban renewal was radical economic and cultural betterment, a noble motive. It was based on the convergence of three powerful mid-twentieth-century beliefs: (1) that an emergent industrial economy would perform best in a physical setting built on the modernist theories of large single-use buildings and car-dominated city blocks and streets; (2) that a system of free-flow highways slicing through cities would provide both massive accessibility to downtown areas and come to symbolize the presence of the new machine-based civilization; and (3) that a modern downtown expressed in fresh architectural and urban form would rid American cities of their provincial roots and elevate them to world status as urban icons and desirable places to be.

The unspoken motives were darker. The centers of most American cities at the time were becoming increasingly poorer, increasingly African American and immigrant dominated, and more and more the home of small, local-serving businesses. Urban renewal physically demolished cherished and irreplaceable buildings. That was crime enough. But in the process it robbed the poorest citizens of the most affordable housing available to them within each region. Severing the social bonds typical of traditional, walkable neighborhoods, it turned these newly displaced people into car dependent victims of sprawl. And as it eradicated local economic networks, it opened the door to residents' eventual dependence on franchise retail businesses, national in scope and corporate in outlook. Freeway construction had the unanticipated effect of decanting as opposed to supporting the growth of center cities. The flight of both people and particularly jobs increased in the last four decades of the twentieth century, depriving the needy of the critical choice of work opportunities close to their homes. It is now clear that even if there was no conspiracy to act prejudicially toward the interests of a particular group of Americans, urban renewal unleashed truly sinister consequences.

The program was nationwide in its inspiration and scope. Its trigger was in every case the declaration of physical and economic blight. Through federal financial support, whole city sectors were judged substandard and taken over by municipalities through eminent domain. Existing buildings and lot lines controlling the size and bulk of buildings were erased. The constitutional rights of land and building owners were trampled as their property was targeted for redevelopment and seized against their will. To add insult to injury, municipalities proceeded to issue requests for proposals for the land taken and contributed it free and clear to third-party private developers, often adding public capital to each deal. This heavy public subsidy was delivered under the illusory objective of helping the market construct the new twentieth-century American city.

The sum total of projects throughout the country delivered under urban renewal never amounted to the massive reconstruction campaign advertised by its federal and local government proponents. The politics and economics of the program were discredited almost immediately. The taking...

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