Pittsburgh, fig. 7.3, and root shock in New York after 9/11, fig. 8.5. Upper lithograph: Honoré Daumier. From the series “Locataires et Propriétaires”: Scene from a neighborhood in process of demolition. REPRODUCED COURTESY OF THE PHOTOTHÉQUE DES MUSÉES DE LA VILLE DE PARIS. Lower lithograph: Demolition for the Avenue de l’Opéra. REPRODUCED FROM L’ILLUSTRATION, 1929.
French urbanist Michel Cantal-Dupart wrote of that neighborhood, “At the base of Boulevard Saint Michel, Haussmann had demolished the Church of Saint André des Arts, which was the parish church for the riverside neighborhood that stretched from the Pont Neuf to the Pont Saint Michel. According to their residence east or west of the new boulevard, the parishioners were reassigned to Saint Germain or Saint Séverin. One was in the 6th arrondissement, and the other in the fifth. Boulevard Saint Michel, although it united traffic towards Paris, proved to be an almost unassailable obstacle to the urbanism of the neighborhood. Though it has been more than a century since the demolition of the church, the neighborhood has remained disorganized. The village never regained its authenticity. It had lost an essential organ.”2
The sense I was getting—that the renovation entailed a massive, irreparable upheaval—was heightened by the realization that Haussmann was thrown out of office in 1870. At about the same time as the fall of Haussmann, Emperor Napoleon III entered into a disastrous war with Germany. France was quickly beaten back, and a siege laid around Paris. Over the months of the siege, and during the peace negotiations that followed, residents of the city lost whatever faith they had had in the emperor’s government. In fact, that government collapsed and was replaced by a provisional government, which appeared to be just as unreliable in its negotiations with Germany and in its treatment of the capital. Obviously, much had happened by the point at which, in an effort to save the country and themselves, the working people of Paris rose up in revolt and declared a new democratic government, the Paris Commune.
War, siege, and abandonment by the national government might seem to have been enough to provoke the Commune. Research has demonstrated that upheaval played a part as well. The Commune was organized by people who had been displaced from the center of the city by the Haussmannian renovations. Living and struggling together in the newly annexed peripheral arrondissements, the displaced people had gathered strength and solidarity from one another.3 Displacement both added to the other layers of frustration and reorganized neighboring, creating new spaces within which relationships and ideas were developed.
The Commune, with its generous reforms and democratic concerns, was quickly overthrown. A bloodbath ensued, during which as many as thirty thousand Communards were murdered. Reading this part of the story of Paris provided me with new ways to think about urban renewal and its consequences. I thought it was probably a good idea that the United States hadn’t gone to war just after urban renewal. Then I remembered Vietnam.
The Housing Act of 1949
The term “urban renewal” is used generically to refer to improvements in cities. In the United States the phrase is also used to refer to a program of the federal government, begun under the Housing Act of 1949, and modified under a number of later acts, the most important of which, the Housing Act of 1954, actually introduced the term into the law. Those acts were designed to provide the money for retooling the city, preparing for the postwar era, and switching from the war machine to new means of productivity. In 1950s America, urban renewal was a synonym for “progress.”4
Progress meant new technologies, new jobs, and—here is where urban renewal comes in—new uses for the land. Those who sought to maintain the old city stood in the way of progress, and progress was a magic word back then: normally honest people would hide their true feelings on any issue in order to be able to say, “I’m for progress.”5 General Electric went a step forward, reminding us through its advertisements, “Progress is our most important product.”
Reclaiming land for new uses has an important precedent in American history in the abrogation of treaties with Native Americans. In the beginning of the westward push, Native Americans were asked to move west of the Appalachians. Then they were asked to move west of the Mississippi. Then they were settled on reservations, which were relocated repeatedly. In the 1950s, children like me grew up with the story of Native Americans being settled on wasteland dotted with black puddles, but being moved when it was discovered that those black puddles were oil.
There is a joke that circulated on email a few years ago. It went like this. Two Navajos, an old man and his grandson, were walking on the reservation one day and ran into a group of white scientists from NASA, standing around a spacecraft. The grandson asked what they were doing and the scientists explained they were preparing a trip to the moon. The grandson translated this to the old man, who spoke only Navajo. The old man pondered this information for a moment, then asked if he could send a message to the Man in the Moon. The NASA scientists, amused by this request, got out their tape recorder. The old man spoke briefly in Navajo and nodded with satisfaction when he was done. The scientists asked the grandson what he had said. He told the Man in the Moon, “Watch out, they’ve come to take your land.”6
The land-claiming strategy embodied in the Housing Act of 1949 was straightforward. An interested city had first to identify the “blighted” areas that it wished to redo. Having defined “slum” and “ghetto,” we must add this concept of blight, which was invented specifically for purposes of redoing aging downtown areas, and meant, quite simply, that buildings had lost their sparkle and their profit margin.7 Quite a remarkable array of buildings could fit under the definitions of blight that were enacted into law.8
Once those areas had been defined, the city had the task of developing a “workable plan.” This had largely to do with figuring out a new use for the area once it was cleared of blight. The workable plan was forwarded to regional urban renewal offices for approval by the federal government. Once the plan was approved, the designated areas could be seized using the government’s power of eminent domain. The people and businesses that occupied the site were given a minimal amount of compensation and were sent away. The seized land was then cleared of all buildings and, thanks to federal subsidies, sold to developers at a fraction of the city’s costs. The developers then built businesses, educational and cultural institutions, and residences for middle- and upper-income people. In some instances, high-rise public housing projects were built on the cleared land.9
Marc Weiss summed up the overall impact of the twenty-four-year program by saying, “Urban renewal agencies in many cities demolished whole communities inhabited by low income people in order to provide land for private development of office buildings, sports arenas, hotels, trade centers, and high income luxury buildings.”10 Rather than providing decent homes and suitable living environments, urban renewal created a massive housing crisis. Weiss noted, “As of June 30, 1967, 400,000 residential units had been demolished in urban renewal areas, while only 10,760 low-rent public housing units had been built on these sites.”11 You might well ask: How did a plan that subsidized developers, and dramatically worsened the conditions of the poor, come to be the law of the land?
Saving Downtown
American business leaders and mayors of large cities believed that the civic organization that had evolved over the first part of the twentieth century, that is, a central downtown surrounded by an array of manufacturing, trading, and residential areas, was becoming obsolete as the population began to overrun the borders and fill the nearby suburbs. In their view, a postwar retooling of the American city was needed, one designed to respond to the changing spatial dynamics and to prepare for competition with other nations. The changing needs of American capitalism were the impetus for the reorganization of the cities, and it was powerful men who sought solutions and pushed for their enactment into law. Weiss noted: “Urban renewal owes its origins to downtown merchants, banks, large corporations, newspaper publishers, realtors, and other institutions with substantial business and property interests in the central part of the city.”12
