Conceptualizing the New Urban Renewal

Abstract

In the 1990s and 2000s, inner city neighborhood redevelopment occurred throughout the United States as billions in public and private investments entered impoverished black communities. This revitalization process led to the displacement of hundreds of thousands of African-Americans. Based on this circumstance, some scholars suggest that this circumstance was a return to the past urban renewal period (1949-1974). While there have been many case studies of contemporary inner city redevelopment, this article uses a comparative historical approach to claim that we have entered and completed a new urban renewal period (1992-2007) that rivals but yet is distinct from the old urban renewal period in four important ways. First, the new urban renewal was a central business district (CBD) expansion strategy, whereas the old urban renewal was a preservation strategy. Second, the dynamics driving the new urban renewal were more complex and included global, federal, and local factors, while federal forces were more important in structuring the old urban renewal. Third, the consequences of the new urban renewal were not explained by race alone but involved an interaction between race and class. Lastly, the new urban renewal was associated with rising suburban poverty and the old urban renewal institutionalized the inner city ghetto. Specifying the parallels and differences between the old and new urban renewal periods is vital for understanding how twentieth- and twenty-first-century urban policies, and their consequences, relate to an ever-changing metropolitan America.