Making the Mission: Planning and Ethnicity in San Francisco

Abstract

Ocean Howell's Making the Mission explores the durability of local, neighborhood-based planning, coalition building, spatial practices, and ethnic formation in San Francisco's famed Mission District. Howell compellingly argues that these nodes of collective action forged and sustained the Mission's enduringly distinct entity—a city within a city—throughout the twentieth century. Howell also connects urban and ethnic histories, arguing persuasively that “broader shifts in the very boundaries of ethnicity,” especially regarding Latinas/os, “were accomplished in no small part through debates over urban planning power” (p. 21, emphasis in original). In fact, he argues that “neighborhood identity was largely ethnic identity,” even as the Mission's cultural politics shifted from defending whiteness to celebrating diversity (p. 121). Making the Mission also triangulates San Francisco, Chicago, and Los Angeles, in part to demonstrate profound differences between San Francisco and the most studied cities of the “great West.” Howell divides the narrative into four periods defined by the availability of institutional space at the municipal, state, and federal levels to allow Mission-based planners political and spatial efficacy. From the 1906 earthquake through the 1920s, “citizens of the Mission” took leading roles in determining the district's economic, social, and spatial development by acting collectively through unions, social groups, and the powerful Mission Promotion Association. During the 1930s, New Deal agencies favored sanctioned municipal authorities, limiting the Mission's neighborhood power. From 1945 through the 1950s, the dominance of centralized planning and urban renewal effectively precluded neighborhood planning. Mission organizations endured, however, building stable interethnic coalitions and capacity to work with city government. When the central-planning stranglehold broke, the Mission Coalition Organization partnered with city government and the federal Model Cities program. The new regime of neighborhood planning rose and fell in lockstep with municipal agencies and the Great Society more generally.