The Roots and Routes of Urban Renewal

Abstract

This synthetic essay offers a new look at the origins of the ideas that underpinned urban renewal. Recent accounts separate policy history from the cultural influence of modernism in planning and architecture to show how real estate interests and urban planners co-opted the reform energies and social idealism of the modern housing movement and brought private capital downtown. However, understanding the full history of urban renewal requires showing how it was shaped as both policy and idea. This essay traces the intertwined history of campaigns for both slum clearance and modern housing to show how the motives of planning, profit, and reform idealism combined to form both a modernist “ethic of city rebuilding” and an aggressive program for ridding the city of “blight” and restoring property values. Urban renewal was indebted to both, and a full accounting of its history should reveal the tense and productive relations between the two.