The Transatlantic Collapse of Urban Renewal: Postwar Urbanism from New York to Berlin

Abstract

Christopher Klemek offers an engaging intellectual and political history of the rise and fall of urban renewal in the Atlantic world. It is hard to disagree with the author's condemnation of the “policy debacle called urban renewal” (p. 2). One need not go far to see the deadening effects of large-scale modernist redevelopment projects. That said, the book's title overstates its transatlantic reach. Berlin, London, and Toronto provide interesting points of comparison to New York City, establishing the transatlantic flow of ideas and planners, but the book's center of gravity is clearly the U.S. Northeast. Germany's early influence on U.S. urban planning is established. The British townscape movement is shown to be an alternative, albeit peripheral, to American thinking. Toronto makes an appearance because Jane Jacobs took refuge there. Its antifreeway movement is thus presented as little more than a sequel to New York City's. These international forays are intended to answer Klemek's central question: How distinctive was the U.S. experience? Not very, it seems.