Era Of Urban Renewal Research Articles

Research on Age-Friendly Renewal Design of Community Parks Based on Elderly Participatory Construction: A Case Study of Xinmenkou Community Park Renewal

Age-friendly design embodies a pivotal urban development endeavor in addressing the aging society during China’s urban renewal era. Among the key components of this renewal process, community parks occupy a prominent position, and their adaptation to cater to the older population stands as a significant area of research and development. Drawing upon an analysis of the characteristics and requirements of the senior population, along with factors influencing their participatory construction of community parks, this study proposes methodologies for elderly-involved construction activities encompassing design, planting, maintenance, and activity participation. Capitalizing on a user-centric approach, the study targets three primary aspects—space, facilities, and activities—to proceed with an age-friendly renovation for the Xinmenkou Community Park in Gulou District, Nanjing, China. By introducing tailored zones such as a self-created space zone, a planting experience zone, a voluntary maintenance zone, and an activity participation zone, the design aims to fulfill the aspirations of older residents for the participatory construction of community parks. This innovative scheme revitalizes aging urban communities and presents a fresh perspective for urban renewal strategies.

Towards sustainable urban transition: A critical review of strategies and policies of urban village renewal in Shenzhen, China

Urban villages are typical informal settlements in Chinese cities where rural villages were gradually surrounded by urban built environments during urbanisation. In the era of urban renewal, these “urban enclaves” have been systematically demolished due to their “chaotic” building layouts and “backward” appearance. Existing policies related to the redevelopment of urban villages mainly follow a “demolish-rebuild” orientation, while lacking sufficient consideration of the mechanisms behind their environmental aspects and performances. In the long run, such a direction of urban redevelopment will hinder the achievement of sustainable development goals. This paper reviews the major municipal-level policies that relate to urban villages and urban renewal in Shenzhen through the adoption of systematic literature survey and content analysis. An analytical framework of “Three Contents and Six Instruments” is established to examine the highlighted and overlooked aspects of these policies. Results reveal that Shenzhen’s implemented policies aim to formulise, modernise, and consequently homogenise urban villages into “urban-like modern communities” through the following upgrades: urban infrastructure development, improvement of sanitation conditions, and building façade beautification. However, these approaches for “environmental enhancement” were not primarily based on identifying and understanding the real causes of the exhibiting “environmental problems.” Meanwhile, the inspiration and inheritance of informal rules, especially the involvement and participation of residents for the rehabilitation of urban villages have been entirely overlooked. These two overlooked crucial aspects should be introduced in policy-making and integrated with existing adopted strategies to match local contexts and resolve specific issues. The paper advocates to extend the connotation of the concept of environment from an infrastructural consideration to a mechanism-based and performance-orientation thinking during the making of urban renewal policies. It suggests that environment could be utilised as an inclusive medium to efficiently frame and link multiple aspects in the policies.

Wastelanding and Racialized Reproductive Labor: “Long Dyings” in East Chicago from Urban Renewal to Superfund Remediation

Abstract This article examines the gendered valence of environmental racism and white privilege as it unfolded in the history of urban renewal, public housing, and Superfund remediation in East Chicago, Indiana. Offering a deep history of the US Smelter and Lead Refinery Superfund site, it demonstrates that the historical process of “wastelanding” in the Calumet region relied on the exploitation of reproductive labor. The nonprofit Purdue-Calumet Development Foundation (PCDF)—led by Purdue University administrators and supported by East Chicago municipal administrators, academic researchers, and local business executives—spearheaded East Chicago’s urban renewal program. Through the course of executing these renewal measures, the PCDF co-opted Black and Brown women’s reproductive labor to accomplish their goals and relied on metaphors of feminized labor—particularly women’s stereotyped tasks of cleaning and nurturing—to explain and sanitize the social cost of slum removal. These historical legacies of politicizing reproductive labor are visible today in government officials’ continued disproportionate burdening of East Chicago’s minority women as the city navigates its lead poisoning epidemic. Housing and environmental government agencies (alongside their partners in industry) have reinscribed their reliance on traditional gender roles from the urban renewal era through the distant futurities of Superfund contamination sites. Tracing the long history of the city’s mismanagement of toxic environmental exposures reveals the need for environmental historians to study the important role of racialized reproductive labor in both the perpetuation of environmental injustices as well as the resilience of environmental justice communities as they work to survive devastating health impacts and social trauma.

The Urbanism of Racial Capitalism

AbstractEmerging in British agricultural discourse in the seventeenth century, the term blight moved from agriculture to culture, and so from countryside to city, in the context of the industrializing American city of the early twentieth century. This city housed increasingly large populations of reserve labor and provided increasingly large spaces to accommodate that population. Defined as “blight,” the spaces occupied by reserve labor were expelled from the very system that produced them: those spaces become obstacles to property development, as opposed to products of a disavowed form of de-development. As race has been the principal medium of difference that has legitimized and stabilized the hierarchical social order of industrial capitalism, the management of “blight” also inscribed race in urban space. A long but continuous line therefore connects the political definition of “black”—in terms of an absence of the full rights of persons, from the era of enslavement, through the era of segregation, to the present—with the political definition of “blight” in terms of an absence of full rights to property from the era of urban renewal into present-day austerity urbanism.

The Raced–Space of Gentrification: “Reverse Blockbusting,” Home Selling, and Neighborhood Remake in North Nashville

Proponents of gentrification often use some rendition of a “rising tide lifts all boats” justification when assessing the impact that gentrification has on original residents in a gentrifying area. One of the benefits that is widely accepted by proponents and opponents of gentrification is that homeowners experience an increase in property values that can easily be transferred to family wealth or cash. Yet, there is virtually no research that provides an evidence base to support this seemingly direct relationship. Through a case study of prominent historically black neighborhoods in North Nashville, we find that the process of potential home equity realization for original homeowners in a gentrifying area is complicated by a variety of factors. We theorize that, in addition to class and socioeconomic phenomena, home buying in the context of gentrification operates much like reverse or inverted “blockbusting” during the era of urban renewal. These processes involve the creation of value out of the racialization of space whereby black homeowners and residents are incentivized and often forced to leave as a precursor to predominantly white populations entering. We comment on how these findings fit into the history of discriminatory and exploitative housing practices in the United States.

Reversing the Tide of Suburban Families? The Design, Marketing, and Occupancy of Urban Renewal’s High-rise Housing

During the postwar urban renewal era, many US cities constructed high-rise downtown apartment buildings to lure families back from the suburbs. These projects met demand for high-end downtown housing. They often remain occupied today—in stark contrast to the more rapid demise of many other redevelopment projects designed for shopping, entertainment, or public housing use. Yet, they also often fell short of their larger demographic goals. This occupational history of New Haven, Connecticut’s first downtown high-rises shows that the projects’ architecture, site planning, public realm, and rental structures never lived up to either suburban alternatives or their own marketing promises.

Replacing Truth with Social Hope and Progress with Redescription: Can the Pragmatist Philosophy of Richard Rorty Help Reinvigorate Planning?

Through a review of Richard Rorty’s philosophical work and critiques of original planning documents from the Urban Renewal era, this paper makes three points. First, a pragmatist epistemological approach offers a better foundation for planning than the current communicative paradigm. Second, updating planning’s Enlightenment roots with Rorty’s view of moral progress as a process of “redescription” can help reduce the anxiety planners feel in putting forward bold visions. Last, Rorty’s concept of the liberal ironist provides an interesting model for planners that sees equal value in the contributions made by both the Jane Jacobs’s and Robert Moses’s of the field.

Learning Lessons from the Urban Renewal Era

Learning Lessons from the Urban Renewal Era

Building a Local Preservation Ethic in the Era of Urban Renewal: How Did Neighborhood Associations Shape Historic Preservation Practice in Lexington, Kentucky?

The federal urban renewal program had wide-ranging consequences for American cities of all sizes and locations. Among the most consequential was its catalyzing effect on the historic preservation movement nationwide. While preservation practice at the dawn of the urban renewal era emphasized historic monuments, by its end in the mid-1970s, preservationists were much more concerned with neighborhoods, districts, and larger swaths of urban fabric, thus, becoming relevant to all manner of future city shaping and revitalizing efforts. While this expansion took place nationwide, the paths taken by individual cities varied considerably. Because of its large number of historic downtown residential neighborhoods, and its long involvement with historic preservation, Lexington, Kentucky, provides an ideal case study to explore this transformation, highlighting the ways in which neighborhood associations and local preservation organizations collaborated to set the stage for widespread adoption of local historic districts in the 1970s.

The planned destruction of Chinatowns in the United States and Canada since c.1900

ABSTRACTUnlike virtually all other old immigrant enclaves in North American cities, the historic downtown Chinatowns of big cities in the United States and Canada largely survive, though not for lack of plans to destroy them. City Beautiful era plans, development projects, and other public and private interventions displaced or sought to eradicate Chinatowns, from Los Angeles to Victoria to Chicago, New York, and Philadelphia. Urban renewal era projects destroyed large portions of many Chinatowns, and some entirely. This article traces these broad patterns and trends of planned and realized destruction and preservation across 15 of the major cities in twentieth-century Canada and the United States.

Accomplishing Place in Public Space: Autoethnographic Accounts of Homelessness

Recognizing the deep-seated need many people share for a sense of home, we employ autoethnography to illustrate how those who are homeless can make homelike places within public spaces. By revisiting and reflexively analyzing various accounts of homelessness as experienced by one of the authors, we show that home can be made through (a) re-appropriating public spaces, (b) harnessing feelings of safety, and (c) interacting with others. We conclude by discussing how this homemaking process not only reinforces the claim that many people desire home, but also motivates us to think about the ways in which public spaces might cater to this desire in an era of urban renewal.

Working in the Australian suburbs: Creative industries workers’ adaptation of traditional work spaces

The cultural and creative industries contribution to the economic and social sustainability of cities is a well acknowledged phenomenon which has accelerated in the era of urban renewal since the late twentieth century. The second-tier city of Brisbane, Australia was for many years considered a cultural backwater in the national context, yet its recent urban development within a short period of time has produced a city that now has all the hallmarks of a ‘creative city’. Brisbane’s transformation has been shaped by urban and cultural policies that are largely focussed around its inner-metropolitan localities, producing a growth in cultural infrastructure and the aestheticisation of inner-city precincts.However, like most Australian cities, the majority of Brisbane’s population live, and increasingly work in the suburbs. This article is based on a large research project that shows that creative industries workers are well represented across suburban localities. The article examines the policy and planning implications for creative industries located in Australian outer suburbs and the communities in which they are located.

Derelict paradise: homelessness and urban development in Cleveland, Ohio

Seeking answers to the question, Who benefits from homelessness? this book takes the reader on a sweeping tour of Cleveland's history from the late nineteenth-century through the early twenty-first. Daniel Kerr shows that homelessness has deep roots in the shifting ground of urban labor markets, social policy, downtown development, the criminal justice system, and corporate power. Rather than being attributable to the illnesses and inadequacies of the unhoused themselves, it is a product of both structural and political dynamics shaping the city. Kerr locates the origins of today's shelter system in the era that followed the massive railroad rebellions of 1877. From that period through the Great Depression, business and political leaders sought to transform downtown Cleveland to their own advantage. As they focused on bringing business travelers and tourists to the city and beckoned upper-income residents to return to its center, they demolished two downtown working-class neighborhoods and institutionalized a shelter system to contain and control the unhoused and unemployed. The precedents from this period informed the strategies of the post--World War II urban renewal era as the new urbanism of the late twentieth century. The efforts of the city's elites have not gone uncontested. Kerr documents a rich history of opposition by people at the margins of whose organized resistance and everyday survival strategies have undermined the grand plans crafted by the powerful and transformed the institutions designed to constrain the lives of the homeless.

Housing Patterns of Homeless People: The Ecology of the Street in the Era of Urban Renewal

In this article, the authors examine the political and economic community dynamics of the street homeless as well as other groups involved in conflicts regarding the process of urban renewal. Since postwar suburban flight, homeless people have lived largely in the shadows of vacated city centers. But “not-in-my-backyard” (NIMBY) battles over the homeless have become increasingly common, especially as the influx of comfortably housed residents bring suburban expectations to urban centers, generating conflicts that affect homeless urban camp communities. Drawing on four years of ethnographic data, the authors describe social conflicts revolving around homelessness and urban renewal. Moreover, through examining the patterns of economy and polity among sectors with different economic positions in the city, the authors illustrate how “problematic” groups of people, such as the homeless, are not antithetical to community. Instead, they are key stakeholders in urban communities with goals, concerns, and desired boundaries similar to those who “legitimately” live downtown.

Public Health and Advocacy: Lessons from and for Urban Regeneration

Public Health and Advocacy: Lessons from and for Urban Regeneration

Excavating the Postwar Sex District in San Francisco

This article traces the emergence of the postwar sex district in San Francisco, in particular, and in the metropolitan United States, in general. The author argues that the sex district of the 1960s and 1970swas not simply a relic from the first half of the twentieth century but rather a fundamentally newphenomenon. Infused by the libertinism of the sexual revolution, the eroding legal criteria of “obscenity,” and the immense profitability of pornography and other forms of commercial sexual entertainment, owners of sex businesses brought an element of explicit, public sexuality to the streets of San Francisco and other American cities that had not existed since the nineteenth century—and then only to a much lesser degree. Furthermore, the sex district played a crucial, though relatively unknown, role in municipal politics during the era of urban renewal and redevelopment.

Reshaping New Haven: The Urban Renewal Era, 1950-80. New Haven Colony Historical Society

Book Review| October 01 2002 Reshaping New Haven: The Urban Renewal Era, 1950-80. New Haven Colony Historical Society Reshaping New Haven: The Urban Renewal Era, 1950-80. New Haven Colony Historical Society. ROBERT ASHER ROBERT ASHER Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Connecticut History Review (2002) 41 (2): 205–210. https://doi.org/10.2307/44369585 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation ROBERT ASHER; Reshaping New Haven: The Urban Renewal Era, 1950-80. New Haven Colony Historical Society. Connecticut History Review 1 January 2002; 41 (2): 205–210. doi: https://doi.org/10.2307/44369585 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All Scholarly Publishing CollectiveUniversity of Illinois PressConnecticut History Review Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

The Politics of Poverty Deconcentration and Housing Demolition

Concentrated poverty is the organizing framework for much housing policy at the federal and local levels. This article examines the effect of concentrated poverty on the politics of housing and community development at the local level. A case study of the Minneapolis-Saint Paul metropolitan area suggests that in high-poverty neighborhoods efforts to deconcentrate lead to political battles reminiscent of the urban renewal era in which poor and minority residents fight to save their housing and communities from slum clearance. For central cities, the deconcentration of poverty as a policy objective introduces a new set of criteria against which community development efforts are judged, making the development of subsidized and affordable housing more difficult to initiate or sustain. At the regional level, concerns about the concentration of poverty can create new alliances of resistance to affordable housing and even justify demolition in older, inner-ring suburbs.