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How States Shaped Postwar America

Author : Nicholas Dagen Bloom

Publisher : University of Chicago Press

Page : 376 pages

File Size : 34,1 MB

Release : 2019-04-15

Category : History

ISBN : 022649831X

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Book Description

The history of public policy in postwar America tends to fixate on developments at the national level, overlooking the crucial work done by individual states in the 1960s and ’70s. In this book, Nicholas Dagen Bloom demonstrates the significant and enduring impact of activist states in five areas: urban planning and redevelopment, mass transit and highways, higher education, subsidized housing, and the environment. Bloom centers his story on the example set by New York governor Nelson Rockefeller, whose aggressive initiatives on the pressing issues in that period inspired others and led to the establishment of long-lived state polices in an age of decreasing federal power. Metropolitan areas, for both better and worse, changed and operated differently because of sustained state action—How States Shaped Postwar America uncovers the scope of this largely untold story.



Redevelopment and Race

Author : June Manning Thomas

Publisher : Wayne State University Press

Page : 314 pages

File Size : 49,88 MB

Release : 2013-04-15

Category : Social Science

ISBN : 0814339085

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Book Description

In the decades following World War II, professional city planners in Detroit made a concerted effort to halt the city's physical and economic decline. Their successes included an award-winning master plan, a number of laudable redevelopment projects, and exemplary planning leadership in the city and the nation. Yet despite their efforts, Detroit was rapidly transforming into a notorious symbol of urban decay. In Redevelopment and Race: Planning a Finer City in Postwar Detroit, June Manning Thomas takes a look at what went wrong, demonstrating how and why government programs were ineffective and even destructive to community needs. In confronting issues like housing shortages, blight in older areas, and changing economic conditions, Detroit's city planners worked during the urban renewal era without much consideration for low-income and African American residents, and their efforts to stabilize racially mixed neighborhoods faltered as well. Steady declines in industrial prowess and the constant decentralization of white residents counteracted planners' efforts to rebuild the city. Among the issues Thomas discusses in this volume are the harmful impacts of Detroit's highways, the mixed record of urban renewal projects like Lafayette Park, the effects of the 1967 riots on Detroit's ability to plan, the city-building strategies of Coleman Young (the city's first black mayor) and his mayoral successors, and the evolution of Detroit's federally designated Empowerment Zone. Examining the city she knew first as an undergraduate student at Michigan State University and later as a scholar and planner, Thomas ultimately argues for a different approach to traditional planning that places social justice, equity, and community ahead of purely physical and economic objectives. Redevelopment and Race was originally published in 1997 and was given the Paul Davidoff Award from the Association of Collegiate Schools of Planning in 1999. Students and teachers of urban planning will be grateful for this re-release. A new postscript offers insights into changes since 1997.



The Boston Contest of 1944

Author : Jeffry M. Diefendorf

Publisher : Routledge

Page : 173 pages

File Size : 32,55 MB

Release : 2015-03-05

Category : Architecture

ISBN : 1317506081

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Book Description

During World War II, many European government authorities and planners believed that the damage caused by bombing constituted a great opportunity to transform their cities. Even as the fighting continued, a great many plans were drawn up, and this has been the subject of much scholarship. However, what is often overlooked is wartime planning in cities not damaged in the war. United States cities were not bombed, but in Boston, one of its leading cities, the last years of the war brought a major effort to encourage both new plans to modernize the city and also means of implementing those plans. The wartime initiative to transform Boston had several sources. Both the Great Depression and the war had led to major measures by the federal government to try to deal with fiscal challenges and the need for new housing for the many people who relocated during the war because of the creation of new industries to help the war effort. Boston hoped it could benefit from these measures. Moreover, in the late 1930s, Harvard University had become a key residence for figures important in modernist planning, including Joseph Hudnut, Walter Gropius and Martin Wagner. These factors combined in 1944 to inspire what was called The Boston Contest. Its goal was to suggest solutions to many problems found in the metropolitan area. These issues included commercial and industrial developments, housing, transportation, education, recreation, welfare, urban finances, metropolitan government, and citizen participation in solving problems. This book, published in 1945 contains the top 3 prize winning entries and excerpts from 9 of the other nearly 100 entries. It gives a fascinating insight into the developing ideas of urban planning in the United States at a critical juncture.



The Transatlantic Collapse of Urban Renewal

Author : Christopher Klemek

Publisher : University of Chicago Press

Page : 330 pages

File Size : 10,37 MB

Release : 2011-07

Category : Architecture

ISBN : 0226441741

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Book Description

The Transatlantic Collapse of Urban Renewal examines how postwar thinkers from both sides of the Atlantic considered urban landscapes radically changed by the political and physical realities of sprawl, urban decay, and urban renewal. With a sweep that encompasses New York, London, Berlin, Philadelphia, and Toronto, among others, Christopher Klemek traces changing responses to the challenging issues that most affected the lives of the world’s cities. In the postwar decades, the principles of modernist planning came to be challenged—in the grassroots revolts against the building of freeways through urban neighborhoods, for instance, or by academic critiques of slum clearance policy agendas—and then began to collapse entirely. Over the 1960s, several alternative views of city life emerged among neighborhood activists, New Left social scientists, and neoconservative critics. Ultimately, while a pessimistic view of urban crisis may have won out in the United States and Great Britain, Klemek demonstrates that other countries more successfully harmonized urban renewal and its alternatives. Thismuch anticipated book provides one of the first truly international perspectives on issues central to historians and planners alike, making it essential reading for anyone engaged with either field.





Urban Planning Theory Since 1945

Author : Nigel Taylor

Publisher : SAGE

Page : 196 pages

File Size : 19,54 MB

Release : 1998-12-12

Category : Political Science

ISBN : 9780761960935

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Book Description

Taylor describes the development of urban planning ideas since the end of the Second World War, outlining the main theories from the traditional view of planning as an exercise in physical design to recent views of planning as 'communicative action'.



Planning in Cold War Europe

Author : Michel Christian

Publisher : Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG

Page : 582 pages

File Size : 36,7 MB

Release : 2018-10-08

Category : History

ISBN : 3110532409

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Book Description

The idea of planning economy and engineering social life has often been linked with Communist regimes’ will of control. However, the persuasion that social and economic processes could and should be regulated was by no means limited to them. Intense debates on these issues developed already during the First World War in Europe and became globalized during the World Economic crisis. During the Cold War, such discussions fuelled competition between two models of economic and social organisation but they also revealed the convergences and complementarities between them. This ambiguity, so often overlooked in histories of the Cold War, represents the central issue of the book organized around three axes. First, it highlights how know-how on planning circulated globally and were exchanged by looking at international platforms and organizations. The volume then closely examines specificities of planning ideas and projects in the Communist and Capitalist World. Finally, it explores East-West channels generated by exchanges around issues of planning which functioned irrespective of the Iron Curtain and were exported in developing countries. The volume thus contributes to two fields undergoing a process of profound reassessment: the history of modernisation and of the Cold War.



From Warfare to Welfare

Author : Jennifer S. Light

Publisher : JHU Press

Page : 304 pages

File Size : 25,98 MB

Release : 2005-09-19

Category : History

ISBN : 9780801882739

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Book Description

During the early decades of the Cold War, large-scale investments in American defense and aerospace research and development spawned a variety of problem-solving techniques, technologies, and institutions. From systems analysis to reconnaissance satellites to think tanks, these innovations did not remain exclusive accessories of the defense establishment. Instead, they readily found civilian applications in both the private and public sector. City planning and management were no exception. Jennifer Light argues that the technologies and values of the Cold War fundamentally shaped the history of postwar urban America. From Warfare to Welfare documents how American intellectuals, city leaders, and the federal government chose to attack problems in the nation's cities by borrowing techniques and technologies first designed for military engagement with foreign enemies. Experiments in urban problem solving adapted the expertise of defense professionals to face new threats: urban chaos, blight, and social unrest. Tracing the transfer of innovations from military to city planning and management, Light reveals how a continuing source of inspiration for American city administrators lay in the nation's preparations for war.



Postwar

Author : Tony Judt

Publisher : Penguin

Page : 1000 pages

File Size : 24,83 MB

Release : 2006-09-05

Category : History

ISBN : 9780143037750

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Book Description

Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize • Winner of the Council on Foreign Relations Arthur Ross Book Award • One of the New York Times' Ten Best Books of the Year “Impressive . . . Mr. Judt writes with enormous authority.” —The Wall Street Journal “Magisterial . . . It is, without a doubt, the most comprehensive, authoritative, and yes, readable postwar history.” —The Boston Globe Almost a decade in the making, this much-anticipated grand history of postwar Europe from one of the world's most esteemed historians and intellectuals is a singular achievement. Postwar is the first modern history that covers all of Europe, both east and west, drawing on research in six languages to sweep readers through thirty-four nations and sixty years of political and cultural change-all in one integrated, enthralling narrative. Both intellectually ambitious and compelling to read, thrilling in its scope and delightful in its small details, Postwar is a rare joy. Judt's book, Ill Fares the Land, republished in 2021 featuring a new preface by bestselling author of Between the World and Me and The Water Dancer, Ta-Nehisi Coates.



At Home in Postwar France

Author : Nicole C. Rudolph

Publisher : Berghahn Books

Page : 271 pages

File Size : 40,88 MB

Release : 2015-03-01

Category : Architecture

ISBN : 1782385886

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Book Description

After World War II, France embarked on a project of modernization, which included the development of the modern mass home. At Home in Postwar France examines key groups of actors — state officials, architects, sociologists and tastemakers — arguing that modernizers looked to the home as a site for social engineering and nation-building; designers and advocates of the modern home contributed to the democratization of French society; and the French home of the Trente Glorieuses, as it was built and inhabited, was a hybrid product of architects’, planners’, and residents’ understandings of modernity. This volume identifies the “right to comfort” as an invention of the postwar period and suggests that the modern mass home played a vital role in shaping new expectations for well-being and happiness.