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This essay proposes a new approach to world's fairs. Local elites, representing manufacturing, banking, transportation, merchandizing, and commercial interests, organized pre–World War I expositions to create urban settings supporting trade and cultivating innovation on a long-term basis. These stimuli came in the form of systematized infrastructure and environmental improvements, resources for training technical workforce, educating public taste, and reputation building. Most historically important, the result was to constitute the public facet of the second industrial revolution, identified on the business side with new energy sources, integration of industrial production and consumption, transportation, and institutionalization of research allied with industry based on official reports and documents. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examines early disaster recovery and prevention planning projects in fishing port cities in the northern part of Japan after the 1933 Sanriku tsunami, the later modernization of those cities, and their current recovery from the 2011 Great Northern Japan earthquake. This work reframes the goal of disaster recovery and of disaster prevention planning in our society as social resilience —the ability of a community to cope with and adapt to stresses such as social, political, environmental, or economic change. Drawing on the author's field research in Kesennuma, this study also describes postwar economic and industrial development in fishing ports that changed social and spatial structures. It shows that postwar administration and planners ignored the prewar disaster recovery and prevention planning based on local social systems, which caused fundamental problems in redevelopment and disaster prevention planning after 2011. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The turn of the twentieth century witnessed a significant expansion of both Deptford in southeast London and the market town of Dadaocheng in northern Taiwan. A factor that unites the two can arguably be found in both historically avoiding becoming part of the cities to which they now belong. The collective desire of their more well-to-do residents to shape an urban modern space that could fit their aspirations transcended national boundaries. Defined as the "urban elite," the more notable residents were both globally situated and connected. They lived in a modernity that was self-defined and interpreted, one that was differentiated across a range of institutions: family life, economic and political structures, education, mass communication, and individual orientation. The purpose of this article, therefore, is to argue that these arenas should be understood as a narrative of continual design and redesign. What is more, they were essentially marshaled by a rising new urban middle class. The fortunes that they acquired were a result of their connections to the town they helped mold and transform. Using social elite theory, this article will argue that if the social, economic, and political conditions across areas are similar, people will behave in comparable ways with only contextual differences. In the case of Taiwan, attention to this overlooked aspect of its social history is important in helping to situate the island in global comparisons. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The redevelopment of the Bankside area in central London was proposed in 1943, yet substantive regeneration was only achieved toward the end of the century. This article analyzes the processes whereby a postwar industrial, then deindustrial, locality evolved into a popular leisure and residential quarter. It argues that strategic plans for the area engendered only incremental and piecemeal redevelopment. Change was principally driven by industrial decline, government building policies, and the availability of finance, and, since the 1990s, by private-sector investment and culture-driven regeneration. Tensions and conflicts arose over the direction of, sometimes controversial, redevelopment. The locality's principal building, Bankside power station, inhibited the realization of early redevelopment plans, but, as Tate Modern, was instrumental in the cultural and social transformation of the area. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the 1950s and 1960s, the Netherlands experienced a rapid growth in car ownership. Dutch planners and politicians soon realized that this growing automobility would radically transform the living environment, daily commute, and consumption behavior of millions of people, in particular of those living in or near large conurbations. By investigating how professional and political elites perceived increasing automobility, and how their responses subsequently affected urban planning in the Netherlands, this article offers a comprehensive and multifaceted narrative of the dawning of the Dutch motor age. I demonstrate how the gloomy and fearful predictions of planners and traffic engineers working in the 1960s foreshadowed a wider discontent with car-centered planning. Their engagements with local officials and urban action groups led to planning compromises I describe as a form of "gentle modernization," typical for a country which has always opted for a cautious approach to modernity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Yangzhou, once a capital city of China, has been transformed into a post-Socialist city. This narrative of its urban development explains its evolution from "a city for the royal family to build its temporary palace" in Imperial China, through "a city as a tool to develop manufacturing industries" during the Socialist regime, to "an ecological garden and a city with an attractive living environment" in Transitional China. Changing value systems interact with economic and political constraints to explain the course of its urban history. The explanation rests on the premise that urban development ultimately depends on the investment potential of the local economy and local power constraints impinging upon adopted plans. This case study explores how political and economic constraints shape the ambitions of local policy makers and planners, thereby reflecting the evolution of those Chinese cultural values that as development imperatives have shaped urban planning practice in China. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the revitalization of the Avenue of the Americas. It follows the efforts of leading New Yorkers to transform the Avenue into a more profitable space while turning it into the political, commercial, and cultural capital of the Western Hemisphere. Using a transnational perspective, the article argues that the remaking of the Avenue must be understood in relation to the growing involvement of New York reformers in Latin America, especially São Paulo. It illustrates how New York urban reformers' perception of São Paulo as a rising city and that of Brazil (and Latin America) as important allies to the United States during and after World War II (WWII) served as catalysts for growth as these actors—especially Robert Moses—strove to establish New York's global dominance. By focusing on the networks of exchange between São Paulo and New York, this article sheds light on the ideological origins of New York's urban renewal projects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article proposes that the Fordist model of industrial standardization enabled and empowered the Soviets to enact distinctly socialist, decentralized, urban patterns. It follows the design of the Kharkiv Tractor Factory (KhTZ) and the socialist city (sotsgorod) to house its workers, built outside of the first capital of Soviet Ukraine between 1930 and 1931. The near-impossible schedule of Stalin’s hyperindustrialization drive, known as the first Five-Year Plan (1928-1932), limited the options both tractor factory and sotsgorod designers could pursue, which made easily replicable architectural types and models particularly attractive. Once tested on an experimental site like KhTZ, a type deemed successful joined the ranks of those ready for slight adjustment—a process known as priviazka in Soviet architectural discourse—and export to far-flung sites in the Soviet sphere. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay aims to historicize urban theorist Richard Florida's influential formulation of the "creative class" by focusing on the emergence of a high-tech economy in North Carolina's Research Triangle metropolitan area. In the 1950s, a powerful coalition of academics, businesspeople, and politicians launched a plan to move the state away from its traditional reliance on low-wage industries by founding a research park between Raleigh, Durham, and Chapel Hill, believing that scientific firms would value the park's proximity to several nearby colleges and universities. The essay argues that local boosters emphasized the area's cultural opportunities and intellectual climate as major quality-of-life considerations not only for hightech companies, but also the scientists and engineers that they hoped to employ. Research Triangle Park thus created a blueprint for subsequent development strategies-later promoted by Florida, among other scholars and consultants-that made arts, education, and other cultural institutions central to the marketing of an urban area's identity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, the development of Dutch airports during the antebellum period from military airfields to mixed-airfields and finally to a municipal airports is examined from an institutionalist-historical approach. Specific attention is given to the evolution of Amsterdam Airport Schiphol within a regional socioeconomic context and within a national context of local competition, particularly between the big cities in Randstad Holland. This article argues that the rise and development of Schiphol and its impact on the surrounding urban area (city and the region) can be characterized as a coevolutionary process involving different actors within various domains— economic, political, and institutional—and at different spatial levels. Airport development, therefore, has to be conceived as the result of a collective arrangement that has determined the spatial and economic development of the airport itself and the surrounding area. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In the eyes of many, the steel city of Gary, Indiana, entered a period of decline in the middle of the twentieth century. The once great city was seemingly racked by job loss, crime, racial division, or moral decay. Which of these caused the decline of the city depended upon the perspective of the story’s teller. Each narrative of decline contained a different moment where the city went wrong and it began to decay. For some it was the moral decay of the 1950s, for others it was the rise of black power and politics in the 1960s, for still others it was the white backlash against civil rights in the 1970s. Some saw a microcosm of America, some saw a dangerous cauldron of race and ethnicity. The source of decline and the origins of the urban crisis were largely in the eye of the beholder. The stories people chose to tell about Gary mattered because for much of the twentieth century, Gary was at the center of American narratives about industrialism. These were outsider narratives of decline read onto the Indiana steel city because Gary represented larger debates. People read onto Gary their changing expectations and anxieties about industry and industrial spaces. This article traces the changing attitudes outsiders held toward Gary from the middle of the twentieth century through the period of deindustrialization at the end of the century and examines American narratives about deindustrialization and urban decline. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Our historical understanding of the origins and development of multiple dwellings is incomplete. The standard account involves people struggling to establish permanent homes despite overcrowding and hypercompetitive housing markets. But there was another line of development for multiple dwellings in America—one that followed the spatial logic of hospitality rather than domesticity. Instead of evolving out of residential structures, it arose from the practice of providing travelers and strangers with temporary shelter, food, refreshment, and household services. Empirically, this article offers a significant revision of the history of urban housing, one that involves a distinctive set of imperatives and a different morphology. Theoretically, it contends that our analysis of the urban landscape, with its longtime emphasis on the production and distribution of goods, would benefit from another look the interrelated phenomena of mobility, transience, and anonymity—classic symptoms of urbanism that were foundational concepts in early urban theory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article builds on the scholarship of Black urban history in general and the Great Migrations in particular. It examines the migration, community-building, class consciousness, and sociopolitical activist efforts of African American migrants who made their way to Houston, Texas, from farms, small towns, and medium-sized cities in eastern Texas and Louisiana between 1914 and 1941. It defines migration to Houston as a form of accommodation-activism, one of many vehicles used by people of color to gradually achieve socioeconomic, sociopolitical, spiritual, personal, and racial autonomy. Relying on themselves and the chain migration networks of others, these individuals and families decisively abandoned their birthplaces for better wages, quality schools, decent homes, improved lifestyles, advanced social equality, and civil rights in industrializing Houston. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Examines the demise of Philadelphia's Skid Row in Pennsylvania in 1976. Role of the business community in advocating for a rehabilitation program for Skid Row residents that complemented the destruction of their physical environs; Development of Skid Row as an economic and social desolation district during Philadelphia's industrialization; Effects of the changing economic conditions to renewal of the urban district.

Focuses on postwar homebuilding and industrial decentralization in Los Angeles, California. Community description; Challenges of urban expansion; Technological determinists; Establishment of new production facilities; Transformation of work and labor force.

Explores the relationships among industrialization, the location of industry and residential pattern in Montreal, Quebec. Demonstration of the importance of class and occupation in Montreal's residential pattern; Introduction of a methodological approach to social class using a select set of occupations.

Examines the industry structure in Scotland. Factors contributing to the industrialization; Growth of cotton industry; Expansion in the engineering interest in textile machinery.

Focuses on the role of East Europeans in the industrialization of the United States. Description of the urban industrial environment; Reasons for the migration of East Europeans; Economic strategies used by European immigrants.

Examines the interwar Sofia versus the Nazi-Style Garden City in Bulgaria. Assessment on the comprehensive urban plan for the capital based on Amalgam ideas; Factors contributing on the explosive growth of interwar; Impact of the Nazi-Style Garden City and the Muesmann plan on industrial development.

Focuses on the growth of migration in Duisburg, Germany during 1867-1890. Impact of migration on occupational and urban life; Pattern of urban development; Influence of migration on the industrialization of cities.

The bright lights of the Ginza skyline in downtown Tokyo, familiar to many observers of the Asian scene, can blind one to the fact that Tokyo is merely the largest and best known of Japan's nearly 650 cities. Together they house 85 million (or nearly 76%) of the nation's 111 million citizens, who live in crowded habitats where population densities exceed those of Newark and Philadelphia. Despite such crowding, however, Japan's cities are remarkably crime-free, and they operate with an efficiency that American city dwellers find astonishing. The essay that follows is a modest attempt to explain how Japan's cities have reached this state of development. It analyzes economic, social, and political aspects of change in urban Japan since approximately 1800; it describes English-language materials available on the subject; and it suggests some promising topics for future investigation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Discusses the impact of urban growth and industrialization on women's employment in Milan, Italy, at the end of nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century. Pattern of female employment from 1881 to 1901; Reason for fewer women in the labor force in 1911; Percentage female in labor force by industrial categories in Milan in 1911.

Focuses on the social structure of industrial change and urban growth in a small town in France, Le Chambon-Feugerolles in the years between 1870 and 1914. Militancy of Chambonnaire strikes for creation of trade union organizations by skilled, urbanized, artisanal workers; Growth of semiskilled working class due to industrial change; Social condition of industrial workers.