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This introduction to this special section, "Cities on Paper: On the Materiality of Paper in Urban Planning," explores the vital role played by paper documents in the practice of urban planning linked to the shaping of modern cities in Europe and the United States during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This introductory essay considers recent literature on the materiality of paper to show the significance of examining the visual and written information transcribed on its surface in concert with assessing how it has been assembled, organized, reproduced, circulated, distributed, and archived. By exploring such uses of paper documents in urban planning practices, such cartography, arboriculture, maintenance, and the production and dissemination of expert knowledge, the five essays in this section demonstrate the relevance of the material culture of paper within the municipal and national bureaucracies that spearheaded dramatic urbanization campaigns in modern cities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The systematization of street tree planting in twentieth-century cities went hand in hand with the development of the modern city's managerial system. In the systematization process, tree planting and care was serialized and standardized. To facilitate these procedures, tree locations and conditions began to be surveyed, planned, and recorded on paper. Focusing on street tree planting in East and West Berlin, this article examines the role of different paper formats, technologies, and representations such as lists, plans, maps, and index and edge-notched cards in the evolution of an increasingly regimented urban arboriculture. Paper was intricately related to both the life and death of the trees that it helped to document. As much as the malleable and variable nature and materiality of street trees contributed to an evolution of paper formats to capture the trees' changeable conditions, so the use of paper to control, regulate, and systematize also contributed to standardizing trees, their planting, and their care. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article closely investigates the unique visual representations of the building plans of late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century Berlin, and emphasizes the agency of the paper plan in the profession and discipline of Städtebau. Following positions in German media theory, the paper plan is understood and theorized as a medium of bureaucracy and the plan drawing as a set of cultural techniques. In doing so, the article traces the refinement of the instruments for regulating the building of the city—from the building plan, to the building zones plan, to the town development plan. It is argued that the paper plans themselves have agency in seeing the city and hence thinking about the city (through their methods of visual representation), and agency in the formation of graphic terms and concepts (derived from the making of building plans). The paper plans mediated visual and verbal knowledge of the city that would have been inconceivable without them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Reviewed: The Papers of Frederick Law Olmsted. Vol. 3: Creating Central Park, 1857-1861. Olmsted, Frederick Law.

This paper retraces the history of Italy's first-generation rent control—a strict system of nominal rent freezes—from its adoption in 1915 to its final dismantling in 1978. It investigates the political and economic reasons why this policy was adopted, removed, intensified, or lightened at different times. In addition, this paper reports data on the evolution of rents in various Italian cities over the period considered, drawing them partly from published statistical sources and partly from archival research. In particular, it presents original data on controlled and uncontrolled rents in nineteen Italian cities between 1953 and 1975 (with gaps), taken from the Istat historical archive. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper seeks to look into the role played by the rulers and the merchant class in the emergence of exchange centers (or market centers) in Western India, particularly Rajasthan and Gujarat, during the early medieval period. The paper tries to examine the combined efforts made by both the ruling class and private individuals in the agrarian expansion, which in turn encouraged exchange (trade and commerce) and ultimately paved way for the rise of different exchange centers in different parts of Western India. The focus is on the rising agricultural productivity, commercial transactions, and initiatives by rulers and merchants, which together provided suitable climate for the emergence of exchange centers. Rulers being aware of the revenue-generating potential of commerce themselves encouraged trade by establishing markets. Not only rulers but the merchants too helped in the growth of trade and commerce during the period of study. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines newspapers, archival collections, interviews, and personal papers to place Richmond, Virginia, at the center of the national debate about public–private revitalization projects. Since World War II, America's urban leaders, led by interracial coalitions of black politicians and white business elites, have used racial capitalism to promise that tax-funded redevelopment projects would enrich their cities, provide better public services, and reconcile the legacy of racist urban planning. Richmond's issues with Project One and the Sixth Street Marketplace in the 1980s, as well as recent issues with the Navy Hill Project, reveals the continuum of political and economic peril that comes with using such plans. Because urban revitalization is supremely profit-driven and shaped by the economic thinking that created disparate levels of white corporate wealth and black urban poverty, it is bound to exacerbate systemic racism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is about the unique spatial arrangement of the capital (Nanjing) and imperial mausoleum (Xiaoling) in fourteenth-century China. According to Confucian principles and traditional practices, the location of tombs should be separated from the space of the living for philosophical and emotional reasons. However, this convention was challenged by the Hongwu emperor (1368–1398), founder of the Ming dynasty (1368–1644), who built his own imperial mausoleum, Xiaoling, within the confines of the capital, an unprecedented act. According to primary sources—ritual texts, gazettes, tour books, and poetry—this innovative capital–mausoleum plan suggests an extension of the pattern by which the Hongwu emperor honored his ancestors through spatial arrangements and incorporated the imperial ancestors into dynasty-building. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

COVID-19 calls for a new understanding of urban landscape and associated living. As an emerging topic, lockdown urbanism involves an unpredictable future where lockdown or quarantine may be a come and go new normal for everyday practice, but the topic itself seems to have escaped historical inquiry. This paper attempts to answer why the strict lockdown is suitable for China by revealing a long and complex history of urbanization and its social and administrative organization. The urban fabric is characterized by a system of urban patterns: enclosed communities, the spatial layout and service distribution of the neighborhood, and the formation of the center. It was also animated by daily ritualistic practices, such as the control of time, quotidian lockdown practice (yejin), and individual ties within the enclosed neighborhood. This paper contributes to a better understanding of the deep history of urban form and the order and logic behind lockdown urbanism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this paper is to discuss the problem of describing an urban plot and to propose a definition that can be used in comparative studies of historic towns. The need for a uniform definition results from comparative research using spatial databases and historical GIS (hGIS). The article discusses the problems in vectorization of plots for the purposes of hGIS analyses, as well as the methods of presenting urban plots on historical plans that have been used so far, on the example of the Historic Towns Atlas series. We compared the results of the analysis with the plot definitions appearing in the literature on urban studies. Based on the literature review and research discussed in the article, we developed and proposed a plot definition for the ontology of historical urban spaces. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Chicago, the "city of neighborhoods," was a center for 1970s community activism. This article uncovers the history of Northwestern University's Center for Urban Affairs (CUA), which worked behind the scenes to create networks—and supply research—that helped Chicago community organizations be so effective. Their work was directed by two veterans of the civil rights movement, John McKnight and Stanley Hallett. Both were committed to "liberating data" and sharing it with community organizations, who used it to remake institutions so that they served rather than exploited surrounding areas. CUA students and faculty pursued research questions raised by community organizations while questioning existing institutional arrangements. CUA activities cast new light on 1970s neighborhood activism in Chicago, which produced innovations in credit, housing, health, municipal resource allocation, and more. Their approach remains critical today, as urban universities again seek models for nonexploitative, mutually beneficial relationships with surrounding communities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Considering the age of socio-ecological crises in which we live, the urgency of understanding the complicated relationship between society and nature is apparent. To achieve this, unfolding the urban metabolism of cities through metabolic flows from the perspective of urban political ecology will grow increasingly essential in the future. This paper aims to explore the concept of urban political ecology as a perspective for understanding emergence of a new urban metabolism in İstanbul in the nineteenth century through metabolic flows of water. The context of "metabolic" emphasizes labor as an agent for the very production of nature as urbanized nature through tap water, waste, and sanitation. It shows the transition and the conflict between the labor-intensive urban metabolism and capital-intensive urban metabolism of İstanbul, which started in the nineteenth century. The metabolic flows of water in terms of infrastructure were affected by the first impacts of foreign capital investments and capitalist relations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyses the rise of a new kind of urban citizenship in the context of the urban crisis of the 1980s: the vigilant citizen, characterized by a view of citizens as possible victims, who assume and are called upon to take responsibility for social safety. Top-down policy explanations insufficiently clarify why the polarized debate over urban petty crime developed into a consensus by the mid-1980s. Tying in with recent trends in urban police history, this paper shows the diversity of bottom-up actors in Amsterdam that helped to, sometimes unintentionally, further a communitarian "social safety" agenda: vigilantes and victim-support groups, the former based in more conservative circles, the latter partly inspired by women advocacy groups. These actors entered into a sometimes-tense dynamic with the police and municipality, which took up the challenge of providing victim support and of educating the public for neighborhood prevention. This slowly yielded results. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Focusing on the neighborhood of Bushwick from the post–World War II (WWII) era to the onset of the neighborhood's gentrification, this paper traces the fundamental significance of race in the policy decisions that led to the evolution of Bushwick from a vibrant middle-class community to one of concentrated poverty and blight by the end of the twentieth century. Drawing on firsthand accounts, senate hearings, court trials, media accounts, as well as the secondary literature, this paper shows how policy actions and inaction led to the inevitable destruction in the neighborhood during the blackout of 1977. Although the blackout marks one of the most turbulent periods in the neighborhood's history, the community's resilience is accentuated throughout the destruction and its aftermath. Today, as Bushwick's residents face a new threat in the form of gentrification, this paper seeks to situate this contemporary development within the historical and ongoing significance of race in urban studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Tucked into strip malls along Brookhurst Street are the scattered agglomeration of restaurants, markets, bakeries, butcher shops, hookah lounges, educational centers, hair salons, and clothing stores catering to groups who come from the Middle East and North Africa. Proliferating over the last twenty-five years, this Anaheim thoroughfare is colloquially known as Little Arabia. The small strip of commerce is supported by the nation's largest Arab population residing throughout Southern California. The emergence of Little Arabia is similar to what scholars refer to as "ethnoburbs," "invisiburbs," and "design assimilated suburbs." Little Arabia, however, represents something different: what this paper refers to as an "ethnoanchor." To illustrate the descriptive utility of the ethnoanchor typology, this paper unpacks the historical, spatial, social, and political dynamics of Little Arabia to illustrate how contemporary migration patterns are influencing suburban regions, collectively illustrating the constitution of a new kind of American dream. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1928, the Committee of Fourteen, New York City's leading private antivice organization, employed a black teacher to conduct a five-month undercover investigation of Harlem's nightlife. It had been ten years since the committee had subjected the neighborhood to such intensive surveillance. Typically explained as the result of racism, that neglect also reflected white investigators' increasing inability to gather information in Harlem. This article explores the work of investigators and the racial dynamics of undercover investigations to show how those difficulties grew from the congregation of waves of new black migrants in the neighborhood and, as Prohibition drew whites to Harlem, blacks' retreat into private spaces, buffet flats, for their leisure. It uses the rich snapshot offered by the black investigator's reports to reveal how, in the 1920s, black prostitutes, rather than being successfully regulated, blended into these new black spaces. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

“This is a Black Paper,” declared BUILD’s statement criticizing the Buffalo Public School system for providing inferior education to black children in Buffalo, New York. Written in 1967 by the community organization, BUILD (which stood for Build Unity, Independence, Liberty, and Dignity), “BUILD Black Paper Number One” was a call for change. Like other black communities in late 1960s America, black Buffalo was caught up in the fervor of the Civil Rights and Black Power Movements. A “Rust Belt” city, Buffalo was hit hard by deindustrialization, which, coupled with unemployment, segregated housing and unequal education, adversely affected its black community. In 1967, a riot exploded in Buffalo’s predominantly black East Side. This article analyzes statements made by black Buffalonians and argues that Black Power thrived in Buffalo in the late 1960s, through community organizations which attempted to address urban issues that negatively affected African Americans in a postindustrial city. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the southern influence and litigation around carceral logic in public education, as evident in the racialized disciplinary codes and police presence in schools that led to the criminalization of youth during desegregation through the 1960s and into the 1970s. Southern school districts and state legislators worked in tandem with law enforcement to increase discipline and surveillance in newly desegregated spaces, changed laws to swiftly prosecute and remove youth from schools, and increasingly targeted youth with harsh disciplinary policies grounded in racist assumptions categorizing Black students as inherently violent. This form of disciplinary power and control presaged federal legislation including the Law Enforcement Assistance Act of 1965 and the Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention Act of 1974, and shaped the foundations of today's anti-Black school discipline policies and police presence in schools. This article explicates how southern schools contributed to a burgeoning carceral logic that shared commonalities across the nation but at the same time were distinct from other regions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

10 "A City Within a City: Great Growth of a Favored District", I New York Tribune i , June 17, 1892; W.E.B. Du Bois, I The Philadelphia Negro i (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999), 5; James Weldon Johnson, "The Harlem Gold Mine", I New York Age i , December 24, 1914; James Weldon Johnson, "Harlem: The Culture Capital", in I The New Negro i , ed. Historical Interpretations of Federal Urban Policy", I City & Community i 9, no. 1 (2010): 13-22; Sulemain Osman's, I The Invention of Brownstone Brooklyn i (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011); Mary Rizzo's, I Come and Be Shocked: Baltimore Beyond John Waters and The Wire i (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2020); Zawadi Rucks-Ahidiana's, "Race and Class in the News: How the Media Portrays Gentrification" (Working Paper Series 2016-2017.82, Institute for the Study of Societal Issues at the University of California, Berkeley, 2018); Carla Shedd's, I Unequal City: Race, Schools, and Perceptions of Injustice i (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2015); and Lynell Thomas's, I Desire and Disaster in New Orleans: Tourism, Race, and Historical Memory i (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014). 3 Adrienne Brown, I The Black Skyscraper: Architecture and the Perception of Race i (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2017); "Appraisal Narratives: Reading Race on the Mid-Century Block", I American Quarterly i 70, no. 2 (2018): 211-34. [Extracted from the article]

Although both praised and contested for its advanced conceptual elaboration and ineffective practical implementation, respectively, participatory planning has largely been considered a Yugoslav national legacy and a point of diversification compared with other similar contexts. However, there has been little research on the roots and features of public participation as observed through the lens of international influences on Yugoslav spatial and urban planning. By identifying the main channels (professional networks and events) and nodes (planning organizations and documents) in the diffusion of participatory planning ideas at both the international and national levels, we trace the evolution of citizen participation discourse in Yugoslavia. Based on archival research of the relevant documents (selected articles in professional journals, decrees, and plans), the paper examines the authenticity of the concept of citizen participation in Yugoslavia to, finally, elucidate the specificities of its implementation in the context of socialist self-management. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Chinese quarters developed significantly during the eighteenth century along the coasts of East and Southeast Asia, exhibiting a common urban milieu in cities such as Manila, Batavia, Hoi An, and Nagasaki. Sharing similarities, they can be found both in states ruled by Asians and by Europeans, allowing for a comparison. This paper aims to prove that urban and architectural approaches of Chinese enclaves in these ports were similar in the eighteenth century and clearly referenced historic water towns of southern China. To do this, historical plans and textual sources of the aforementioned four overseas cities will be used. These results aim to be valuable as an historical basis for studies on acculturation processes in contemporary Chinese quarters. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper situates a ten-year period of political upheaval in addressing the problem of Single Room Occupancy (SRO) housing in Vancouver, Canada, within an epistemic transformation of public health. Until 1970, the Vancouver Health Department exemplified a colonial history of public health in establishing the city's skid road as a cordon sanitaire. But the 1970s saw a sudden fading of the Department's authority just as a more collaborative approach to housing policy was emerging. The sunsetting of sanitary enforcement was driven in part by the arrival of a "new public health" that became primarily concerned with defining public health problems and solutions through the regulation of racialized bodies and behaviors—a cordon thérapeutique. By the 1980s, this shift constituted an epistemic and regulatory abandonment of SRO housing, leading to the accelerated deterioration of the entire housing stock and costing incalculable human suffering and the loss of lives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the development and legacy of nineteenth-century "animal suburbs," focusing on Boston and Brighton, Massachusetts. As domesticated animals were pushed from downtowns—and as large-scale animal industries emerged in the 1800s—urban areas grappled with what to do with livestock populations for urban consumers and markets. Animal suburbs like Brighton marked important developmental forms—marking key changes in human-animal relationships, and also in urban development, law, politics, and environmental change. These animal suburbs had distinctive built environments, ecologies, economies, and social landscapes that shaped development in the nineteenth century and in the many decades that followed. This paper explores the life and death of one animal suburb—Brighton—and shows the centrality of these marginal spaces in explaining why parts of American cities look the way they do today, while also providing insight into developments of nineteenth-century law, political development, and capitalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the archival turn, archives have been widely portrayed as "dominating" institutions, which has led to even community archives being defined as "anti-authority." It is the contention of this paper that this approach misses (1) the way in which DIY archives provide territorial authority for marginalized communities, and (2) the radical potential of such counter-narratives in seeing the city itself as an archive. Outlining both the role of archival authority in community archives and the use of an archival imagination in approaching the city, the paper considers possibilities for urban movements and campaigns, bringing together examples from the Resistance Project, 56a Infoshop, Advisory Service for Squatters, Occupy London, and the Remembering Olive Collective. An approach is forwarded which, in light of the participatory turn in archival studies, reframes the city as an archive, to encourage attentiveness to authority and to produce a capacity to aspire. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article considers the rise of the Ku Klux Klan as a political force in Detroit in the 1924 and 1925 elections. In the 1910s, the Detroit Citizens League had risen in Detroit politics through its practice of the rhetoric of political Protestantism, designed to mobilize Protestant laymen through religious appeals. In the 1920s, this style of politics backfired on the Citizens League: after spending years focusing on Detroit's business elite, Protestants abandoned the Citizens League in droves when that organization backed a Catholic for mayor. By turning to the Ku Klux Klan, many Protestant voters found an organization making the appeals that they had backed a decade before and which was better at incorporating them than the Citizens League. Ultimately, the Citizens League's response to the Klan was complicated both by reluctance to further alienate past supporters and by an inability to unite politically with past foes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article uses the case of the bookstore Librería Colombiana and the broad investment portfolio of their owners—the partnership Camacho Roldán & Tamayo—to show how networks of commodity exchange shaped Bogotá's space during the late nineteenth century and its articulation to the rural and the global. I examine the combined speculative investments of the partnership in books, cows, and land to explain how they turned Librería Colombiana into a landmark in the city and benefited from the credit it yielded to further their social standing and economic power. By siphoning off capital from their hacienda to buy foreign books and urban land during the whirlwind of speculation spurred by the urban renovations processes, Camacho Roldán & Tamayo helped connect Bogotá to a global world of books, altering social and spatial relations, and reinforcing the city's domination over its hinterland. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over recent years, the political critique of the characterization of slums has progressively developed within hegemonic urban planning discourse. In planning history, however, the emergence of slums remains associated with the narrative and geographies of underdevelopment in the context of modernization theory. To deconstruct this narrative and thus contribute to the decolonization of planning discourse, this paper undertakes a historiographic analysis of English-language journal publications dealing with different forms of subaltern urbanism. I show how the concept of "slums" has progressively broadened in meaning to encompass an ever-larger array of derogatory concepts, and that the term "slum" is limited to certain geographical hotspots, thereby contributing to geopolitical biases and knowledge gaps. Through the content analysis of publications, I am able to outline a historical periodization of hegemonic planning themes and proposals addressing slums in diverse geographies, along with critical views on their underlying perspectives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

South Florida developed as an urban gambling resort center that posed both cultural and political challenges to the traditional southern values that animated the state's approach to regulating vice. This article examines the conflicts over vice tourism in South Florida by focusing on the relationship between Governor Spessard Holland and former Miami Beach Mayor Louis "Snet" Snedigar. Snedigar became Holland's undercover informant when the governor cracked down on illegal gambling as part of his effort to fund the state's old-age pension program by taxing bets placed at horse tracks in South Florida. By exploring the entanglement between a conservative southern state and a "liberal" urban outpost, this article illustrates how the southern approach to urban development forestalled the emergence of South Florida as a recreational gambling resort comparable to Las Vegas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Austin, Texas, has long been a fast-growing city associated with high technology, live music, creative economic sectors, and an abundance of cultural capital. These traits, along with its location in the Sunbelt, usually explain its rapid and consistent growth. This essay argues that an artificial abundance of water, created by a series of dams and reservoirs built from 1938 to 1960, is an important factor in Austin's development. Dams and water incentivized real estate development, provided power and recreational opportunities, and created an attractive image that leaders used to promote the city. Rapid growth caused by artificial abundance, however, also masked the city's environmental risk and threatens to undermine its resilience as climate events like droughts become more frequent and intense. Thus, technocratic solutions to urban environmental problems often become problems themselves as their impacts on the landscape become naturalized over time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the management of London's Victoria Park over a fifty-year period from when it was laid out at the beginning of the 1840s to 1890. It investigates questions raised by other recent studies about the relationship between public and private and between the individual and the population within public parks. This is achieved by a consideration of two separate but interlinked aspects of the park: its spatiality (its relationship to the city) and its functionality (its relationship to the individual). By examining these aspects, a palimpsest of different conceptions of Victoria Park can be uncovered, which in turn directly relate to the potential field of actions in the real space of the park. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the early twentieth century, St. Pauli was not the only place in Hamburg to go to have fun. In the city's East End, a wide range of pubs, clubs, and ballrooms turned working-class quarters into a vibrant pleasurescape. Based on historical-topographic and archival research, this paper explores eastern Hamburg's forgotten pleasurescape with the aim of drawing attention to pleasure culture as a social driving force and of redressing the balance in the city's one-sided history of pleasure culture. In the course of the study, the term "pleasurescape" is more clearly nuanced and geo-spatial historical mapping further explored as a tool for urban history. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Examines Cleveland's failed attempt to make the 1949 housing act, or the Wagner-Ellender-Taft Act, work to halt the decline of the city from 1949 to 1958. Details on Cleveland's urban planning; Efforts taken by Ernest J. Bohn to push Cleveland's urban renewal and public housing; Career and achievements of Bohn.

The architect Burnham Kelly hired social scientist Leon Festinger to analyze friendship among residents living in veteran housing at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1946. Festinger accomplished this by linking friendship to mundane social events—such as neighbors chatting in common courtyards—and he attributed these events to the subtle but meaningful ways that architecture organized people in space. In studying social relations between neighbors, Festinger wondered if class or racial attitudes played a role in whether or not tenants became friends. Festinger framed his housing study in apolitical terms, but his research provided a methodological framework for later analyses of desegregated public housing that had major political consequences. These studies of racially integrated housing found their way into the landmark case of Brown v. Board of Education, where they provided evidence for the plaintiff's claim that desegregation could be accomplished peacefully. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The recent history of urban public libraries reveals significant changes in the way librarians, city officials, and patrons understood the value of public institutions. Branch libraries in the South Bronx during New York City's financial crisis of the 1970s reveal both the dramatic and seemingly minute developments through which the city shifted toward neoliberalism. This article draws on archives of the New York Public Library and the papers of Local 1930 (The New York Public Library Guild, AFSCME District Council 37). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

After his election in 1973, Los Angeles's first African American mayor, Tom Bradley, worked to implement reforms that would increase civilian oversight and accountability of the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD). Ensuring procedural fairness that treated all residents equally, Bradley and other liberals believed, would lead to reductions in police harassment, abuse, and shootings. Placing their faith in the power of government to effectively manage the police allowed liberals to pledge both strong support for tough law enforcement and propose police reforms. This liberal law-and-order, however, did not result in similar police reforms, such as civilian review, pursued in other Democratic-run cities. No event demonstrated this limitation of Bradley's liberal law-and-order approach to police reform as the Rodney King beating and the 1992 Los Angeles rebellion. Rather than demonstrating the failure of liberal reform, Los Angeles shows how liberal law-and-order facilitated the expansion of police authority after the 1960s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The displacement of working-class residents from center to periphery constitutes a crucial element of late-nineteenth-century urbanization. Yet urban historiography has paid little attention to how this process was perceived by those most directly affected. Analyzing primary source material from late-nineteenth-century Germany, this article argues that working-class urbanites opposed suburbanization not only because of their jobs or to remain close to places of entertainment and leisure. Rather, the nascent working-class movement also criticized suburbanization because they feared it jeopardized opportunities for political participation and collective action. Against this backdrop, I argue that contemporary discussions around the "Right to the City" differ considerably from earlier rhetoric. In particular, I show that working-class communities suffering from displacement in present-day cities are deprived of some of the most influential framings of the past. The paper, thus, illustrates how interdisciplinary perspectives open new avenues for critical research on notions of urban belonging. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the urban politics that led to the outbreak of the Newburgh, New York, welfare controversy in 1961. It uncovers the intricate interplay between race, place, and poverty that led to the early backlash against social welfare from the immediate postwar years to the early 1960s. Newburgh officials engineered their welfare reform as a political response to the economic, demographic, and urban transformations the city underwent in the 1950s. Race was central to their concerns as they scapegoated newly arrived African American migrants and blamed them for the city's population loss and slowing economy. Welfare reform served at once as a tool for migratory, demographic, and racial regulation. The Newburgh story demonstrates that welfare regulation was used by city officials to enforce racial hierarchies in the Jim Crow North and suggests that city politics should be taken into greater account in the history of the American welfare state. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Given the size and importance of Chicago's Polish community, the Chicago story, as pridefully told in this book, stands in for the history of Polish America, interweaving the affairs of neighborhood parishes and local organizations with the general history of Poles in the United States, which those parishes and organizations played a great role in making. Pacyga demonstrates that a Polish Chicago still exists, but shows that it is a new Polish Chicago comprising Solidarity- and post-Solidarity-era immigrants and ethnic Poles who have moved to Chicago's suburbs. But wishful liberal nostrums which paper over the long history of racialism in America or rely upon rainbow fantasies to transcend it fail to appreciate how deeply entrenched white racism still is in American society and American institutions; how deeply white supremacism has penetrated portions - perhaps large - of contemporary America, despite no less palpable racial progress; and how difficult it will be to root these out when, it appears (in the wake of the 2020 presidential election) that sizable numbers of white Americans would rather keep racial matters in America much as they have been since the end of slavery days. "Chicago's Polonia lives on", Pacyga writes, "not simply in memory but as a vibrant Polish American community in both the city and suburbs... Chicago's Polonia has been yet again resurrected anew" (p. 267). [Extracted from the article]

In late 1960s Chicago, radical black police officers opposed to police brutality created the Afro-American Patrolmen’s League (AAPL). This paper describes the political vision of the AAPL and that of the contemporaneous, path-breaking black television series Bird of the Iron Feather, which was inspired by the AAPL and created with AAPL members’ input. Both used their positions within white-dominated institutions to present black perspectives on white power. The AAPL and Bird also analyzed gangs, both black and white, as functional parts of a larger, white-dominated, urban “machine” political structure. Their analyses of structural racism, and their understanding of the diverse responses of black Americans living within such a system, uncovered the complexities of black urban life in the mid-twentieth century. Together, they stand as sophisticated expressions of a popular black power vision that eschewed romantic images of revolutionary resistance in favor of careful analysis of and resistance to personal and structural white violence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores implications of such social divisions as race, class, as well as gender in politics in the United States during the 1990s and sheds new light on Bill Clinton's rationale for welfare reform. The present study is an attempt to figure out to what extent racism, classism, and sexism influenced Bill Clinton's decision to sign Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA) in 1996. In our analysis, we draw upon primary sources, written documents, or records such as President Bill Clinton's autobiographical memoir My Life, his book with Al Gore Putting People First, and other texts from his political speeches. Our paper endeavors to fill gaps in the existing literature on welfare reform concerning implications of race, gender, and class issues in welfare reform legislation in 1996. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the struggle for control over Rocky Mount's Community Action Program (CAP)—Nash-Edgecombe Economic Development (NEED)—as a turning point in a longstanding urban conflict. For decades, white businessmen and government officials had repeatedly blocked African Americans from using federal policy innovations to promote racial equality and black economic advancement. Implementation of the city's War on Poverty initially followed these well-established patterns. But by the summer of 1967, working-class African American neighborhood organizations, supported by federal and state agencies, loosened the white political establishment's grip on NEED, secured improvements in rental housing regulation, and increased their role within the city's evolving black freedom movement. In exploring these transformations, this essay argues that the CAP should be reevaluated from the perspective of how it altered the course of local economic and political struggles, and how local contests over implementation of the CAP reshaped the War on Poverty. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay seeks to understand the origins, development, and consequences of school policing and student discipline at Franklin K. Lane High School in New York City. During the fevered years of the late 1960s, perhaps no other school in the country saw more tension, violence, repression, and resistance. What took place there represented a kind of denouement in the city's decades-long battles over race, class, policing, discipline, desegregation, community control, and student rights. In centering the happenings at Lane, this essay demonstrates how the logics and politics of school policing and student discipline were forged not only from the top down, by government officials at the highest levels, but also from the bottom up, in the complex interplay between the parents, student organizers, teachers, and administrators at the school. It also demonstrates how city officials leveraged individual school conflicts into broader carceral expansions that affected the entire public education system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A second underrepresented group is the pre-school children cared for by the CAS; Staller ignores this population for similar reasons, that CAS and the NBLH were primarily concerned with adolescents. Prior to 1884, most CAS placement records were haphazard, incoherent, and provided minimal information with, "one- or two-line summations of the rare answers to those letters and the almost equally rare visits by agents", according to historian Stephen O'Connor.[15] Only after the death of Charles Loring Brace in 1890 did the CAS begin providing documentation covering placed children, their biological families, foster families, and CAS agents. She found little evidence of CAS hostility toward parents or families of NBLH residents, a finding which conflicts with much of the recent historiography which describes CAS officials aggressively removing Catholic children from their homes or without parental consent.[13] In addition, the CAS found employment for many youth in metropolitan New York, not just the American West. A report by social worker Georgia Ralph in 1922 which examined CAS placements from 1865 to 1905 offered conflicting evidence about the success of CAS programs.[16] Staller provides no evidence challenging any of these earlier criticisms of the CAS. [Extracted from the article]

This study analyzes slum journalism in the British provincial press and reveals that it continued to be a major theme until well into the twentieth century. Instead of the rather moralizing reporting of the earlier nineteenth century, this journalism used the device of civic shame to pressurize local government into taking action on slums as a matter of public health. It examines the discourses that resulted from civic shame in two newspapers—the Manchester Guardian and the Birmingham Daily Gazette —and challenges the idea that interest in reporting local political matters decreased during this period. Civic shame is shown to work in two ways—offering detailed vignettes of aspects of slum life based on personal observation and showing (some) slum-dwellers as worthy of better living conditions, and blaming the local authority directly for failing to address the problem. In this way, later slum writing sought to appeal directly to the reader not just to impart facts but to stimulate empathy and to develop a desire for action. Such in-depth studies of a particular social issue sought to address the local authorities directly, to apportion blame and to use slum writing as a tool for social action. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article I describe and discuss my attempt to design an entire course around a shared class project of conducting applied local environmental history research leading to an online book. Although I am an environmental historian, this course draws heavily on urban history as well. I start with the concrete details of my current course design, followed by some reflections on my previous attempts at teaching this course. Ultimately, I believe that both urban and environmental history courses would benefit from attempting to get our students into the field and conducting local research that links physical places to written documents and narratives. This provides the students the opportunity to connect history with physical places that they can visit and experience. We would be remiss if we did not use this inherent advantage that we have as urban and/or environmental historians. Through this "field history," we can reach students and teach them how to truly engage in the practice and art of history. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1967, black residents of Asheville's public housing complexes issued a challenge to the Asheville Housing Authority. Proclaiming "we are human and we want our freedom," tenants demanded a new relationship to the institution that governed their lives in this southern Appalachian city. The Asheville rent strike began in 1967, and with this campaign, low-income black residents punctured the oppressive political and social dynamics of the city that had rendered them invisible. With this strike, tenants articulated claims for justice based on a recognition of their dignity and a correction to unfair treatment. Despite the power of institutionalized racism and the dynamics of paternalism, black tenants flipped the script to challenge the deeply ingrained system of white paternalism that structured their daily lives. Ultimately, tenants at Hillcrest and Lee Walker Heights challenged the very nature of black leadership in Asheville, North Carolina, by taking on the city government. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In China, the field of urban renewal is one of the core concepts within the disciplines of urbanism and architecture. After decades of economic growth, many issues have been added to the field of urban development, which has diversified significantly. To comprehensively understand the developmental context of urban renewal in China, this paper starts from the urban and architectural disciplines, combined with the international background of urban regeneration, and systematically analyzes the progress of urban renewal in China from 1985 to 2017. Four major research themes are summarized and divided into three stages of development with the aim of chronologically sorting the contexts and trends of urban renewal in the thirty years since China's "Open Door Policy." [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Martin Wagner (1885-1957) was a leading city planner of the Weimar Republic and chief planner for Greater Berlin from 1926 to 1933. This essay addresses the role of statistical data visualizations in early twentieth-century planning and, specifically, in Wagner's conception of the city as a financial organism subject to managerial-governmental intervention. I argue that for Wagner modern techniques of social data calculation and representation, such as the balance sheet and the graph, became key instruments of planning by translating urban territory into an avatar of the metropolitan economy. Heuristic devices, such "paper cities" of data also had a rhetorical function, both in Germany and in the United States, Wagner's adoptive home after 1938—serving to publicize planning expertise and frame the discipline's intellectual and political legitimation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]