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URBAN RENEWAL: A Case Study
The Urban Renewal Act of 1949 set in motion urban renewal projects in cities across the United States. Urban renewal, especially at the outset, was a program designed to clear large areas of “slum” housing to make way for modern develop-ments. In general, the cleared land was sold to private developers for use in new developments designed to extend the central business district or to attract middle income residents. In either case, the former residents of the area were relocated outside the renewal district. Such major projects as Lincoln Center in New York City, the Civic Arena in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and the New Jersey College of Medicine and Dentistry in Newark, New Jersey, are the result of urban renewal efforts.
At the outset, urban renewal inspired the imagination of the country and a broad coalition of industry, labor, and community groups supported the program. AS urban renewal unfurled, however, commuity opposition grew. Jacobs’s landmark book, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, was the manifesto of the antiurban renewal movement; it lambasted the social and esthetic damage th program was causing and called for alternative, more organic approaches to the modernization of cities. In contrast to the obliterative approach of urban renewal, jacobs and colleagues proposed a “sparrow principle,” arguing that
Not a sparrow should fall, That meant that no planning that the neighborhood did should hurt anyone in the neighborhood. Not a person, not a household, not a business, nothing should be at the expense of others. We would not turn into predatory animals for the purpose of some grand planning or somebody’s favor.
Unexamined in Jacob’s, work but of great concern to many other observers of the urban renewal story, was the fact that urban renewal was a program that descended disproportionately on African-Americans. In 1961, for example, African Americans were 10% of the US population, but 66% of residents of areas slated for urban renewal. A particular hardship of Urban Renewal was that it strengthened segregation. African Americans were forced out of the renewal areas, but only were able to move to other ghetto areas. In some places, these ghetto areas had no vacant housing. This meant that families were forced to share accommodations, creating severe overcrowding. Public housing was a partial solution to the problem of overcrowding, but not to the problem of segreation. Rather, projects were build to confine blacks to ghetto areas. Indeed, urban renewal intensified segregation by destroying integrated communities and creating segregated ones.
Dr. Mindy Fullilove an colleagues visited 6 US cities to study urban renewal. They interviewed more than a hundred people examined archives, collected photographs, attended community meetings and walked the affected neighborhoods.
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