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By the 1960s the urban renewal program was well underway, and it was largely controlled by the downtown planning regime. The San Francisco Redevelopment Agency (SFRA) had cleared over 1,280 acres in the Fillmore (or Western Addition) neighborhood, displacing more than 13,500 people, mostly African Americans. As the built environment of the Mission District deteriorated, local institutions began to worry that the SFRA might be planning something similar for their neighborhood. They also worried that the coming BART stations might trigger speculative displacement. In response, a social service agency called the Mission Neighborhood Centers (MNC) produced a study of the Mission in 1960. The document identified problems with a deteriorating environment and inadequate services, but also identified strengths in the neighborhood's multiethnic character and longstanding institutions.

Neighborhood groups like the Mission Council on Redevelopment and later the Mission Coalition Organization were eager to collaborate with the SFRA. But under urban renewal law, the SFRA was unable to give neighborhood groups veto power over any specific plan. Primarily for this reason, neighborhood groups came out against the plan, eventually succeeding in blocking it. Soon thereafter, Mayor Joseph Alioto nominated the Mission for a grant under Model Cities, a Great Society program that funded neighborhood-based planning efforts. Thus was created the Mission Model Neighborhood Corporation (MMNC), a local planning authority. Collaborating with the SFRA, the MMNC built public housing, began social programs, and had a number of other successes. Though it was a multiethnic organization, it received some challenges from the Latino left, particularly a group called Los Siete de la Raza. However, the chapter argues that the ultimate failure of the organization is best explained by the Nixon administration's defunding of Model Cities.

This chapter addresses the controversies surrounding the issues of unemployment, and relations between police and the community formed the local context for the emergence of the black power movement. The proposal for a Police Affairs Committee immediately turned into a test of authority between the city council and the Oakland Economic Development Council (OEDC). The appearance of the Black Panther Party announced a radical turn in the trajectory of black protest. The campaign for the Model Cities program was the most unified example of political mobilization of the Oakland black community to date, and its ending marked a turning point for the movement. In its aftermath, local organizing for black power took three main paths: bureaucratic alliance, bureaucratic opposition, and independent party organization—the Black Panther Party. By 1972, the Black Panther Party had recovered sufficiently from government harassment and its own factional divisions, and had concentrated its resources in Oakland.

This chapter details the surprising encounter between the neighborhood-based planning groups and the San Francisco Redevelopment Agency (SFRA). The neighborhood groups had originally invited the SFRA to engage in collaborative planning for the Mission District, partly because they viewed the urban renewal program as the best tool to prevent the speculative displacement that might be triggered by the coming BART stations, and partly because they worried that the agency might otherwise try to clear the Mission. In fact, the SFRA had never planned to clear the neighborhood, and it proved willing to collaborate with the new Mission Council on Redevelopment (MCOR). However, problems arose when the SFRA revealed a plan that would have radically transformed the areas immediately surrounding the coming BART stations.

Historically, urbanization has been characterized by population density, durable built environments, governance, specialized economic activities, urban infrastructures, and their rural spheres of influence. This chapter highlights major contemporary patterns, trends, processes, and theories related to these dimensions, with special attention to the relation of central places to surrounding rural areas. Definitional issues related to the different dimensions of urban settlements and contemporary urban patterns are discussed. Theories and policies corresponding to these major characteristics of urban patterns and urbanization processes are presented, beginning with a brief overview of economic spatial theories. Focus is given to central place theory, where cities are conceptualized as central market places providing goods and services to lower-order cities and their rural hinterlands in exchange for food and materials. The impact of advances in technology and infrastructures on global trade connections is discussed, and insights from Castells’ network society are highlighted. Empirical evidence of two urban policies—the compact city model and urban growth management—are reviewed for their connections to central place theory. Published in the Strungmann Forum Reports Series.

This chapter explores the decline of the use of the public utility model for traffic with respect to the “floor space” problem. Street railways added to discontent over traffic problems. By the time Herbert Hoover became U.S. Secretary of Commerce, attraction to a new model known as “associationism” was gaining ground. This model mobilized private interests and gave them a direct role in solving social problems. As a result, the National Chamber and Commerce Department opted to work together in solving the problem of big business, taking into account the problem of traffic. A number of experts gathered at the Hoover Conference and sought to come up with new means to improve traffic rather than traffic surveys or other similar investigations on street conditions. Other measures that were taken include a gasoline tax and parking meters, which eventually led to the free-market model of city traffic.

This chapter explores participation in public administration, specifically in the “Model Cities” program of Philadelphia in the 1960s. It focuses on the intertwined problems of participation and expertise in the case of the Area Wide Council, a group of black citizens who experienced direct, substantial participation (mandated by law and funded by the government) in the re-design of North Philadelphia—and then had it taken away from them. The chapter traces the grammar of participation and asks: what did participants look like before they became experts in participation? What motivated the transition to a participation dependent on contributory autonomy? It focuses on the effects of creating an experimental supplement to representative democracy, and the double bind that legal requirement created for the AWC participants. This double bind resulted in a critique from within—Sherry Arnstein’s famous "ladder of citizen participation". The last part of the chapter focuses on how this critique formed a nascent expertise in participation relying on “technical assistance” and practical approaches, that would become part of a general toolkit of participatory practices.

This chapter discusses the squareness of the ideal city in the Bible. The Bible describes a model city or settlement on four separate occasions, and in each instance it has the form of a square. The ultimate square city is the New Jerusalem, described by both John of Patmos and the prophet Ezekiel as a twelve-gated, walled square The forty-eight Levitical cities described in Numbers 35 were likewise square. And even that archetypal of all biblical settlements, the encampment of the twelve tribes of Israel during their wanderings, was itself arranged as a square. Thus, anyone looking to the Bible for guidance on how to build a community must come to the conclusion that a godly city should be square.

This chapter examines the democratically planned state-sponsored projects that became possible due to the new banner of cooperation between government and grassroots organizers. It first provides an overview of the battle over community control of housing development before discussing a number of New York's War on Poverty initiatives such as the Upper Park Avenue Community Association (UPACA), along with their significance for community-based housing activism. It also considers efforts to involve African Americans in economic development, the involvement of women in grassroots development planning, and the creation of community development corporations (CDCs). Finally, it describes Model Cities, an urban initiative designed to engage “the community” by inviting neighborhood participation in planning and attacking many problems at once. The successful projects showed not only that democratic state-sponsored urban renewal was possible, but that New York's tenant history made a difference.

This chapter follows the post-riots development of black power in Newark as it shifted from a politics based on community participation to one based in community control, a tension central in the history of community action. It tracks the efforts of antipoverty activists to first end the violence, then shape the narrative thereof. Faced with charges that it had played a major role in fomenting the violence and with diminished and redirected federal funding, the UCC proved time and again – most significantly in the wake of Martin Luther King’s assassination – that it was perhaps the most effective agent of peace in the city. It demonstrates that, when Amiri Baraka and his United Brothers organization took aim at City Hall via a decisive turn to electoral politics, they found a ready reservoir of political experience and activists in those who had for the previous four years pursued community action.

This chapter examines the growing attraction of many renewalists towards secularization, that is, in non-religious forms of ministry. As they grew more frustrated with the church’s inability to reorient itself towards renewal, more of these reformers came to believe that their objectives lay not in reforming the church but escaping it. The advent of the War on Poverty provided one obvious route, as its massive infusion of government funds offered opportunities well beyond what the church could provide. Renewalists invested their energies in programs like Model Cities, and encouraged community control over poverty funds. These types of activities were abetted by the popularity of secular theologies, which identified the ultimate form of Christian expression in secular realms. Some renewalists began to speak of post-renewal, the idea that the church was an obsolete institution. A number of underground churches, religious communities divorced from traditional denominations and geared towards secular ends, emerged during this period.

The fall from environmental grace that Mark Twain described was a product of sweeping industrialization at the close of the 19th century. Spurred by the advent of hydroelectric power, a whole new group of commercial schemers flooded the Falls in search of wealth, power, and prestige. “This is an electrical era,” a Niagara booster bragged. “Back in the centuries that are past, we had the stone age, the ice age, etc., but the electrical age is purely the utilization of natural forces by the genius of man.” “Naturally,” he noted, “the first development of electric power was at the source of the greatest quantity of power anywhere to be found on earth, the Falls of Niagara.” That meant Niagara Falls would remain a watchword of industrial expansion far into the future. Among the legion of businessmen, engineers, and investors flocking to the fin de siècle Falls was an unheralded entrepreneur named William Love. After surveying the area in the early 1890s, Love was smitten. The environment he encountered was beautiful and bountiful. He soon unleashed bold plans to build both the world’s greatest hydroelectric power canal and “a model manufacturing city” that might someday encompass millions of people. By offering cheap power to businesses and an array of modern amenities to residents, Love’s Model City would become “the most complete, perfect and beautiful” urban locale “in the world.” As Love told anyone who would listen, his plan was destined to succeed. History knows Love for his dramatic failure. The economic crisis of 1893 undercut investments in Model City, while Love’s tangled business plans killed construction of his power canal. By the early 1900s, Love was long gone. In Model City, located a few miles from the Falls, little remained of his epic vision, save for a few small buildings. Yet in the town of Lasalle, an environmental ruin associated with Model City remained a prominent part of the landscape for many years: “Love’s Canal.” Before Love’s funding evaporated, his workers excavated a portion of a power canal and waterfall that would have been higher and more powerful than the natural Falls.

The crown was always present for London, both as a threat and as a major source of livelihood. The city’s charter and its right to govern its own affairs came from the king. But the relationship between the city and the crown was tenuous. The king could revoke the charter and take the government of London into his own hands, and the king did so on occasion. City officials were quick to quell riots, particularly the gild rivalries that would give the crown an excuse. The royal court and the nobles and bishops who congregated there provided a market for the luxury goods that London imported or produced. Suitors to the courts stayed in London and contributed to its wealth. London, the largest city in England, was a model for other cities. Coronations and royal events passed through London to Westminster, and the city staged lavish welcoming ceremonies.

Driving north on the 290 Expressway from Buffalo to Niagara Falls each day, thousands of cars race alongside the mighty Niagara River. North America's fastest-flowing body of water, the Niagara seems jet-propelled. If the Mississippi is the Father of Waters for its grand length, then the Niagara is its furious little cousin: a short but manic river that, in a span of roughly 30 miles, sprints from Lake Erie to Lake Ontario, with a famous plunge of nearly 200 feet at Niagara Falls. Few visitors ever come away from a tour of Niagara unmoved. "I was in a manner stunned and unable to comprehend the vastness of the scene," Charles Dickens said of his first glimpse of the Niagara River Basin and Falls in the 1840s. "Niagara was at once stamped upon my heart, an image of Beauty; to remain there, changeless and indelible, until its pulses cease to beat, for ever." For Dickens, as for countless others, Niagara Falls exemplifies the American natural sublime. The highway chasing the Niagara River illuminates a different force cutting through Western New York: industrialization. For what was once a scenic landscape astride a beautiful waterway has long since become a poster child of mega-industrial growth. In Buffalo, where the "Niagara" section of the thruway begins, mammoth factory buildings, hulking steel mills, and a cityscape of grain elevators testify to the industrial pathway that made the region a production powerhouse. At Niagara Falls, the road rolls past majestic power canals and generating stations, illuminating the region's (and the nation's) path to hydroelectric energy. The advent of hydroelectric power, as the saying goes, turned night into day and helped fuel the American industrial dream. No wonder area nuns used to tell troublesome teens that they should pray for their souls. If the Soviet Union wanted to take out American industrial power in Cold War times, Buffalo-Niagara was a main target.