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Municipal Governments, Socialist Land Masters, and Urban Land Battles

You‐tien Hsing

in The Great Urban Transformation: Politics of Land and Property in China

Chapter 2 discusses local politics at the municipal government level. It focuses on land battles in the urban core between high‐ranking state units (or “socialist land masters”) ... More

Chapter 2 discusses local politics at the municipal government level. It focuses on land battles in the urban core between high‐ranking state units (or “socialist land masters”) and municipal governments. It argues that while the socialist land masters occupy premium land parcels inherited from the planned economy, the municipal government's authority is reinforced by a modernist discourse, Western urban planning doctrines, and recent policies that grant authority over state‐owned urban land to the territorial government. Rather than settling the matter of power in the city, however, municipal leaders' granted authority is tested and defined by their political, regulatory, organizational, and moral authority in negotiations with those above, within, and below them. The municipal government's regulatory capacity is especially challenged by a fragmented real estate industry that includes players from state, non‐state, and hybrid sectors.Less

Grassroots Resistance: Property Rights and Residents' Rights

You‐tien Hsing

in The Great Urban Transformation: Politics of Land and Property in China

Chapter 3 examines two types of grassroots resistance in Beijing triggered by inner‐city redevelopment. One concerns property rights protests launched by pre‐Revolution private ... More

Chapter 3 examines two types of grassroots resistance in Beijing triggered by inner‐city redevelopment. One concerns property rights protests launched by pre‐Revolution private homeowners; the other focuses on residents' rights protests by long‐term inner‐city residents displaced by redevelopment projects. The homeowners succeeded in recovering their pre‐Revolution homeownership, and their protests quickly escalated to challenge the more fundamental issue of the state's exclusive claim over land and land rents. The displaced residents, on the other hand, framed their grievances and demands not as property owners, but as residents whose livelihood is rooted in the inner city. While both groups used legalistic and territorial strategies to negotiate with the state and to expand mobilization networks, the expansion of their demands from property rights to residents' rights is particularly meaningful in the pursuit of citizenship rights.Less

Who Holds Final Authority?: The San Francisco Redevelopment Agency and the Mission Council on Redevelopment

Ocean Howell

in Making the Mission: Planning and Ethnicity in San Francisco

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 ... More

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.Less

Economic Development Policy, Regional and Local: The Iron Range Resources and Rehabilitation Board

Jeffrey T. Manuel

in Taconite Dreams: The Struggle to Sustain Mining on Minnesota's Iron Range, 1915-2000

Chapter four describes the Iron Range Resources and Rehabilitation Board and economic development policy on the Iron Range. The IRRRB was formed in the 1940s to diversify the Iron Range's economy and ... More

Chapter four describes the Iron Range Resources and Rehabilitation Board and economic development policy on the Iron Range. The IRRRB was formed in the 1940s to diversify the Iron Range's economy and ensure that tax money from mining was spent on long-term investments. Yet the IRRRB was enmeshed in controversy from its birth. In the late 1950s and 1960s it became a model for a short-lived national agency designed to support declining regions: the Area Redevelopment Administration (ARA). This brief federal program was soon abandoned. The IRRRB has also struggled to develop new industries on the Iron Range, often coming under fire for well-publicized boondoggles.Less

Urban Renewal and the Prospects of a Free and Open Society

Brandon K. Winford

in John Hervey Wheeler, Black Banking, and the Economic Struggle for Civil Rights

Chapter 6 demonstrates the limitations of “black business activism” during the 1960s while focusing on urban renewal in Durham, North Carolina. Durham’s urban renewal program began in 1958, as a ... More

Chapter 6 demonstrates the limitations of “black business activism” during the 1960s while focusing on urban renewal in Durham, North Carolina. Durham’s urban renewal program began in 1958, as a consequence of the Housing Act of 1954 and the state’s fledgling Research Triangle Park (RTP) initiative. The urban renewal program paved the way for an infrastructure that ultimately provided linkages in the physical landscape between RTP, the University of North Carolina, Duke University, North Carolina Central University, and North Carolina State University. Wheeler became the lone black member on the Durham Redevelopment Commission, the group responsible for administering the Bull City’s urban renewal program. I argue that, in part, Wheeler’s support for the federally funded urban redevelopment program fit within his own framework of how best to implement the gains already being won by the civil rights movement. The chapter also examines the “War on Poverty” in North Carolina in the context of Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society. It does so through trying to better understand Wheeler’s involvement with the North Carolina Fund (NC Fund), an antipoverty agency created by Governor Terry Sanford in 1963. The Fund became the model for President Johnson’s national reform agenda.Less

Creating a Unified Business Elite

Joel Rast

in The Origins of the Dual City: Housing, Race, and Redevelopment in Twentieth-Century Chicago

This chapter describes the origins of the Chicago Central Area Committee, an organization created in 1956 to provide a unified voice for the downtown corporate community in civic affairs. Prior to ... More

This chapter describes the origins of the Chicago Central Area Committee, an organization created in 1956 to provide a unified voice for the downtown corporate community in civic affairs. Prior to 1956 the downtown business community was fragmented, with no single organization representing downtown interests as a whole. By the mid-1950s, certain business leaders saw this as a growing problem. The passage of the Illinois Blighted Act in 1947 and the federal Housing Act of 1949 ushered in a series of slum clearance projects in the city’s central area sponsored by various neighborhood groups. Business leaders grew alarmed as these projects were introduced in piecemeal fashion, unconnected to any broader vision for downtown redevelopment. Business unity was forged through political struggles over concrete planning initiatives in which business elites became increasingly cognizant of their collective interests in the city’s slum clearance and redevelopment program.Less

The Material Frame

Walter Armbrust

in Martyrs and Tricksters: An Ethnography of the Egyptian Revolution

This chapter discusses the material frame of Tahrir Square. As a space, it has been shaped by the political-economic policies of the past four decades, which essentially turned it into an antihuman ... More

This chapter discusses the material frame of Tahrir Square. As a space, it has been shaped by the political-economic policies of the past four decades, which essentially turned it into an antihuman space, nominally suitable only as a “nonplace” that people passed through. A liberalized economy under the umbrella of a state that systematically redistributed income upward shaped demands for “bread, freedom, and social justice” as surely as it walled off Bulaq from communication with its urban surroundings, segregated Garden City to protect the imperial agents of the “Washington consensus,” and prepared downtown for private redevelopment. The causes of the revolution were inscribed in the urban fabric of its primary theater. It should be emphasized that the revolution-era character of Tahrir Square is incomprehensible without linking it to the growth of the formal parts of the expanding city, specifically the suburbs and their gated communities. But it is equally incomprehensible without similarly linking it to the even more significant growth of the informal parts of the city, and indeed the more general character of informality in many spheres of life, most significantly labor, which was systematically made precarious by the same design that poured resources into the new cities and slated Bulaq for extinction. However, the quotidian antihuman Tahrir Square depicted in the chapter has greater depth as a performance space than one might think.Less

The Destructive Character: Renewal and Memory

Michael P. Roller

in An Archaeology of Structural Violence: Life in a Twentieth-Century Coal Town

Several planning documents connected to redevelopment efforts of the last quarter of the twentieth century are examined in chapter 7 in combination with drastic changes in the landscape of the town ... More

Several planning documents connected to redevelopment efforts of the last quarter of the twentieth century are examined in chapter 7 in combination with drastic changes in the landscape of the town and altered community social interactions. I assert that urban renewal resulted not only in drastic changes in the material and economic landscape, but more importantly, was also a process of subjectivization. Increasingly residents subjected each other to bureaucratic demands suggesting that, at least tactically, they had adopted the language of neoliberalism--renewal, and management--enunciating a new community comprised of atomized individuals adopting entrepreneurial attitudes to space, labor, and governance. At stake was the capacity for the materiality of landscape to remember, reproduce, and channel social relations in a manner responsive to the exigencies of uncertain economy.Less

Neighborhood Nonprofits Tap Outside Resources for Development

Carolyn T. Adams

in From the Outside In: Suburban Elites, Third-Sector Organizations, and the Reshaping of Philadelphia

This chapter examines how community nonprofit organizations are mobilizing substantial outside funding, including government support, to preserve and rebuild disadvantaged neighborhoods in greater ... More

This chapter examines how community nonprofit organizations are mobilizing substantial outside funding, including government support, to preserve and rebuild disadvantaged neighborhoods in greater Philadelphia. It shows that actors and institutions situated beyond the city limits play an important supporting role in the urban redevelopment work undertaken by community-based nonprofits. These outsiders exert influence through community development financial institutions whose resources are helping in the process of rebuilding neighborhoods. This chapter explains how neighborhood redevelopment became a nonprofit responsibility and how community organizations obtain investment capital. It considers “walking-around money” used by legislators in Pennsylvania to help community development corporations and other nonprofits carry out projects in their districts. It also asks whether community reinvestment has been effective in reshaping the city.Less

Latino as Worker: The Changing Politics of Race in the City and the Neighborhood

Ocean Howell

in Making the Mission: Planning and Ethnicity in San Francisco

In the immediate postwar period, there grew a sharp divergence between the municipal government and the institutions of the Mission District when it came to ideas about planning and urban life. ... More

In the immediate postwar period, there grew a sharp divergence between the municipal government and the institutions of the Mission District when it came to ideas about planning and urban life. Nowhere was this divergence more pronounced than around the subject of race. While citywide agencies operated under discriminatory policies and assumptions, the institutions of the Mission District became more racially egalitarian than they had ever been. The Merchants, local Catholic parish churches, and social service providers all began to view Latinos as a racial minority, but also surprisingly, to welcome them as such. The growing acceptance of the neighborhood's multiethnicity would prove an invaluable asset in the planning debates of the following decade.Less

A “Salvable Neighborhood”: Urban Renewal, Model Cities, and the Rise of a Social Planning Regime

Ocean Howell

in Making the Mission: Planning and Ethnicity in San Francisco

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 ... More

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.Less

The Return to the City within a City: The Mission Coalition Organization and the Devolution of Planning Power

Ocean Howell

in Making the Mission: Planning and Ethnicity in San Francisco

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 ... More

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.Less

The Legacy Effect of Squatter Settlements on Urban Redevelopment

Ignacio A. Navarro and Geoffrey K. Turnbull

in Urbanization and Development: Multidisciplinary Perspectives

The chapter presents a theoretical model that seeks to answer the question of why former squatter settlements tend to upgrade/redevelop at a slower pace than otherwise similar settlements originating ... More

The chapter presents a theoretical model that seeks to answer the question of why former squatter settlements tend to upgrade/redevelop at a slower pace than otherwise similar settlements originating in the formal sector. We argue that squatter settlers' initial strategy to access urban land creates a ‘legacy effect’ that curtails settlement upgrading possibilities even after the settlements are granted property titles. This chapter tests our model using the case of Cochabamba, Bolivia, and obtains results consistent with the theoretical model prediction. The chapters's results suggest that the commonly used ‘benign neglect while keeping the threat of eviction’ policy has profound impacts on how land is developed in the informal sector and this poses costly consequences for local governments after legalization.Less

Wresting the New From the Once Modern

in The Third City: Chicago and American Urbanism

This chapter examines urban redevelopment in Chicago. It explores the strategies used to replan and rebuild local public housing communities and the logic of public housing redevelopment in ... More

This chapter examines urban redevelopment in Chicago. It explores the strategies used to replan and rebuild local public housing communities and the logic of public housing redevelopment in contemporary Chicago. It also evaluates the neighborhood impacts of housing development on street-level redevelopment. This chapter also highlights the problem with mixed-income neighborhood development in Chicago and the urbanist builders' violation of Jane Jacobs' precepts.Less