Search Results

This chapter examines the project of the ‘new urban right’, highlighting the role of neoliberal think tanks and their ‘organic intellectuals’ in the development of new policy frames and strategies. It begins with the right's narration of urban crises in post-1975 New York City before examining the neoliberal makeover of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. During this time, welfarist modes of urban governance have been displaced by a dogmatic (but at the same time inventive) form of neoliberal urbanism, based on the moral reregulation of the poor, together with state-assisted efforts to reclaim the city for business, the middle classes, and the market. Yet neoliberal urbanism has also been an adaptive project, evolving over time and space: if the shift in the ideational climate was a slow, incremental, and largely endogenous one in New York, it roared in from out of town, with violent intensity, in New Orleans.

This chapter examines some of the new media technologies of fear that emerged in urban Delhi during the postcolonial period, using the events of the Monkeyman panic as a point of departure. In 2001, Delhi was deluged by stories of a monkey-like creature that attacked people at night. These accounts, which combined both terror and the carnivalesque, originated almost exclusively from the proletarian and lower-middle-class neighborhoods of East Delhi and the nearby suburbs of Ghaziabad and Noida. Almost immediately a frenzy of media effects began with regular television and news reports, daily sightings, and television interviews given by victims of the so-called “Monkeyman.” The chapter explores how new technologies of fear, which intervene through media effects, and cultures of viral media proliferation combined to create productive situations of danger and an urban crisis that constantly exposed the fragility of institutions of power in Delhi in the 1990s.

This chapter explores the Republican response to the ‘urban crisis’ of the mid-to-late 1960s. Specifically, it shows how conservative Republicans used the crisis – and particularly the violent uprisings and riots - to oppose further urban anti-poverty programmes and to advocate for ‘law and order’. Nonetheless, the chapter explains why a small band of moderate and progressive Republicans were spurred by the crisis into saving Johnson’s War on Poverty when it looked set to be scrapped in 1967.

This chapter addresses the question of whether a society should banish or not. It explores the possible alternatives to banishment and stresses the need to decrease the economic and social inequality that supports the present urban crisis. This chapter also shows that banishment mostly works to expand the criminal justice system and decrease both the rights bearing capacity and life circumstances of those who are targeted for banishment.

By the late 1960s decades of disinvestment in American cities, combined with the refusal of insurance companies to provide coverage for their residents, had spawned a national urban crisis. This chapter charts the role of the insurance industry in creating the crisis, and the strategies pursued by life and property and casualty companies to prevent regulation and combat charges of discrimination during the late 1960s and 1970s. In hopes of protecting their investment autonomy, life insurers launched a two billion-dollar Urban Investments Program in 1967. The program failed to ameliorate discriminatory conditions that fueled the urban crisis, but succeeded in preventing passage of legislation that would force the industry to more equitably distribute its investments. Facing criticism for denying insurance coverage to urban residents through a process known as redlining, property and casualty companies joined forces to successfully defend their risk rating practices. This defense rested on the depoliticization of risk via claims that industry underwriting decisions were both fair and based on objective calculation.

George Romney announced his resignation from HUD after Nixon’s reelection in November 1972, citing the lack of integrity and honesty in politics as his reason. Nixon declared the urban crisis over despite the fact that HUD had met very few of its goals and certainly had not eradicated urban poverty. With Romney’s departure, funding and construction of affordable housing ceased and several community improvement programs were eliminated. Nixon cut billions from affordable housing and urban renewal programs despite the fact the funds had already been appropriated by Congress. Ultimately, Nixon claimed that housing issues should be solved by more local authorities. Section 8 was introduced to allow privately owned businesses to rent to public housing recipients. Unfortunately, section 8 vouchers were often not enough to move people out of inadequate housing, and private owners were not obligated to accept section 8 vouchers.

The introduction outlines the focus, scope, and significance of the book, introducing the Black activists, educators, parents, and students who navigated, challenged, and contributed to the urban political and educational landscape from mid-twentieth century civil rights struggles through the recent corporate reorganization of the public sphere. Black women’s political and intellectual labor powered movements for racial justice and is centered in this discussion of Black politics, social movements, and education reform. The introduction explains how the book presents a different account of Black politics and urban communities in the period after the 1960s by challenging interpretations of urban decline and “urban crisis.” It also explains the historical and contemporary importance of education as a site of struggle that reveals the boundaries of U.S. democracy and changes in the relationship between citizens and the state. The introduction outlines how historical considerations of racial liberalism, the Great Migration, the New Deal, labor, Black protest, machine politics, deindustrialization, the politics of Black achievement, desegregation, self-determination, equity, and education reform inform subsequent chapters.

This chapter describes how the three larger industrial cities of Pittsburgh, Baltimore, and Philadelphia responded to the urban crisis. It explains that programmes of renewal evolved in US cities over the long period of urban decline, often driven by extreme racial problems and a gradual recognition that suburban sprawl was itself a problem. Partnerships between the public, private, and community sectors have emerged to drive change. The chapter also considers the recovery prospects of three smaller U.S. cities: Louisville, Chattanooga, and Akron.

Overlapping chronologically with the preceding chapter, chapter 4 explores a localized “punitive turn” in Chicago’s policing arrangement during the late 1940s and especially in the 1950s. Driven by grassroots pressure from white citizens, the exposure of corruption both politically and within the police department, and the rise of the famed Daley machine, police power and the size of the police department itself both expanded dramatically during this period. Once elected, Daley radically expanded the number of police officers employed by the city. Those officers were also invested with increasing amounts of discretion, leading to the expanded use of stop and frisk and other tools that disproportionately were used against Black citizens. In a department lacking meaningful accountability mechanisms, this increased discretion also led to widespread accusations against police that they were engaged in the illegal detention of citizens and also of torture. The chapter also details the early onset of the urban crisis, especially on the West Side as neighborhoods there transitioned from white to Black, and an early-1950s “war on drugs” that police waged on the Black South Side.

This chapter compares the recovery of American weak market cities with those in Europe. It provides a general overview of urban-development phases in the old industrial U.S. cities that struggled with industrial decline and urban crisis. These include Pittsburgh, Baltimore, Philadelphia, Louisville, Chattanooga, and Akron. The chapter explains how these cities developed into industrial giants and how they were subsequently hit by industrial decline.

New York’s SoHo neghborhood has become a paradigm for artist-driven urban development in former idnsutrial neighborhoods. Yet, less is understood about how artists shaped SoHo’s transition from industrial area to bohemian enclave to upper-income neighborhood. Historians have only begun to examine the origins of post-WWII gentrification in American cities, and scholarly theories of gentrification and the “creative” class rarely treat artists as historical actors. A historical study of SoHo demonstrates how artists’ housing needs, political organizing, entrepreneurship, and the novel arguments they created about the role of the arts in the city generated new forms of urban living and altered scholarly understanding of the importance of the arts in urban life.

This chapter traces the failure of different bond proposals designed to finance development in Hunters Point, a poor and working-class black neighborhood in southeast San Francisco. It takes these failures as both the culmination of one tragedy, and presaging another. The first tragedy was in how black neighborhoods were repeatedly deemed unworthy of debt not despite, but because, of the racial politics of liberalism in San Francisco. The second tragic act was that attempts to address some of these inequities were undermined largely by a white electorate who increasingly rejected the very idea of “public investment,” especially for black children. The focus is less on the municipal bond market mostly because this chapter argues that a mix of class-biased voter thresholds, escalating tax burdens, and racism intersected to push large swaths of San Franciscans to reject select bond issues, thereby reinforcing racial inequality built up over the previous twenty years.

This chapter outlines the questions framing the book, the intersecting fields to which its analysis contribute, the historical context in which its events unfold. Following the 1967 uprising, Newark, New Jersey was perceived as a hopelessly faltering city and exemplar of the urban crisis. Yet the record of residents’ own efforts to reclaim Newark’s future belies these perceptions of inevitable decline. This book illuminates how social justice movements influenced by civil rights reforms, black power activism, and antipoverty policies sought to institutionalize their gains in the 1970s and beyond. Organizations and individuals characterized as fixers were key to these transformations. “Fixers” embodied reformist and sometimes, radical vision, political savvy, and deliberate “in-betweenness.” They are predominantly social movement brokers, seeking to mend a social contract or to forge a new one out of pieces of the old. “Fixers” blurred the boundary between protest and politics, between the radical and moderate, or even conservative, between the public realm of legislation and elections and the quasi-private realm of civic associations, trade groups, unions, and nonprofits. Newark’s history of racial discrimination, suburbanization, and economic decline gave rise to a complex landscape of activism in the 1960s and emergence of fixers in the 1970s.

The Long Crisis explores the origins and implications of one of the most significant developments across the globe over the last fifty years: the diminished faith in government as capable of solving public problems. The origins of this transformation are found in city-dwellers’ efforts to preserve liberal commitments of the postwar period. New York faced an economic crisis beginning in the late 1960s that disrupted long-standing assumptions about the services city government could provide. In response, New Yorkers—organized within block associations, nonprofits, and professional organizations—embraced an ethos of private volunteerism and, eventually, of partnership with private business in order to save their communities from neglect. Local liberal and Democratic officials came over time to see such alliances not as stopgap measures but as legitimate and ultimately permanent features of modern governance. Local people and officials, this book argues, built neoliberalism from the ground up.

This chapter discusses the lessons that can be learned by European cities from the recovery of U.S. cities from urban crisis and industrial decline. The core lesson seems to be that change is possible by working at problems, adopting a long-term approach, and pursuing what works. However, there are three factors that make the recovery of U.S. weak market cities particularly problematic. These include the lack of historic and deeply embedded urban infrastructure and culture, the different cycles of rapid immigration into U.S. cities that created many human and social tensions from which people sought to escape, and the fragile systems of social and public support for cities.

How do individuals, households and communities seek to survive in the midst of humanitarian crises? How do aid agencies assess and respond to the needs for assistance? This chapter delves into the Syrian refugee crisis in Lebanon and illustrates the complexity of assessing evolving needs and designing humanitarian responses in an urban, middle-income country environment. The chapter explores the pros and cons of cash assistance and market-based interventions, and discusses how to address mounting hostility between the host and refugee populations.

This introductory chapter briefly captures the major themes covered in this book. It explores three key concepts regarding Black Power: how the ideas, tactics, and language readily associated with Black Power permeated the community activism, and everyday lives, of ordinary African Americans at the local level; how and why mainstream politicians and institutions exploited Black Power's flexibility as an ideology and organizing tool in their efforts to guide the course of black advancement; and the subsequent impact and meaning of those efforts. The chapter examines how public policies intended to engage, modify, and sublimate the Black Power impulse evolved as a response not only to the deepening urban crisis and growing black radicalism but also to the Johnson administration's troubled War on Poverty.