Abstract
A recurring theme explored in much of the finest recent planning history scholarship is the international diffusion of dominant planning paradigms. Christopher Klemek’s The Transatlantic Collapse of Urban Renewal: Postwar Urbanism from New York to Berlin demonstrates convincingly how valuable it is to reexamine urban renewal outside the typical national and single-city context and employing the international diffusion perspective. How the United States planned to redevelop its beleaguered postdepression and postwar industrial cities and how war-torn western Europe would reconstruct its urban fabric was guided by the transatlantic dialogue among leading planners and architects, those who advised governments and those who trained the onslaught of new urban professionals. Klemek carries the reader back and forth across the Atlantic, beginning first with the modernist assault on the despised industrial city in Europe. Clearly, modernism was strongest in the European context, but was carried to North America through emigrés such as Hans Blumenfeld, who came to the United States in the 1930s and worked in Philadelphia, but in the face of McCarthy-era politics that led this avowed socialist to lose his residence permit, migrated north to Toronto to lead a massive modernist-inspired urban renewal effort. Another architect-planner, Walter Gropius, carried the vision of the 1933 Athens Charter, calling for the decongestions and redevelopment of cities, to the United States as chair of Harvard’s architecture program from 1937 to 1952, where he educated a generation of leading urbanists.
Yet even as the bulldozers were clearing the rubble from European cities to make way for the modernist vision advanced by the International Congresses for Modern Architecture (CIAM) and the Modern Architectural Research Group (MARS), there was a countermovement underway. In Great Britain, it was a rediscovery of the old city, what became known as the “townscape critique” with its celebration of the vernacular. On the United States side, the assault against the urban renewal order was exemplified by the conversion of modernist Ed Bacon in Philadelphia to a preservationist intent on restoring the city as a way of “cracking the suburban ideal” (94). Another critique came through the writings of social scientists from Harvard such as Marc Fried, Chester Hartman, and Herbert Gans, all three who celebrated the virtues of older urban neighborhoods. Of course, Jane Jacobs figures prominently in Klemek’s story, not just as the Greenwich Village–based defender of chaos in great American cities but as a renegade voice that more quickly gained resonance and respect among planners in Europe than she did on the homefront in her sweeping rebuttal of the modernist gospel. Klemek chronicles the Transatlantic Collapse of Urban Renewal in the 1960s and 1970s as protests against the ubiquitous highway ribbons of the modernist world order fueled protests in affected neighborhoods of North American cities such as Philadelphia, Toronto, and New York (as well as other cities that Klemek does not have space to incorporate). In Great Britain, it was not highway construction but the proposed clearance of the Covent Garden area, an ancient food market tucked into a vibrant inner city neighborhood, that helped to coalesce the opposition to the urban renewal order. Across Europe and North America, the urban renewal order collapsed in the face of grassroots, democratic, and later neoconservative opposition to the dominant role of the state in refashioning cities embedded in the urban liberalism that supported this movement. Klemek concludes that the collapse of the urban renewal order engendered a “complicated ideological fallout” (248) that continued to hamper efforts to achieve anything close to a grand vision of the livable city over the past three decades.
By terminating the story in the early 1980s, Klemek substantiates his thesis concerning the rise and fall of the urban renewal order. As a result, however, he is not able to make meaningful connections between the original urban renewal order and its offspring, “urban revitalization,” which cropped up in various forms on lands initially slated for the modernist vision. Urban revitalization led to inner city shopping marketplaces (e.g., Baltimore, Boston, London, and Berlin), vast new inner city high end housing (e.g., Chicago), and the continued appearance of modernist expressways (take a trip around Washington, DC’s Beltway) that continues to the present. In many respects, the neighborhood coalitions in North America and across Europe that brought down urban renewal were as short-lived as were the successes of the pioneering modernists. And in the long run, the modernists may have proved to be the victors in the battle to guide urban development in many of the places that Klemek has examined. This is not in any sense intended as a criticism of Klemek’s ambitious study, but a call to further research. He has fashioned a fresh and intellectually rigorous framework for examining urban redevelopment planning that should be employed to carry the story and the analysis closer to the present. How did the “revitalizers” differ from their predecessor “renewers” and what consequences did this have for cities are important questions. Quite appropriately, one doesn’t find the word “sustainability” in this study, but perhaps the current sustainability movement is much like the grassroots protests against the modernists in 1960s and 1970s. For that reason, practitioners and planning students seeking to become effective urban planning practitioners would do well to understand through Klemek’s cogent analysis that globalization planning ideas are neither something new nor something to be neglected.
This is a very readable work, but the ceaseless shifting between the various cases in the book requires a slow and careful reading. Thankfully, the author provides two very useful tables following the narrative, one that sorts out “the transatlantic pillars of the urban renewal order, 1920-65” (250–51) and one that chronicles “the collapse of the urban renewal order, 1950-80” (252–53) across his six case study cities of Berlin, London, Toronto, Boston, New York, and Philadelphia. These provide a much needed roadmap to fully understand the essence of his message. Suffice it to say, this is a very important book that would benefit in so many ways courses in planning history and theory, and should guide future research in this important planning field.