Journal of Urban History

This essay introduces a special section in the Journal of Urban History that explores the interplay between educational policies and housing markets in metropolitan U.S. history during the twentieth century. A review of the literature in urban/suburban history reveals that most scholars have emphasized the centrality of housing policies and real estate markets in establishing patterns of racial segregation and metropolitan inequality while marginalizing or neglecting the educational policies and public school markets that simultaneously shaped these processes. The evidence in this forum challenges the dominant view that housing policies structured educational outcomes in American cities and suburbs, revealing that school policies often shaped housing outcomes as well.

Suburban historians have generally neglected the role of schools as an explanatory factor in the transformation of twentieth-century U.S. metropolitan space, since public education does not fit neatly into their narrative. At the same time, educational historians have focused so intently on the rise and decline of big-city school systems that they have largely failed to account for suburbanization. This article seeks to bridge the gap by examining the rising practice of “shopping for schools,” the buying and selling of private homes to gain access to more desirable public school attendance zones. This case study of three communities near Hartford, Connecticut,traces the convergence of real estate interests, suburban homebuyers, and government officials, particularly as the postwar labor market increasingly rewarded higher levels of educational attainment. Shopping for schools not only brings together educational credentialism and suburban consumerism but also helps to explain increasing stratification among suburbs in recent decades.

During the 1920s, elites in southern cities capitalized on rapid population growth to heighten residential segregation through vast school building programs. In Raleigh, North Carolina, the board of education ignored popular protests when it relocated the district’s premier schools to new racially restricted suburbs on the city’s northwest side, knowing development would follow. Simultaneously, the board refused to build even a single school for the black middle-class suburbs located outside the heavily segregated southeastern section of town, despite numerous requests. The legacy of these school board actions shifted the city center northwest of Capitol Square and left black communities on the southeast side economically and politically isolated from the rest of the city. When Raleigh faced court-ordered busing in 1971, black and white students lived on opposite sides of downtown. As a result, meaningful integration had become an impossible task without extensive busing, as was true in metropolitan areas across the nation.

This article examines how school and municipal planning practices contributed to segregated schools and segregated neighborhoods well after Brown. In Nashville, Tennessee, a consolidated city–county municipality, federal urban renewal and housing initiatives and federal education guidelines linked with local practices to favor suburban space, neglect urban space, and reinforce segregation in both housing and schooling. School construction policies served the interests of suburban real estate development and helped to concentrate poor black children and families in the central city. The range of policies and market forces at work in linking schools and housing proves the falsity of the de jure–de facto framework courts and historians often applied to school segregation. An uneven distribution of educational resources shaped over decades by local and federal policy led to an uneven distribution of the burdens that came with busing, an inequality made to seem normal by spatial ideology that favored the predominantly white suburbs.

This article ties the expansion of the (European) welfare state model to Belgian national politics and exemplifies how welfare state concepts, such as universalism and decommodification, were adopted in the political campaign for Flemish nationalism in a country on its path to federalism. It focuses on the construction of leisure infrastructure in Flanders, the northern (Flemish-speaking) region of the country, and scrutinizes the role that planning, urbanism, and architecture played in the political project that was set up to strengthen the Flemish community and craft a sense of Flemish cultural identity. It furthermore relates these developments to the situation of pillarization in the country and explicates the convergence of these different forces by narrating the developments in one (telling) case study municipality (Dilbeek) in the Flemish border of the capital city.

Urban historians have greatly expanded their geographical purview in recent years, incorporating suburbs and hinterlands into their analysis of social and environmental change. Urban environmental historians and suburban historians have played a critical role in the regionalization of urban history over the last decade. This case study of the development of New York City’s water supply reveals the benefits of taking a regional approach to urban history. From the New York Public Library to Central Park’s Great Lawn to neighborhood parks, the New York City landscape bears the traces of the continuous development of the city’s water network. Expansion of the water system in rural hinterlands enabled municipal officials to put urban reservoirs to new uses, creating some of the city’s most beloved public spaces. The rehabilitation of urban infrastructure underscores the intimate linkages between rural development and the urban built environment.

This article analyzes the renovation and construction of the Parc des Princes and the Stade de France in post-Second World War Paris. The history of the two stadia testifies to a shift in the envisioned role of stadia in the Parisian basin between the late 1960s and the end of the twentieth century and stands as evidence for the emergence of new urban planning actors. Both stadia were also critiqued as symbols of broader problems with Parisian urbanization, notably as manifestations of anti-democratic planning processes. At the same time, the Parc and the Stade also reflected an emerging consensus over the role of spectator sport in society, accompanied by attempts to re-envision mass sporting spectatorship as a more democratic and familial practice. This article thus situates the two stadia within the history of Parisian urbanization and within broader global urbanizing processes.

This article traces the development and diffusion of self-governing “miniature municipalities” and “juvenile cities” between the late nineteenth century and World War II. Hundreds of thousands of children enjoyed junior citizenship in these environments in connection with the period’s city improvement schemes. The stories of the men and women who set out to construct virtual cities as a means of addressing the problems of life in real cities introduce a new cast of characters and a new movement to the historiography of urban reform in the United States.