Journal of Urban History

The history of water infrastructures in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, illuminates the role of the environment in the production of social and political inequality. This article combines original archival research with insights from political ecology and urban anthropology to argue that the circulation of drinking water and flood water was a critical and quotidian form of exchange connecting Haiti’s stratified social hierarchies. A comparative historical analysis of two neighborhoods representative of elite and non-elite communities demonstrates that water infrastructures exacerbated poverty and inequality by facilitating the upward distribution of wealth and the downward distribution of risk. A case study of water politics in the 1970s shows how the Duvalier dictatorship’s technocratic reforms changed urban elites’ expectations of the state and made urban water dynamics a key metric for assessing the presence of the state in daily life. Dominant narratives of urban crisis in Haiti tend to focus exclusively on the challenges posed by unchecked rural-to-urban migration and the demographic expansion of the underclass. This article offers a new angle by uncovering the destructive environmental consequences of elite-driven urban development.

This paper examines the management of London’s Victoria Park over a fifty-year period from when it was laid out at the beginning of the 1840s to 1890. It investigates questions raised by other recent studies about the relationship between public and private and between the individual and the population within public parks. This is achieved by a consideration of two separate but interlinked aspects of the park: its spatiality (its relationship to the city) and its functionality (its relationship to the individual). By examining these aspects, a palimpsest of different conceptions of Victoria Park can be uncovered, which in turn directly relate to the potential field of actions in the real space of the park.

In the postwar period, the strong economic growth in Western countries coincided with the configuration of their modern urban planning systems. This article aims at exploring to what extent the targets of the economic planning that was broadly adopted in this growth period conditioned the performance of urban planning tools by analyzing the case of Spain. During the so-called “Spanish miracle” that started in the early 1960s and lasted until the mid-1970s, there were notable contradictions between economic and spatial planning policies and between the performance of the national and the municipal governments. It is concluded that the lack of an integrated approach to regional and urban planning policies at national level combined to the gap with the actual local planning framework, illustrated through the example of three cities, can help to understand the patterns of urban growth in a context of an expanding economy.

This article examines the origins of urban renewal in Singapore through a transnational history lens. It focuses on the role in particular of two United Nations–led teams of experts one headed by Erik Lorange and the other by Charles Abrams in the early 1960s and the impact these had on how urban renewal proceeded in Singapore’s central city area. This approach broadens the focus to encompass more than just the role played by Singapore’s Housing and Development Board and Urban Renewal Authority which dominates much of the existing scholarship. In doing so it finds that there was much more agreement between these international experts and their visions of a modern city and that of the Singaporean agencies and individuals tasked with implementing renewal.

This article examines the construction of industrial cities in the early years of the People’s Republic of China (PRC; 1949-) by focusing on Anshan—a major steel city in Manchuria (Northeast China) that had been constructed by the Japanese prior to 1945. I demonstrate that the PRC industrial cities embodied the nature and limits of the new socialist regime’s vision of industrialization. The early PRC overwhelmingly focused its resources on heavy industry, which translated into the financial and bureaucratic superiority of industrial enterprises to city governments. The early PRC industrial cities drew from not only the Soviet urban-planning model but also the legacies of pre-revolutionary regimes, even including imperial Japan. The construction of industrial cities was driven by negotiations among various actors including city officials, enterprise managers, and domestic migrants. Building on the multi-layered local, national, and transnational forces, the industrial city of Anshan was a microcosm of the early PRC.

Tucked into strip malls along Brookhurst Street are the scattered agglomeration of restaurants, markets, bakeries, butcher shops, hookah lounges, educational centers, hair salons, and clothing stores catering to groups who come from the Middle East and North Africa. Proliferating over the last twenty-five years, this Anaheim thoroughfare is colloquially known as Little Arabia. The small strip of commerce is supported by the nation’s largest Arab population residing throughout Southern California. The emergence of Little Arabia is similar to what scholars refer to as “ethnoburbs,” “invisiburbs,” and “design assimilated suburbs.” Little Arabia, however, represents something different: what this paper refers to as an “ethnoanchor.” To illustrate the descriptive utility of the ethnoanchor typology, this paper unpacks the historical, spatial, social, and political dynamics of Little Arabia to illustrate how contemporary migration patterns are influencing suburban regions, collectively illustrating the constitution of a new kind of American dream.

This article examines newspapers, archival collections, interviews, and personal papers to place Richmond, Virginia, at the center of the national debate about public–private revitalization projects. Since World War II, America’s urban leaders, led by interracial coalitions of black politicians and white business elites, have used racial capitalism to promise that tax-funded redevelopment projects would enrich their cities, provide better public services, and reconcile the legacy of racist urban planning. Richmond’s issues with Project One and the Sixth Street Marketplace in the 1980s, as well as recent issues with the Navy Hill Project, reveals the continuum of political and economic peril that comes with using such plans. Because urban revitalization is supremely profit-driven and shaped by the economic thinking that created disparate levels of white corporate wealth and black urban poverty, it is bound to exacerbate systemic racism.

Dividing the City uses a newly discovered, parcel-level, record of restrictive covenants (circa 1850-1950) to document the scope, variety, location, timing, dissemination, and impact of racial restrictions in the City of St. Louis. We underscore the important differences, in their use and their impact, between new subdivision restrictions and petition-based restrictive agreements in older neighborhoods. And we establish the importance of these restrictions to both a dramatic increase in residential segregation before 1950 and the maintenance of that segregation—through public and private policies that emulated and adapted these restrictions even after the Supreme Court held them unenforceable—across the ensuing decades.

Historians have conducted important research on the rise of law-and-order politics in New York City, where anxieties over women’s freedoms, political battles over police oversight, and crime impacts in poor communities contributed to its rise. The numerous walkouts, negotiations, and worker-management conflicts around high-crime areas in New York City suggest that the question of law and order was a salient workplace issue as well for the members of Communication Workers of America Local 1101. In their case, such concerns predate the rhetorical rise of law and order and help us better understand why such politics found fertile ground among working-class New Yorkers, white and black. Repeated incidences, largely in the city’s black ghettoes, prompted workers with a strong class consciousness and commitment to solidarity to transform the problems and experiences of individual workers into a shared question to be addressed via collective action.

In the four decades straddling the turn of the nineteenth century, the small Ontario town of Niagara-on-the-Lake experienced marked growth in its tourism industry. Catering predominantly to wealthy upper-middle-class Canadian and American visitors, the lake-side settlement offered numerous opportunities for polite recreation. Chief among them was lawn tennis, a sport that sat somewhat outside of the mainstream in terms of its high-class, mixed-sex participation demographic. While its players were imbued with a strong amateur philosophy, local boosters recognized the sport’s potential to generate tourism income through its two tournaments, but this hinged on the outward presentation among its players/guests of refined gentility—a reflection of both class and gender—both on and off the court. This article considers how lawn tennis tournaments fit into the town’s burgeoning tourism industry, and examines gender relations—particularly the role of women—in relation to this development.