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In Search of the Social: Neighborhood and Community in Urban Planning in Europe and Beyond, 1920-1960

November 14, 2016, 6:32 a.m., Couperus, S., Kaal, H., Allgemein.

This introductory text presents the overarching question that informs the articles in this special section: How have notions of neighborhood and community determined urban planning discourse and practice in mid-twentieth century Europe? Against the backdrop of World Wars, crises and recovery schemes, aspirations to repair – or create – social cohesion among urban dwellers were manifest in the parlance and actions of a range of historical actors, many of which were at the heart of urban planning and reconstruction: architects, sociologists, administrators, planners and local officials. This special section covers different temporal and geographical contexts in Europe (and the US) to disentangle multilayered notions of ‘the social’ that have permeated neighborhood and community planning schemes. Moreover, taken together, the articles will show how persistent dichotomies in urban planning historiography, such as top-down versus bottom-up or organic versus mechanic, obscure historical understandings of how urban communities were conceived spatially, socially and politically.

Quelle: http://juh.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/42/6/987?rss=1

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Mapping and Making Community in the Postwar European City

November 14, 2016, 6:32 a.m., Cupers, K., Allgemein.

This article examines how midcentury European sociologists, planners, and architects mapped the existing city to build future communities. The neighborhood unit concept spread globally in the first half of the twentieth century. In Europe, its deployment was supported not just by modernist planning principles but by sociological abstractions of community life. Current scholarship emphasizes how these modernist principles were contested by sociologists. The present article demonstrates instead that sociological mapping was instrumental in making the concept of community legible and operable in the postwar European city. During the 1940s, mapping social relationships in urban space was increasingly thought to reveal "authentic" community life in working-class urban neighborhoods, which previously were dismissed as chaotic and promiscuous. Such new sociological mapping shaped, if often only implicitly, the planning and design of modern housing estates and New Towns across Europe and thus connected representations of bottom–up, grassroots communities to an essentially top–down planning apparatus.

Quelle: http://juh.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/42/6/1009?rss=1

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A Small Suburb Becomes a Boomburb: Explaining Suburban Growth in Naperville, Illinois

November 14, 2016, 6:32 a.m., Miller, B. J., Allgemein.

The Chicago suburb of Naperville, Illinois, today has over one hundred forty thousand residents and is considered a "boomburb" because of its double-digit percentage growth over several decades. How did it reach this point? Explanations of urban growth—including the Chicago School and political economy perspectives; categories of suburbs, like boomburbs and edge cities; and narratives within Naperville itself—highlight different mechanisms at work. This study considers the factors that influenced Naperville’s growth and how each narrative fits the suburb’s development. The implications for future studies of suburban growth include the unpredictability of growth as it is happening, recognizing the limits of categorizing suburbs, undertaking comparative studies of suburbs across types or within regions, and not relying heavily on analyses of suburban outliers and unusual cases (like Naperville).

Quelle: http://juh.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/42/6/1135?rss=1

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Building Democracy Anew: Neighborhood Planning and Political Reform in Post-Blitz Rotterdam

November 14, 2016, 6:32 a.m., Couperus, S., Allgemein.

This article interrogates the political semantics of neighborhood planning during and after the Second World War. It argues that as much as a geographical substrate for social and spatial planning, the neighborhood was an organizing principle in agendas of urban political reform in the 1940s and 1950s. Taking the case of Rotterdam, a severely bombed city that suffered from warfare in many respects, this article discloses the languages of political reform that informed an agenda of revitalizing urban democracy within the framework of the neighborhood. Two intertwined trajectories, encompassing public and private initiatives to institutionalize modes of neighborhood politics and democracy, will show how notions of democratic citizenship and the post-war institutional design of urban governance became irreconcilable in Rotterdam, but had a lasting impact on twentieth-century urbanism.

Quelle: http://juh.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/42/6/992?rss=1

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Milwaukee Urban History Scholarship: An Engagement with Scale and Scope

November 14, 2016, 6:32 a.m., Truitt, A. M., Allgemein.

Quelle: http://juh.sagepub.com/cgi/reprint/42/6/1158?rss=1

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Fighting Redlining and Gentrification in Washington, D.C.: The Adams-Morgan Organization and Tenant Right to Purchase

November 14, 2016, 6:32 a.m., Lloyd, J. M., Allgemein.

In the mid-1970s, the Adams-Morgan neighborhood in Washington, D.C., faced both redlining and gentrification. In response to developer-led gentrification and its accompanying displacement, the Adams-Morgan Organization used the tenant right-to-purchase clause of D.C.’s 1974 rent control law to block the eviction of twenty-six families on one street. Simultaneously, the organization leveraged a community reinvestment campaign against a local thrift to obtain financing for evicted families, resulting in successful purchases and further community reinvestment lending. This research shows that tenant right-to-purchase legislation provided the legal opportunity structure necessary for community organizations to fight redlining and gentrification.

Quelle: http://juh.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/42/6/1091?rss=1

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