The Lindsay Administration and the Sanitation Crisis of New York City, 1966-1973
This article examines efforts by the John V. Lindsay administration (1966–1973) to deal with the New York City sanitation crisis of the late 1960s and early 1970s. By this period, the Department of Sanitation could barely function in most low-income neighborhoods of New York City, and this resulted in a series of direct and indirect protest actions. The mass media blamed Mayor Lindsay for the situation and characterized him as an ineffectual city manager. This image has persisted with scholars contending that Lindsay never figured out how to run the city government. This article diverges from these accounts and argues that the Lindsay administration actually rebuilt the Department of Sanitation—a city agency that was operationally breaking down before Lindsay became mayor. In fact, the Lindsay administration popularized the notion that a modern city with global aspirations has to meet the basic spatial needs of its residents and that efficient and responsive sanitation delivery can be achieved through the rationalization of resources and services.
Quelle: http://juh.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/40/6/1138?rss=1
The Best as Enemy of the Good: The Port Authority’s 4th Jetport, Lindenthal’s Massive Span over the Hudson, and the George Washington Bridge
Students of complex organizations have often noted the tendency of organizational leaders to block out crucial information that raises doubts about plans and evidence they have already embraced. Recent research has expanded our understanding of this apparently irrational behavior. This essay examines two historically interesting cases—when attractive alternatives existed but leaders were unable to overcome their prior psychological commitments. These cases underscore the problems of "grooved thinking" and "selective reinforcement" in the development of large urban projects. However, close examination of one of the cases suggests a way to break through this "irrational" rigidity, by setting a goal that is short of "the best" but likely to achieve important results.
Quelle: http://juh.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/40/6/1123?rss=1
The Great Chicago Waiters‘ Strike: Producing Urban Space, Organizing Labor, Challenging Racial Divides in 1890s Chicago
In the 1890s, restaurant and hotel waiters in Chicago formed a biracial labor organization that successfully challenged their employers. The Culinary Alliance, a rare example of biracial unionism in the late nineteenth century, was produced by, and helped to shape, a dramatic reorganization of urban space with the emergence of corporate capitalism and consumer culture in the city. The Alliance’s rise and demise demonstrates the ways urban space was a powerful force in the complex interactions between race and gender relations in urban labor markets.
Quelle: http://juh.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/40/6/1079?rss=1
Impacts of Seaplanes and Seaports on the Perception and Conception of the Modern City: The Case of Istanbul
This article focuses on the waterscape of Istanbul, uncovering an episode in the city’s urban history based on this main geographic characteristic. It studies the novel civil seaplane transportation technologies of the 1920s and 1930s, analyzing their actual and possible impacts on the city. These planes provided not only a rapid link between the city and Europe but also a new vantage point for the perception of its natural and built environment. The aircraft were also planned to play innovative roles in the conception of the urban structure of a modern city as well as in the envisioned international events.
Quelle: http://juh.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/40/6/1028?rss=1
The National Federation of Town Planning and Housing, 1939-1954: A Network for Town Planners and Architects in Franco’s Spain
The autarchy system established by the new dictatorship following the Spanish Civil War proposed the reconstruction of the country as a new Renaissance based on idiosyncratic Spanish values. One of the most unique experiences was the creation of the private society The National Federation of Town Planning and Housing (1939–1954). The aim was to create a social environment appropriate for dignity development in the habitability conditions. The project was very ambitious about town planning dissemination. A professional network concerning town planning and housing knowledge was required. Instruments applied for achieving the objective included publishing books and magazines, exhibitions, congresses, and centers of information within and outside Spain.
Quelle: http://juh.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/40/6/1099?rss=1
Assessing the Impact of the Inner Belt: MIT, Highways, and Housing in Cambridge, Massachusetts
Between 1948 and 1971, the Massachusetts Department of Public Works released plans to build a freeway through Cambridge. One route would carve up a working-class neighborhood while another would run alongside MIT. First, we assess the impact of the planning process. While no highway was built, housing stock declined and uncertainly complicated urban renewal. Second, we explore MIT’s role in this story. Because its campus lay near a proposed route, the university functioned much like any other stakeholder. Yet its economic importance and its involvement with federal defense gave its administrators access to arguments unavailable to local residents or politicians. MIT functioned as both agent and subject, as a private entity at the mercy of federal and state prerogatives and as an influential public force in its own right, whose institutional knowledge, national importance, and civic significance overshadowed city and community prerogatives.
Quelle: http://juh.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/40/6/1054?rss=1
Outside the World of Tomorrow: New York Labor and the Public Sphere in the 1939-1940 New York World’s Fair
This paper analyzes the 1939–1940 New York World’s Fair as a conflicted site of public-sphere formation, and the repercussions of these conflicts on organized labor in New York. Conceived within the liberal administration of Mayor La Guardia and dedicated to the principles of social cooperation, this "closed-shop exposition" granted American Federation of Labor (AFL) trade unions an unprecedented degree of workplace benefits and rhetorical support by the Fair administration. This was undermined, however, by the trade unions’ limited public activities within the fair itself and their refusal of city offers to establish outreach and educational programs through events, rallies, and pavilions. As a result, the public space and discourse of a fair nominally devoted to social interdependence was appropriated by a variety of other interests, particularly those of corporate America. This marginalization would ultimately contribute to delegitimization, as allegations of graft and racketeering by visitors, exhibitors, and the national media framed labor as a direct threat to the "World of Tomorrow" and its visitors. Millions of Americans found their visits marred by exorbitantly inflated prices, delayed by strikes, and disappointed by cancelled exhibits. In the face of outside pressure, and with labor groups unable to address hostile critiques within the fair itself, the exposition administration withdrew its public support for unions while dramatically restricting their workplace rights. In this way, the "business-union" principles of the AFL not only undermined their legitimacy in the eyes of the public, despite the efforts of liberal municipal officials to promote them, but ultimately served to undo those very workplace gains such principles were meant to secure.
Quelle: http://juh.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/40/6/1011?rss=1
Editorial Board Editorial Board
Parliaments, Estates and Representation, Volume 34, Issue 2, pages ebi-ebi, November 2014.
Quelle: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/02606755.2014.969117?ai=2w6&mi=47tg1r&af=R