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urban renewal



  • Houston's Highway History Teaches Planners What Not to Do

    by Kyle Shelton

    Transportation planners have begun to collect the opinions of community residents affected by proposed highway projects, but they have yet to begin to meaningfully incorporate those concerns into planning. Doing so could prevent repeating the blighting effects of urban transporation projects.



  • An Unlikely Coalition Trying to Save a Nashville Black Landmark

    A Nashville Elks lodge building was the 1960s home of a music club where superstars of Black music—and the yet-to-be famous Jimi Hendrix—played during the segregation era. Like many such landmarks, decades of highway building broke up the surrounding community and made the building endangered today. 



  • North Milwaukee Looks to Highway History to Reshape the Future

    Clayborn Benson of the Wisconsin Black Historical Society and Museum is finding common cause with planning activists who want to take down the freeways that separated North Milwaukee from the rest of the city and contributed to its decline. 



  • The Romance of the Highway Obscures Harm to Communities of Color

    by Ryan Reft

    Secretary Pete Buttigieg's comments that interstate construction entrenched racial segregation were denounced as "woke" by critics. But history shows that highway planners knew that such consequences were likely to ensue, and proceeded anyway. 



  • Exiting/In

    by Francesca T. Royster

    A family and community history in Black Nashville puts the rise of "Music Row" in the context of urban renewal projects that destroyed African American communities and institutions, and the unacknowledged Black presence in country music. 



  • The Limits of Nonprofit Urban Development in Boston

    by Claire Dunning

    In Boston, nonprofit agencies became the principal vehicle for redevelopment. While they could empower residents of poor communities to compete for grants and negotiate with city authorities, they couldn't make a deep impact on inequality in the city and let city agencies off the hook for discriminatory policies. 



  • Mr. Biden, Tear Down this Highway

    It's time to stop expanding the urban highways that divide communities, perpetuate racial segregation and harm health, and to consider removing them entirely, argues one architectural designer. 



  • The Second Destruction of Tulsa's Black Community

    by Karlos K. Hill

    Photographer Donald Thompson has set out to capture a visual history of Tulsa's Greenwood district, an African American community decimated first by the 1921 race massacre and then by urban renewal in the 1970s. Historian Karlos Hill interviews him about his work. 



  • The Rise of "UniverCity"

    Universities wield increasing control over their surrounding communities. Historian Davarian Baldwin discusses the impact of that power for good and ill. 



  • The Violent Origin Story of Dodger Stadium

    by Ranjani Chakraborty and Melissa Hirsch

    Through interviews with several former residents of the area, Vox explores the story of their neighborhoods razed to make room for Dodger Stadium. It’s one that’s often missing from the history of Los Angeles and has created a double-edged relationship for some Dodger fans. Features commentary by historian Priscilla Leiva.