As with the roads, these projects served some economic purpose, but not even close to what they replaced. In other cases, urban renewal was done to build high-rise public housing or major development projects like Lincoln Center in Manhattan or Dodger Stadium in Los Angeles.

Among the black neighborhoods divided by highways were Treme in New Orleans, the Brooklyn area of Charlotte, and Overtown in Miami. In city after city, highways that were built to appease white suburban commuters, and enabled through eminent domain and funds from the 1949 Housing Act and 1956 Interstate Highway Act, were shoved through these areas, causing surrounding blight and pollution. Unsurprisingly, the condemned neighborhoods were overwhelmingly African American, and to a lesser degree Hispanic and Asian. Old neighborhoods were thus demolished, replaced with highways, public housing, and top-down economic developments. imposed “urban renewal.” Also known as “slum clearance”, these policies worked from the Modernist notion that urban neighborhoods were dangerous and antiquated, and that automobile-centric design represented the brave new technological future. In the decades before and after World War II, government bureaucracies across the U.S. But most of the blame lies elsewhere: many of these neighborhoods once thrived before city and state governments, using federal money, destroyed them. Can this be blamed on failure within these communities to properly maintain their own spaces? Perhaps somewhat.

Many of America’s black urban neighborhoods are trouble spots, marked by crime, poverty and blight.

Cut and run madeleine urban pdf