Journal of Urban History

World War Two and its aftermath transformed Chicago's African American community. The Great Migration entered a second and more intense phase as black migrants flooded into Northern cities. This massive relocation of Southern blacks resulted in the expansion and reformulation of Chicago's ghettoes on both the West and South Sides of the city. The question of a response to this Second Ghetto from African Americans themselves presents itself. White politicians, cultural elites and businessmen still controlled the city and could impose their will on its neighborhoods simply redrawing ghetto boundaries to reflect the new realities of the postwar era...

Drawing on Bachelard's notion of “cosmicity” this article investigates the living conditions of Parisian working-class families in the second half of the nineteenth century. Nineteenth-century social critics claimed that the lack of privacy in urban apartments made decent family life impossible. However, evidence from judicial dossiers concerning attentat à la pudeur (intimate assault against children) illuminates the lived experience of children and their families in Paris apartments. Rather than a sharp divide between public and private, children experienced their apartment homes as the core of a social and spatial world under the surveillance of parents, neighbors, and other children...

This article examines the way in which public response to a municipal proposal concerning greenspace reduction in Paris during the Second Empire reflected not only political antipathy but also an ever-increasing understanding of public urban greenspace as part of the private domain. By examining archival records concerning the proposal, essays, newspaper accounts, and memoirs, this article argues that a particular proprietary sensibility, fomented by expansive public greenspace development in Paris, intersected with extant social constructs and political tensions to create a public, coordinated, and sustained challenge to the authoritarian regime...

Urban historical scholars have neglected smaller urban centers, including their residential environments and the forces that shaped them. For a time, one of these forces was the mail-order kit home. Kit manufacturers sold houses to families throughout the United States and Canada but enjoyed their greatest success in small towns where detached single-family homes were the norm. They worked to insert themselves into local building industries: They challenged lumber dealers and ignored architects but strove to mollify the contractors on whom they and their customers depended...

This essay examines the complicated relationship among hippie communes, the environmental movement, and New Left and Black Power militants in the late 1960s and early 1970s. In those relationships lie the roots of the divide that separated environmental issues on one hand and urban issues on the other during the 1970s and beyond. This essay examines how the fight between militants and back-to-the-land communards and environmentalists, between what we might call urban progressives and antiurban progressives, was staged as a fight between those who cared about the issues of the city and those who turned their backs on them...

This essay reexamines the history of public housing and the controversy it generated from the Great Depression to the Cold War. By recasting that history in the global arena, it demonstrates that the debate over public housing versus homeownership was also a debate over the meaning of American citizenship and democracy, pointing up starkly divergent notions about what was and was not American. Through an examination of national conflicts and neglected local struggles, this article further shows that the fight over public housing was far more meaningful and volatile than traditionally assumed...

As Milwaukee’s chief park planner in the early to mid-twentieth century, Charles Whitnall responded to the various underlying ideologies of the period within which he worked. His preference for parks was a political and physical response to and remedy for the industrialized and heavily congested city he called home. By examining the Progressive Era discourse associated with planning, this article situates Whitnall’s work within the political, aesthetic, and environmental contexts of geographic thought that influenced his plans for Milwaukee...

The move to consolidate, and eventually to close, Homer G. Phillips Hospital sparked a major uprising in St. Louis, Missouri, during the years 1976 through 1984. This article explores the struggle in St. Louis’s black community to keep open, and later to reopen, Homer G. Phillips Hospital from a vantage point that demonstrates the diversity of opinion surrounding the struggle. For many black St. Louis residents, the physical space of Homer G. Phillips Hospital was a metaphor for identity, a manifestation of citizenship rights, and a means of delineating a territory of shared histories, understandings, and values...

In The Mystery of Capitalism , the darling of neoliberalism, Hernando de Soto posits that secure property titles explain “why capitalism triumphs in the West and fails everywhere else.” While social scientists have taken him to task for an oversimplification of the causes and remedies of poverty, historians have contributed little to this important policy debate. Applying comparative methods across time and space, such a retrospective analysis exposes serious flaws in de Soto’s thesis. Case studies of Paris, Chicago, and Mexico City covering successive, fifty-year periods support his contention that property law was the single most important factor in determining the fate of rural migrants trying to find a place to live in these exploding cities...

With the economic and social changes in Europe at the end of the sixteenth century and the formation and consolidation of an urban network throughout the continent, questions such as poverty, sanitation, and hygiene began to pose acute problems in the cities of the age. A new school of thought, known in Spain as Ciencia de Policía and in the Mediterranean area as Policy Science, proposed solutions for these problems and tested them through practical interventions inside the urban setting. In this article the author compares the work of two thinkers: Cristóbal Pérez de Herrera, a Spaniard, and Nicolas Delamare, a Frenchman...

This article argues that the scope and importance of squatting has been greatly understated in discussions of nineteenth-century urban development. Period newspapers reported often on the struggle of cities and titleholders across North America to evict squatters, indicating that squatters were a common and persistent component of the city landscape. Evidence also suggests that many, if not most, squatters believed that they would eventually win clear title to their homes.

This essay looks at two popular and influential films of the late 1960s and early 1970s, which were both shot in New York City: Midnight Cowboy (1969) and Klute (1971). It places them in film history, New York City history, and U.S. urban history more generally, finding that they offer an update on earlier century narratives of the connections between urban areas and deviant sexuality. In this modern version, it is not just a moral tale but also an economic one, where, because of the historical decline of the U...

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