Boston’s West End is the most well-documented neighborhood destroyed by urban renewal,” made famous initially by Herbert Gans’s book, The Urban Villagers (1962). Although approximately 63 percent of the families displaced by urban renewal were African-American or Hispanic, this Boston community was mainly inhabited by working-class Italians. It was a little piece of Italy, with narrow winding streets alive with urban social life.
It is difficult for me to isolate the impact of Urban Villagers.” In my experience, it was but one contribution to growing criticism of urban renewal in the early 1960s and, with that, the physical orientation of urban planning that urban renewal represented. Shortly after it was published, I was both writing my dissertation in urban geography at Clark University and a project director in urban renewal, so I witnessed the impact in both urban renewal planning circles and in the more academic arena.
It was part of the drum of criticism that led to the 1966 Model Cities Act and the redefinition of urban renewal and rethinking of the field of urban planning. I think the impact of the Urban Villagers” might best be evaluated as part of a creeping barrage of critical writing led off by Jacobs and “Death and Life” in 1961. “Urban Villagers” was published in 1963 and Martin Anderson weighed in from the right in 1964 with “The Federal Bulldozer.”
At the same time, planners such as Paul Davidoff were mounting a critique within the field of planning. Jay Stein’s *Classic Readings in Urban Planning* (1995) includes some writing from this period. In 1965, The National Council of Mayors published *With Heritage So Rich*, which documented the destruction of historic buildings caused by urban renewal and served as the mandate for the National Historic Preservation Act of 1966. Although not concerned with urban renewal directly, Blake’s *God’s Own Junkyard* (1964) was a popular and graphically arresting treatment of the trashing of the built environment. My own memory is that so much was being written that we were responding to the larger context. The Federal urban renewal program was trying to move away from the great emphasis on redevelopment by demolition with the initiation of the Community Renewal Program (CRP) in 1959, which was more neighborhood and socially oriented. The final element I will throw in this stew is the Highway Act of 1962, which started the metropolitan transportation studies. The goal of these studies was to bring the interstate system to cities.
Many cities, such as Hartford, tried to coordinate the urban interstate system with urban renewal. Elsewhere, the transportation planning of the state and the local urban renewal did not have a big direct impact on urban renewal in cities, but, along with others, laid the groundwork for changing programs and practice. Speaking from being in the trenches at that time, I would say that the *Urban Villagers* did not have a significant direct impact on urban renewal in cities, but their work, along with others, laid the groundwork for changing programs and practices. Urban renewal was a juggernaut, and work such as Gans and others may have intensified urban renewal as its advocates and supporters sensed they had a limited time to get their work done. The value of Gans’ book was that it moved some of Jacobs’ generalizations into a specific neighborhood and ethnic context that could be related to other areas. To those of us working in Massachusetts who knew the history of the BRA and the North End, it was a particularly scathing critique. I hope this helps. I would be very interested in what you find because I think the *Urban Villagers* has become as important for its symbolism.
Professor of Urban Affairs and Geography
Bibliography: me and u
