Although modernism was a major influence on the buildings - I like the term concrete brutalism better as a pejorative - it was a minor piece of the whole. Urban renewal was about perceptions of efficiency, part of the hubris that the U.S. was prone to after WWII, the same notions of big projects that could solve any problems, the same thinking that lead to the War on Poverty and the Vietnam War.
Some history is needed for context. The Golden Age of Urbanism in the U.S. was about from the 1890s through the 1920s. Those are the years that the modern city took form. Throughout the northeast and midwest a dense urban core of retail and offices formed, while manufacturing and housing began being pushed farther away as mass transportation increased and the price of the automobile dropped. Tenement housing was replaced by apartment buildings as the middle-class’s and even the upper working class’s wages increased. New York City is the paradigm of all this, but other cities imitated it as much as feasible.
You can find hundreds of plans for urban development along rational lines starting well before the modernist movement. The City Beautiful movement started in the 1890s and the White City at the 1893 World’s Fair in Chicago was extremely influential. Every city - copying Hausmann’s Paris to an extent - wanted to create space inside the city to relieve crowding and congestion, by making tree-lined boulevards, parklands, wider roads, public squares and other devices. In New York, the new subways allowed the breakup of the Lower East Side - the most densely packed square mile in the world - and the dispersal of the population to the “suburbs,” i.e. apartments in The Bronx and Queens.
The Depression nearly stopped the expansion of urban cores in the U.S. and home building was further impaired by WWII. After that war, therefore, there was an enormous pent-up need to create housing, along with the huge amount of forced savings from the war years to pay for it.
What planners expected was that cities would continue on as they had been pre-war. What happened was that the middle-class simply picked up and moved out to new automobile suburbs.
After a decade or so, planners saw that what was left in the cities were huge pockets of poverty, aged buildings that nobody took care of, and rising crime. They also saw that these areas were heavily minority. For reasons that were a swirl of good intentions, enlightened self-interest, massive self-delusion, and racism, cities and the federal government saw opportunities to upgrade these areas.
The plans for urban development were remarkably similar across the country. Rather than small incremental improvements in housing stock, entire neighborhoods of bad housing and poverty would be razed all at once, allowing the creation of the 1920s-style amenities: high-rise apartments for efficiency that would create large open spaces of greenery, widened streets for better transportation, and modern factories that would provide employment.
What went wrong? Everything. Jane Jacob’s classic The Death of Life of American Cities is a must to read about why and how cities and neighborhoods and societies work. None of the planners read the book nor understood any of the information in it. In short, you can’t plan a city. Cities grow piecemeal, evolving gradually to meet changing needs section by section.
Worse, the planners’ plans for these renewed neighborhoods failed in every conceivable way. When you tear down a neighborhood, the people in it have to go somewhere. Rebuilding whole neighborhoods takes years under the best of circumstances, none of which ever happened. Being poverty-stricken, the only areas the displaced populations could go was to other ghetto areas, making them even worse off. When finally built, the high-rise apartments were badly designed for actual living in, had unresponsive bureaucracies for landlords, could not change and adapt to differing needs, and soon became inescapable hellholes for crime. Businesses could not be persuaded to go to these inner-city poverty areas, especially not when the suburbs and infinite riches beckoned. Public transportation money vanished as highway-building took all the money leaving the residents without good ways to get to other areas for the jobs. What you had left were a few concrete slabs in the midst of devastation - or often nothing at all. Huge areas in many cities stayed empty for years. The resentment of those forced into even worse ghettos than what they had been in played a major part in causing the urban riots of the 1960s.
Looking merely at the architecture is really the wrong way to look at urban renewal. Modernism – machines made for living – was a symptom of a massive failure to understand either how cities functioned or what was taking place in the real world under the planners’ noses. Nobody liked urban renewal: not then and not today.
What would have been better? In hindsight, piecemeal upgrading that would have allowed people to stay in their neighborhoods but make their housing livable would have been a good start. Better schools. Lots of public transportation. Small business start-up money. The kind of slow, incremental change that doesn’t seem to be doing much of anything until a decade or two later you see that everything is different. The sort of thing that is very much against the American character.
You can also see enormous lessons in this period for rebuilding New Orleans. Too many of the plans people are throwing around sound like urban renewal all over again. They won’t work. But, hey, they’re only affecting poor black people and we certainly know what’s best for them, don’t we? Just like in the 1950s.
