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This article illuminates how a smaller southern city engaged broader planning approaches. Civic leaders, especially women, pushed and partnered with municipal administrations to beautify Augusta, Georgia, a city with extraordinarily wide streets and a long tradition of urban horticulture. Their efforts in the 1900s to 1950s, often in concert with close by planners, led to a confluence of urban beautification, historic preservation, and downtown revitalization in the 1960s. This coordinated activity reshaped Augusta’s cityscape, exacerbated racial tensions, and enshrined principles of the City Beautiful, Garden City, and parks movements long after they receded in large cities, influencing the work of nationally prominent planners commissioned in the 1970s and 1980s.

This article focuses on the origins of Mexico’s Federal District Planning Commission (1950–1953) and the consequences of its failure to implement a major urban renewal project in downtown Mexico City. In the 1950s, Mexico’s leading urbanists hoped to resolve the city’s severe traffic congestion through a new grid design and, in the process, transform it into a mecca for Mexican modernity. These efforts were thwarted by an independent coalition of residents and historic preservations in a movement that reflected the uneasy tensions between urban modernity and national patrimony in mid-century Mexico.

Beginning with Daniel H. Burnham’s iconic 1909 plan, the planning tradition in Chicago emphasized the enhancement of the downtown as the key to the city’s health. Harold Washington challenged the tradition during his one-term mayoralty, as evidenced in his administration’s 1984 comprehensive plan, calling for balanced growth and increased attention to neighborhood concerns. Following Washington’s abrupt death in office, subsequent mayors quickly reverted to the more conventional approach to planning that held sway in Chicago and many other large US cities in postindustrial America.

In 1949, San Diego was one of the first major California cities to switch to a bus-only transit fleet. As time went on, both San Diego and its neighbor Tijuana saw explosive population growth, and in the 1970s a combination of strong leadership and a stroke of luck led to San Diego constructing the first post–World War II light rail system in the United States. The original system went from downtown to the Mexican border and received national and international attention for being delivered on time, under budget, and without federal funds. This article explores the system’s origins, strengths, shortcomings, and legacy.

This article examines the Oakland Redevelopment Agency's efforts (from the late 1950s through early 1980s) to revitalize the downtown core - the City Center project that leveled more than a score of older blocks and buildings, constructed a hotel and close to a dozen office buildings, yet failed to realize a regional shopping mall. City Center was premised on the idea that urban renewal, combined with Oakland's emerging centrality within the Bay Area's freeway and mass transit networks, would enable downtown to compete successfully with both San Francisco and the burgeoning suburbs. Yet unlike contemporaneous mega-projects that seemingly established Oakland as a key regional commercial attractor (e.g., the new container port and major-league sports complex), head-on competition with San Francisco (and the suburbs) for office, retail and hotel development proved a more difficult endeavor.

This study uses urban regime theory to understand the events surrounding Fargo urban renewal during the 1950s. Specifically, it focuses upon the struggle between realtors, banking officers, government officials, and other local actors, as they established a plan for relocating Fargo residents displaced by urban renewal. With a downtown Civic Center as their ultimate goal, coalition partners set aside their differences and produced an unprecedented plan: to avoid any reliance on public housing, relocation would be handled via the private sector, specifically the Fargo Board of Realtors. The study demonstrates that this relocation plan and its subsequent revisions reflected the interests of the individual regime members.

In 1968, the Federal Highway Administration allotted twenty-one additional Interstate Highway miles for a spur into Huntsville, Alabama. This article details the long subsequent battle to build the Huntsville spur. Such late additions to the Interstate System stood to be challenged on all fronts amid the nationwide Freeway Revolt and a shifting legislative environment in Congress. Federal highway policy changes during the 1960s and early 1970s gave freeway opponents opportunities to challenge controversial highways. However, decentralized metropolitan growth encouraged Huntsville leaders and city planners to support construction of the new urban expressway. Despite concerns about environmental damage and racial impacts, Huntsville’s freeway revolt faltered. Further, this article argues that, despite Huntsville’s late addition to the Interstate System, the local highway planning process mirrored the earlier national vision of expressway-driven redevelopment of declining central cities.

San Francisco’s urban planning was dominated by a powerful progrowth alliance of the business sector and the city government in the decades after World War II (WWII). This urban hegemonism did not change until the mid-1980s when the Downtown Plan and Proposition M were passed to restrict unfettered urban growth, which were preceded and followed by a series of debates and attempts to advocate for or against growth throughout the 1980s and 1990s. This article addresses two questions of the significant transformation in San Francisco’s planning history: (1) how did the transformation occur? and (2) what were the transformative themes? Through finding answers to these questions, this article concludes the conflicts between laissez-faire and interventionist planning philosophies as well as the transformative process toward a more balanced planning approach in San Francisco.

Historically, Bayside, a neighborhood like Monjoy Hill on the fringe of Portland, Maine’s downtown, served as the city’s “Zone of Emergence.” In 1944, it was declared in “need of renewing”; by 1970, barely a shell of Bayside remained. With tree-lined streets and Greek Revival, Italianate, and Second French Empire architecture, Bayside hardly fit the stereotype of a slum. This study not only examines Bayside’s changing socioeconomic configuration but also (within the context of the progressive housers’ rhetoric about deslumming) explores the Depression-era and post-World War II government-energized crusade against blight. Like Robert Fogelsong and Alison Isenberg find for larger cities, the study sees this Bayside-dooming campaign as having much more to do with saving the downtown from the threat of suburbia and white flight than with providing safe and sanitary housing and decent neighborhoods to the urban poor.

Between 1960 and 2000, Providence, Rhode Island, transformed its downtown through physical redevelopment. This article examines the proposals and implementation of seven major downtown plans issued for Providence during this period. Each plan proposed significant physical changes like the redevelopment of city blocks, the relocation of railroads, or the construction of open space. Despite Providence's successful redevelopment reputation, the study found that Providence's downtown plan implementation was both incomplete and incremental. Only four of the seven plans issued experienced any implementation during the study period, and of those four plans, only one had more than half of its recommendations implemented. Incremental implementation occurred when unimplemented plan ideas were proposed by later plans and subsequently realized.

In the 1920s, traffic congestion was one of the primary issues concerning urban planners. At the time, traffic mitigation efforts boiled down to a fundamental conundrum: was the solution to traffic congestion more roads or more rules? This article chronicles the debates over traffic congestion relief in downtown Boston during that period, analyzing the two radical, competing proposals of roads, in the form of a major new surface thoroughfare called the Loop Highway, versus rules, in the form of stricter parking regulations. The article analyzes the debates over these proposals and the reasons why the city adopted neither approach. While politics had its hand in dooming the proposals, poor planning played a central role as well. The lack of a comparative analytical framework for evaluating the competing “roads” and “rules” proposals gave detractors the ammunition to oppose either approach on the grounds that the alternative approach would be superior.

In contrast to other urban renewal projects that erased the presence of minority and working-class residents, the design of the Center City Plaza in downtown Kansas City, Kansas, was an attempt to provide a democratic space for a diverse citizenry. Initiated by local officials, the project was intended to alter the “image” of the downtown. Environmental planner Elpidio Rocha was hired to design a pedestrian mall that included abstract sculptural forms. In the context of deindustrialization and suburbanization, however, urban renewal did not halt downtown decline and local political interests dismantled the pedestrian mall, setting the stage for a new round of redevelopment.

Architect, city planner, educator, and writer, Edmund N. Bacon (1910 -) orchestrated revitalization of downtown Philadelphia after World War II and served as one of the most articulate voices for a vigorous urban planning process in American cities. As executive director of Philadelphia’s City Planning Commission from 1949 to 1970, he created Penn Center, restored Society Hill, and preserved open space throughout the revitalized center city. His widely read book, Design of Cities (1967), has greatly influenced the way cities are understood and planned. Architect Alexander Garvin explores the influences on Bacon’s many contributions to twentieth-century planning through a conversation with the exuberant urbanist.