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Unlike virtually all other old immigrant enclaves in North American cities, the historic downtown Chinatowns of big cities in the United States and Canada largely survive, though not for lack of pl...

The survival of Chinatowns and other ethnic enclaves in cities is largely determined by who owns property. Ethnic enclaves such as Chinatowns have traditionally played important economic, social and cultural functions as places for recent immigrants to live and work, though Chinatowns have long faced redevelopment pressures. In North America, as Chinese immigrants and their descendants settle in the suburbs, and as historic Chinatowns’ locations close to revitalising downtowns attract increasing investment, the future of these historic enclaves is shaped by various, often intense and divergent, forces. This article describes changes in the patterns of property ownership in Boston and Philadelphia’s downtown Chinatowns over the last decade (2003–2013) and relates them to changes and continuities in these neighbourhoods’ population, commercial activities and building stock. The trends we observe simultaneously reinforce and complicate debates about gentrification and longstanding efforts to preserve these Chinatowns as ethnic Chinese residential, commercial, and cultural centres.

Amidst expanding interest in local food and agriculture, food banks and allied organizations across the United States have increasingly engaged in diverse gleaning, gardening, and farming activities. Some of these programs reinforce food banks’ traditional role in distributing surplus commodities, and most extend food banks’ reliance on middle class volunteers and charitable donations. But some gleaning and especially gardening and farming programs seek to build poor people’s and communities’ capacity to meet more of their own food needs, signaling new roles for some food banks in promoting community food security and food justice. This article reports the results of a national survey and in-depth case studies of the ways in which food banks are engaging in and with local agriculture and how this influences food banks’ roles in community and regional food systems. The patterns it reveals reflect broader tensions in debates about hunger relief and food security.

Amidst debates over the impacts of immigration, cities and towns across the United States have alternately opposed or welcomed unauthorized immigrants. Although their “illegal immigration relief acts” and “sanctuary laws” are typically justified in terms of law and order, they also grow from divergent hopes, concerns, and assumptions about newcomers’ integration and effects on local revitalization. These issues have gained importance beyond central cities with the suburbanization of immigration and the economic decline of older suburbs in recent decades. This article explores the case of two adjacent, formerly industrial towns in suburban Philadelphia, examining local leaders’ respective rationale for seeking to incorporate unauthorized immigrants in Norristown and to restrict their settlement and employment in neighboring Bridgeport. Despite their obvious similarities, these towns’ distinct experiences of race, migration, and revitalization explain much of their divergent responses.

Agriculture has become a focus of planning for urban regeneration in the United States. However, to make agriculture an impactful part of urban community and economic development – rather than a passing fad – it is vital to identify its most effective forms. This paper reports on field research in six cities in the United States where municipalities, nonprofit organizations and residents are deploying farming and gardening for diverse economic development objectives. Our findings suggest that despite expectations that urban agriculture will attract capital, create jobs and tax ratables and increase property values in preparation for ‘higher-value’ development, its greatest potential is in social enterprise, supplementing incomes, developing human and social capital and promoting food security.

The 16th biennial conference of the International Planning History Society took place in St. Augustine, Florida, USA, from 20 to 23 July 2014. Chris Silver, FAICP, from the University of Florida and Leslee F. Keys from Flagler College co-chaired the conference. The programme included 45 paper and roundtable sessions, with 167 papers, plus 3 plenary sessions.

Urban planning practitioners and academics generally view food system planning as a recent area of study, originating little more than a decade ago. Yet, food planning has a long and multifaceted history. Though not theorized as food system planning in most of the secondary literature in planning history, it is not hard to find when we look, even at some of the most familiar, seminal plans and scholarship in planning history. In this article, we trace the broad continuities and major changes in North American food planning, focusing on physical planning, regional economic development, and community economic development from the age of colonization to the present. The planners of early American cities necessarily organized urban environments and metropolitan infrastructure around agriculture, and some helped to build an international food economy. Since the nineteenth century, professional planners and their grassroots counterparts have struggled to manage the challenges posed by the industrial food system and society, in which the place of agriculture in the city is more ambiguous and contested.

Scholars have largely recounted the modern history of urban planning and development in the USA as a fragmented story in which power and agency have rarely been centralized. Yet the power to plan and develop cities and regions has been highly concentrated in certain periods. Between the 1870s and 1910s, a group of capitalists led by Peter Widener in Philadelphia, William Whitney in New York, and Charles Yerkes in Chicago consolidated the transit systems of these metropolises and the gas and electric utilities of some 100 American cities. Holding key positions in certain regions' public institutions and private corporations, they coordinated development of real estate, parks, and neighbourhoods in tandem with this infrastructure. This article surveys how Widener and his colleagues restructured the Philadelphia region in the Gilded Age. Through fire insurance atlases, deeds, biographical and company sources, it explores the ways they concentrated power and coordinated urbanization.

Problem: Immigration poses various problems for U.S. cities and regions, and the roles planners should play in migrant communities are not clear. Purpose: I consider how practitioners and scholars have understood and addressed the planning challenges and opportunities presented by the major migrations of ethnic minorities to U.S. cities and regions over the past century. Methods: I trace discussions of planning and migration at professional planning conferences over the past century and survey planning scholarship and practice related to immigration and migrant communities in three principal eras: early 20th century southern and eastern European immigration; the mid-century internal migrations of African Americans and Puerto Ricans; and immigration in the late 20th and early 21st century. Results and conclusions: Over the past century, immigration has had physical, economic, and social effects on people and places that are legitimate concerns of urban planners. Yet, the planning profession has had an ambi...

The deindustrialization of North American cities is generally told as a post-World War II narrative, featuring factory closings, highways to the suburbs, and urban renewal programs responding to the loss of jobs and population. Yet, as recent scholarship on industrial suburbanization has shown, the decentralization of manufacturing manifested itself throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Some scholars of twentieth-century planning have observed that urban renewal programs hurt cities as much as they helped. This essay argues that some late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century redevelopment programs played a greater causal role in deindustrialization and the shift in Americans' conceptions of cities from places of production to places of consumption. Surveying the complex relationships between urban and industrial restructuring in Philadelphia during the pre-Depression decades, it examines the prehistory of federal urban renewal at the state and local level.

Schools are among the most ubiquitous institutions shaping city and regional ecology, policy, and everyday experience. In recent decades, planning historians have come to define planning ever more broadly, focusing on a great diversity of urban activities. But the design, development, and administration of public and private schools, from the preschool to university level, have yet to be incorporated into our discipline's debates and discussions to a significant degree. This introductory article frames the articles that follow within the broader history of American education and posits a variety of opportunities and questions to explore as we incorporate the history of schools into planning history.

City Building on the Eastern Frontier: Sorting the New Nineteenth-Century City. By Diane Shaw. (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004. Pp. xi, 209. Illustrations, maps. Cloth, $45.00.)Among the most significant recent developments in the humanities and social sciences is the "spatial turn" that scholars have taken. For historians, new interpretive frameworks for understanding geography and material culture add a more sophisticated spatial dimension to our understanding of change over time. For architectural historians in particular, these developments promise to move their work from the realm of style and aesthetics towards a more meaningful place in debates about social, economic, and urban history. Architectural historian Diane Shaw's new book represents an important step in this paradigm shift.City Building on the Eastern Frontier chronicles the early- and mid-nineteenth-century development of the Erie Canal cities of Rochester and Syracuse, New York. The story is told through their merchants, not their architects. Shaw describes both her subject and her mode of analysis as "vernacular urbanism." She focuses on ordinary cities as opposed to extraordinary metropolises, on the social implications-or "spatial culture"-of urban development rather than the academic design of buildings. Her cities are not so much designed as "sorted"-a functional, rather than aesthetic classification. Yet she still relies on a rich array of visual sources, including maps, plans, and drawings that fill the first forty pages of the book. Shaw combines critical interpretation of these images with evidence of people's visions, uses, and understandings of urban space from such documents as guide books, gazetteers, city ordinances, and diaries.In her view, commercialization was the driving force behind early American urbanization, and market-oriented urbanization in underdeveloped regions of the East was as important for forging American society as settlement was on the western frontier. In a nutshell, she argues "a pervasive mercantile ethos resulted in new cities whose public spaces of commercial, industrial, and civic activity were geographically, functionally, architecturally, and socially sorted to enhance a self-fulfilling image of economic vitality and bourgeois gentility" (1). While the capitalists of Manhattan, Philadelphia, and Chicago established the broader patterns of economic geography across the continent, Shaw claims the big story of nineteenth-century urbanization is found in the small cities that formed the "links in a wider mercantile chain of improvement" (12). In 1800, there were 33 cities with populations between 2,500 and 25,000; by 1900 there were 2,128.Even in Thomas Jefferson's early republic, Shaw declares, "The anti-urban rhetoric of the corrupting influence of the city was being challenged by two new moral imperatives of particular appeal to city builders: the twin virtues of creating economic productivity and carrying civilization" throughout the continent (10). "Improvement" is surely an older idea, but it took a particular form in early nineteenth-century upstate New York, where commercial improvements spurred by the Erie Canal intersected with the social and spiritual movements of the second Great Awakening. Shaw leaves the task of sorting out regional variation in North American urbanization to others. The central task of her book lies in illustrating how the values of the mercantile and professional classes in Syracuse and Rochester were "inscribed into, indeed abetted by, the urban, architectural, and social fabric of the new cities" (18).Following the pattern of urbanization itself, the book's chapters build upon one another in a sort of accretive process. Early chapters treat the founding, planning, platting, and initial settlement of Rochester and Syracuse. …

Municipal ordinances to remove farm animals from city limits played a central part in defining city planning’s role in urban ecosystems, economies, and public health. This article examines the regulation of animal agriculture since the eighteenth century in four cities: Baltimore, Boston, Philadelphia, and New York. Across the nineteenth century, municipal ordinances to remove farm animals from city limits set the tone for the planning profession, aligning it with the field of public health in creating a hygienic city. In the efforts to untangle animal agriculture from waste management, public space, and urban food supply, urban authorities employed some of the first land-use regulations in the United States, shaping new planning powers. Ordinances banning slaughterhouses, piggeries, and dairies culminated with zoning as planning became a profession. These regulations ultimately allowed planners to transform cities and their food environments by dismantling a system in which animals and their caretakers among the urban poor had played integral parts in food production, processing, and municipal waste management. Unpacking the objectives, debates, and impacts of these early regulations reveals enduring tensions and challenges as planners today seek to reweave animal agriculture into cities.