Word: urbanism
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...families out of the cities, downtowns quickly lost their old pizazz. Then the redevelopment binge of the '50s and '60s came disastrously close to indulging the American antiurban instinct to the point of no return. Political pressure to build new housing for the inner-city poor was intense. Urban renewal, a well-intended and wrongheaded federal mission, in those days meant tearing down quirky, densely interwoven neighborhoods of 19th and early 20th century low-rise buildings and putting up expensive, charmless clots of high-rises. Or, even worse, leaving empty tracts. (The resistance of Charleston, S.C., and Savannah to Great...
...urban renewal had its rearguard critics, and vital downtowns had their influential advocates. The right laws were passed. Cases were won. In 1965 New York City passed the Landmarks Preservation Law, setting up a commission that could restrict any changes to designated historic buildings; a year later, Congress enacted its version, which established the National Register of Historic Places and provided preservation grants to states...
...human size and pedestrian stride, makes intuitive sense. Indeed, old sections of cities embody all sorts of folk and classical principles concerning residential density and building size and materials and zoning. In the very arrangements of alleys and building setbacks is a time-tested plan, a kind of urban genetic code...
What has come to be known as gentrification -- the migration of (mainly white) middle-class homesteaders into poor (mainly black and Hispanic) urban neighborhoods -- is neither the cause nor an effect, exactly, of the historic renovation boom. But the two trends have abetted each other. The original '60s militants of the preservation movement were the shock troops of the upper middle class, and it was a broader swath of the same class who in the '70s made living amid urban antiquity seem both virtuous and stylish. Restored carriage houses and pressed-tin ceilings have seduced more children of the suburbs...
...generous, hopeful time, produced terrible urban policy and dispiriting architecture, while in the '80s, a gilded, ungenerous age, the nation is saving buildings and repairing cities. An uncomfortable irony, but preservation is a conservative movement. Thus it carries with it a whiff of complacency...