Word: urbanize
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...respecting city seems to want to be hideous with rubble and raw earth, crawling with helmeted workers, snorting earthmovers and angular cranes. These are the signs and portents of the biggest civic building boom the U.S.?or any other country?has known. It goes by the name of urban renewal, but it might also be called emergency surgery. The metaphor is thoroughly consistent. Considerable pain is involved, and sometimes shock. There is inevitable destruction of healthy tissue, the operation is sometimes a failure, and the patient is really sick or he wouldn't be there in the first place...
...become clear that the sickness of the cities was a kind of heart disease; they have been dying at the center, where the great stores and great buildings and great enterprises are supposed to be. The suburban sprawl, in leeching the center city's lifeblood, was imperiling the whole urban organism. Suddenly everybody?bankers, businessmen, politicians, newspapers and civic associations of all shapes and sizes?found themselves united in a new concern for the city in a mustering of community forces unparalleled in recent times...
...process involves a delicate meld of drawing board and bulldozer, budget and ballot box, bludgeon and crystal ball. Technically, every time an enterprising builder tears down an old building and replaces it with a new one, it is urban renewal. But only in recent years has the process been conceived in terms of an overall plan to reshape the city...
...acts and amendments, the legislation has been expanded to finance the redevelopment of the heart of the city by authorizing clearance of land for "nonresidential" reuse, and setting up other funds for the rehabilitation and conservation of old houses and neighborhoods. Altogether there are today 1,634 federally assisted urban renewal projects going on and being studied in 777 U.S. cities...
...this outlay is more than compensated for by the private building it has generated. Last week Urban Renewal Commissioner William L. Slayton reported proudly that, excluding the cost of land, approximately $6.90 of redevelopment investment is made for every $1 of federal grants...