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The Tortured Pre-History Of Urban Blight: African American St. Louis And The Politics Of Public Health, 1877-1940, Taylor Desloge
The Tortured Pre-History Of Urban Blight: African American St. Louis And The Politics Of Public Health, 1877-1940, Taylor Desloge
Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations
This dissertation is a long history of the contested legal and environmental category of blight, especially in its racialized dimensions, in tandem with the African American experience of living in blighted urban spaces and forging a black politics of public health and welfare. Rethinking the conventional view that identifies blight as simply a preoccupation of post-World War II planners, this dissertation relocates its roots in a politics of public health that emerged a hundred years earlier, in the Post-Reconstruction Era, when black migration to the city and the rise of industrial capitalism raised new questions over both the social needs …
“By The People Most Affected”: Model Cities, Citizen Control, And The Broken Promises Of Urban Renewal, Sarah Rachel Siegel
“By The People Most Affected”: Model Cities, Citizen Control, And The Broken Promises Of Urban Renewal, Sarah Rachel Siegel
Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations
This dissertation stands at the intersection of civil rights social history, political history, and urban planning. Among the first academic work to recognize the significance of the Model Cities War on Poverty program, this dissertation explores how residents tried to make American cities safe places for poor people to live as full citizens. It argues that neighborhood activists in St. Louis and around the country used the War on Poverty and Model Cities specifically to make a bid for a permanent role in city planning for their neighborhoods. This was no less than an attempt to alter the relationship between …