Mapping Decline

by Gordon, Colin

• ISBN13: 9780812240702
• ISBN10: 0812240707
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2008-04-15
• Publisher: Univ of Pennsylvania Pr

Summary

Once a thriving metropolis on the banks of the Mississippi, St. Louis, Missouri, is now a ghostly landscape of vacant houses, boarded-up storefronts, and abandoned factories. The Gateway City is, by any measure, one of the most depopulated, deindustrialized, and deeply segregated examples of American urban decay. "Not a typical city," as one observer noted in the late 1970s, "but, like a Eugene O'Neill play, it shows a general condition in a stark and dramatic form." Mapping Declineexamines the causes and consequences of St. Louis's urban crisis. It traces the complicity of private real estate restrictions, local planning and zoning, and federal housing policies in the "white flight" of people and wealth from the central city. And it traces the inadequacy--and often sheer folly--of a generation of urban renewal, in which even programs and resources aimed at eradicating blight in the city ended up encouraging flight to the suburbs. The urban crisis, as this study of St. Louis makes clear, is not just a consequence of economic and demographic change; it is also the most profound political failure of our recent history. Mapping Declineis the first history of a modern American city to combine extensive local archival research with the latest geographic information system (GIS) digital mapping techniques. More than 75 full-color maps--rendered from census data, archival sources, case law, and local planning and property records--illustrate, in often stark and dramatic ways, the still-unfolding political history of our neglected cities.

Author Biography

Colin Gordon is Professor of History at The University of Iowa and author of Dead on Arrival: The Politics of Health Care in Twentieth- Century America and New Deals: Business, Labor, and Politics in America, 1920-1935.

Table of Contents

List of Maps, Figures, and Tables	p. ix
Preface	p. xiii
Introduction: Our House: The Twentieth Century at 4635 North Market Street	p. 1
Local Politics, Local Power: Governing Greater St. Louis, 1940-2000	p. 39
"The Steel Ring": Race and Realty in Greater St. Louis	p. 69
Patchwork Metropolis: Municipal Zoning in Greater St. Louis	p. 112
Fighting Blight: Urban Renewal Policies and Programs, 1945-2000	p. 153
City of Blight: The Limits of Urban Renewal in Greater St. Louis	p. 188
Conclusion: Our House Revisited: The Twenty-First Century at 4635 North Market Street	p. 221
Notes	p. 229
Index	p. 273
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