Christopher Klemek - Specialized Research AI at MIT

Christopher Klemek

The rise & fall of New Left urbanism

The pillars of the “urban renewal or-

der,” shorthand for an interlocking set
of social policies since the 1940s, were
crumbling fast by the 1960s. Urban pop-
ulations, especially in Western Europe,
the United States, and Canada, sudden-
ly no longer wanted the variety of once
progressive-minded public programs it
encompassed: highways through cities,
demolitions aimed at clearing “blighted”
or “gray” areas, redevelopment for pub-
lic housing superblocks and other mega-
projects. A slum in the eyes of a planner,
it turned out, was often a resident’s cher-
ished homestead, and soon proponents
of the City of Tomorrow ran up against
increasing opposition. The fall of the
urban renewal order was driven from
below, to be sure; but the ideology of
this grassroots uprising was not clearly
drawn from the traditional left or right.
Yet in its wake opened a fleeting concep-
tual space, where the fate of urban plan-
ning and policy–even urban life in gen-
eral–could be debated and reconsid-
ered, sometimes quite radically.

Striking experiments in citizen partic-

ipation, or “advocacy planning,” took
root in Anglo-American urbanism in the
1960s and 1970s, often in the very neigh-
borhoods that were threatened by “the

federal bulldozer.” In districts like Lon-
don’s Covent Garden, Toronto’s St. Law-
rence Neighborhood, and New York’s
West Village, citizens attempted to make
city planning–and by extension urban
life–more democratic and equitable,
putting forward their own proposals
to counter the sweeping urban renewal
plans imposed by government or private
developers. Each of the counterpropos-
als, while not always successfully real-
ized, experimented with alternative
methods of meeting urban challenges–
mobility, preservation, growth, afford-
ability, and upgrading–and embodied
the aspirations and ideals of residents
who couldn’t be easily ignored. Such res-
idents rejected the authority of suppos-
edly impartial experts and liberal policy-
makers, whose pursuit of modernization
in the “public interest” seemed to come
at the expense of urban neighborhoods.
Ad hoc grassroots organizing proved

effective in stopping highway plans,
“slum” clearance proposals, and rede-
velopment schemes. But such victories
posed a follow-up question: must pop-
ular mobilization be only reactive? In
other words, couldn’t cities also be
planned from the grassroots? At a time
when the New Left was championing
the idea that “the people with the prob-

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Christopher
Klemek

lems are the people with the solutions,”
an emergent “New Left urbanism” em-
bodied hopes (in the end fleeting) for
urban renewal with a humane face.

Efforts to stop the construction of

highways through cities formed the ½rst
signi½cant wave of challenges to the ur-
ban renewal order. The second half of
the 1950s saw successful grassroots op-
position to plans for a freeway in San
Francisco along the Embarcadero wa-
terfront and a plan for a sunken artery
through Washington Square in Manhat-
tan, and by the 1960s, this “freeway
revolt” had spread to many American
cities. Robert Moses had predicted, dur-
ing the policy discussions that preceded
the national highway program, that the
portions of the network in dense urban
areas would be the most likely to stir re-
sistance. After all, unlike rural and sub-
urban ones, these urban freeways came
at the expense of large numbers of resi-
dences and businesses, negatively im-
pacting those least likely to use the new
roads and igniting a cultural clash over
an urban versus a suburban vision of
American life. It, too, was a clash be-
tween those who saw themselves as
needless victims–a contingent some-
times dismissed as nimby (“Not In
My Backyard”) obstructionists–and
those who saw some local sacri½ces as
necessary for infrastructure meant to
serve the larger public good.1

These sacri½ces, however, weren’t
equitably distributed, with poor and
minority urban communities facing
disproportionately higher numbers of
demolitions. In fact, Moses and other
advocates didn’t shy away from link-
ing urban highway construction to an-
other agenda within the urban renewal
order: the eradication of areas planners
deemed obsolete or “blighted.” Slum
clearance proposals frequently also

were based upon the undesirability of
an existing neighborhood, which was
condemned for its inherent character-
istics, and not simply as a casualty of
some larger public works project. It took
longer for residents to develop the con-
ceptual and tactical resources to chal-
lenge slum clearance schemes and de-
fend neighborhoods on their own terms,
to af½rm their worthiness in the face of
a rhetoric of blight. Yet this did happen,
and by the early 1960s, pressure from
residents in New York neighborhoods
like Gramercy, Bellevue, and the West
Village forced a shift in rhetoric from
public of½cials, halted several speci½c
slum clearance proposals, and facilitated
the expansion of historic preservation
statutes to protect entire neighborhoods.
Unof½cially, this heralded a larger cul-
tural sea change in attitudes toward old
neighborhoods, evident by the 1970s in
phenomena like the revival of Brook-
lyn’s “brownstone belt” and a growing
enthusiasm for ½xing up homes in Vic-
torian districts more generally. (Inciden-
tally, these trends were reflected, respec-
tively, in two popular public television
programs born during the period, Sesa-
me Street, in 1969, and This Old House, in
1978.) Even the “ghetto” self-help phi-
losophies promoted by some minority
urban leaders at the time exhibited re-
lated themes of neighborhood defense
and uplift.

Grassroots self-empowerment was
complemented by federal legislative
changes–Congressional amendments
to housing legislation in 1959 and 1965,
and to the highway acts in 1962 and
1968–which revised the de½nitions of
urban renewal to include more resident
consultation and more physical rehabili-
tation. However, more assertive citizen
participation in urban planning was not
welcomed universally. As groups became
more savvy and effective at obstructing

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proposals, unwanted projects could be
deliberately bogged down, eventually
killed, through mandated hearings and
court challenges–some resulting from
the very legislative changes and program
initiatives designed to encourage inclu-
sion; measures intended to defuse and
incorporate opposition often, inversely,
fanned it. Still, U.S. urbanites increas-
ingly believed that the sweeping powers
granted to government agencies under
the rubric of urban renewal had auth-
orized a kind of undemocratic monster.
Vigorous opposition, even gridlock,
seemed warranted to check such ty-
rannical abuse of power.

While increasingly successful at op-

posing outside plans, citizen groups
were perhaps less vocal for measures
they supported, and practically none
could point to any successful propos-
als of their own devising. Defensive
battles often obscured the real point:
that neighborhoods wanted to gain
some control to pursue their own con-
structive programs. In the early 1960s,
the New York traf½c commissioner
expressed a common criticism of the
negative tactics deployed so effective-
ly by a West Village neighborhood or-
ganization: “I have yet to hear of any-
thing in New York that that group is
for!” Indeed, the group in question,
led by Jane Jacobs, deliberately chose
to shelve its positive goals until after
renewal plans were defeated, for fear
they might be co-opted as tokens of
community participation. Some groups,
however, did not wait for the dust to
settle before devising counterproposals;
they used them as rallying points against
of½cial plans. And many others took up
planning in the wake of victories.

Community groups didn’t invent the

notion of democratizing the urban plan-
ning process. By the late 1940s and 1950s,

½gures such as Paul and Percival Good-
man, Peter and Alison Smithson, and
adherents of the British “townscape”
movement advocated a certain popu-
lism in design. Social scientists includ-
ing Herbert Gans, Marc Fried, Michael
Young, and Peter Willmott raised ques-
tions about how well the public was
served by urban renewal. And Jane Ja-
cobs’s 1961 book, The Death and Life of
Great American Cities, publicly challenged
the expertise professed by credentialed
urbanists; it granted a folk wisdom to
the various preferences of average city
dwellers, whose implicit rati½cation of
what worked seemed at odds with fash-
ionable planning prescriptions.2

The most relevant ideas, however,
were those that emerged from the Uni-
versity of Pennsylvania’s Graduate
School of Fine Arts. Urbanists who stud-
ied and taught there in the 1950s were
riven by tensions between advocates
of social scienti½c methodologies and
those who were concerned primarily
with urban design questions. Denise
Scott Brown, a graduate student who
emigrated from London to study at the
school in 1958, characterized the divide
as “analysts” versus “artists.” Those de-
bates were suddenly complicated, even
radicalized, by a newly aroused political
sensibility and the more activist posture
that accompanied it. Scott Brown re-
called witnessing at Penn what would
later be dubbed the New Left:

Here, long before it was visible in other
places, was the elation that comes with
the discovery and de½nition of a prob-
lem: poverty. The continued existence
of poor people in America was a real dis-
covery for students and faculty in the late
1950s. The social planning movement en-
gulfed Penn’s planning department.3

That “social planning movement”
found its ½rst systematic expression

The rise &
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Dædalus Spring 2009

Christopher
Klemek

in Paul Davidoff, who came to Penn in
1956, initially as a planning student and
then as an instructor. Combining train-
ing from Yale Law School with a passion
for social justice, Davidoff saw urban
planning as a power struggle, a scramble
for scarce resources. In particular, he en-
visioned the planning process as some-
thing analogous to the adversarial sys-
tem of jurisprudence. Planners, he felt,
only deluded themselves by thinking
anyone could objectively identify and
pursue some sort of abstract public in-
terest. Instead, Davidoff saw only con-
tending forces–and often grossly un-
equal ones. The poor and otherwise dis-
enfranchised groups lacked a strong ad-
vocate in planning deliberations, and
to rectify this, Davidoff imagined an
urbanist analogue to the public defend-
er–“advocacy planners”–who would
function more like community organiz-
ers, helping citizens of modest means
to voice their concerns (usually their
opposition) about proposals sponsored
by politically or economically powerful
constituencies. Davidoff consequently
rejected ½ne arts training conventions,
like the design studio, as overly con-
cerned with aesthetics–as, in effect,
too conservative or “imperial”; he pre-
ferred to sensitize planning students to
sources of social conflict like police bru-
tality. Together with his protégé, gradu-
ate student Thomas Reiner, he drafted
a theoretical framework for a more po-
liticized approach to planning, publish-
ing a set of highly influential articles
over the early 1960s in the professional
journals read by urbanists.

As Davidoff was setting forth his rad-
ical theoretical analysis in Philadelphia,
pragmatic citizen groups in New York
City were ½nding their own routes to
something remarkably similar. Jane Ja-
cobs was a key ½gure in this respect, and
by 1962 she had already made three dis-

tinct, signi½cant interventions on the
urban scene: releasing her controversial
book The Death and Life of Great American
Cities in 1961; organizing her neighbor-
hood in opposition to a slum clearance
proposal for the West Village in 1961–
1962; and leading, beginning in 1962, a
citywide coalition to defeat the lower
Manhattan expressway plan. These three
dramatic strokes were each of lasting
importance for New York City, and per-
haps for urbanism generally. But all of
them were reactive, defensive maneuvers
against threats posed by unwelcome
policies. In a letter congratulating Ja-
cobs on her victories, Lewis Mumford
warned her against “improvising the
means of democratic expression each
time, at a heavy cost,” urging instead
“a more permanent local organization”
than such ad hoc opposition could sup-
ply. Other city residents also sought
more durable protections, and they
were increasingly willing to take proac-
tive, preventative actions against per-
ceived threats to neighborhood stability.
The historic preservation statutes being
enacted by the mid-1960s offered some
protection, but it was relatively super-
½cial–that is, exclusively architectural.
The time had come to offer some con-
crete alternatives on the social, econom-
ic, and political fronts as well.

Jacobs and her like-minded neighbors

formalized their ad hoc opposition (the
Committee to Save the West Village)
into a permanent neighborhood associa-
tion, which allowed residents not only
to set their own priorities, but also effec-
tively advocate for them. Most of these
goals proved relatively modest; among
½ve subcommittees listed in a 1962
newsletter were garbage clean-up, tree
planting, and property improvement.
But tucked innocently within this list
was a more ambitious aim: the creation

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of a working group to look into the
possibilities for low-cost “experimen-
tal housing.” Including this project an-
nounced that the group intended to take
neighborhood development into its own
hands, challenging for dominance both
private market forces, like real estate
speculation, as well as those public agen-
cies hitherto delegated the authority for
making planning decisions. The com-
mittee also pointedly adopted a set of
inviolable principles in an effort to pur-
sue housing alternatives without engag-
ing in the standard operating procedures
of urban renewal: Title I “write-downs,”
eminent domain, condemnation, and
relocation.

The West Village boasted residents
with eclectic skills–from poets to long-
shoremen–and some of these proved
relevant to such a project. Jacobs herself
was certainly well-acquainted with the
politics and considerations involved in
planning, and her husband was a prac-
ticing architect. Nevertheless, the West
Village Committee eventually turned to
the architectural ½rm of Perkins & Will
to give ½nal form to the residents’ ideas.
Indeed, technical skills and professional
expertise, not to mention other key re-
sources like outside ½nancing and of½-
cial approval, were all necessary for the
ultimate success of any community pro-
posal. Yet the participatory process fun-
damental to the West Village Committee
ensured that residents’ goals and con-
cerns were incorporated into the proj-
ect from its inception. This was a direct
challenge to the urban planning status
quo.

After a year of preparatory work, the
committee’s proposal was unveiled on
the front page of The New York Times in
May 1963. The plan for “the West Village
Houses” envisioned a series of buildings
scattered along Washington Street sites,
where stretches of the elevated freight

tracks (a.k.a. the “high line”) of the New
York Central Railway had been demol-
ished. It proposed a handful of small,
½ve-story walk-up apartment buildings,
with orientation and scale meshed with
existing buildings, and with mixed retail
uses at street level.

There were similar stirrings among

neighboring community groups on
Manhattan’s East Side. The Gramercy
Neighbors successfully rebuffed a slum
clearance proposal promoted by Robert
Moses in 1956, by advocating for reha-
bilitation instead of demolition. After
Moses shifted that scheme to a neigh-
boring community, the Bellevue South
Preservation Committee sought to rep-
licate his defeat, and local architects,
led by Mitchell Saradoff, drafted an
elaborate counterproposal that empha-
sized in½ll construction with minimal
clearance. (In spite of this, the city con-
demned the Bellevue neighborhood in
1964.) Residents affected by an East Vil-
lage slum clearance proposal formed
the Cooper Square Committee in 1959.
Echoing the West Villagers’ refusal to
be displaced, the group developed an al-
ternative plan over the 1960s, with con-
sultation from mit-trained planner
Walter Thabit.

Urbanists in academic and profes-
sional planning circles rushed to get
behind these grassroots developments,
with Paul Davidoff’s ideas providing
the rationale. 1964 proved to be a criti-
cal year for this shift. Beginning that
year, Thomas Reiner devoted some of
his Penn classes to the plight of a Phil-
adelphia neighborhood facing destruc-
tion by a crosstown expressway along
South Street. (In 1968, that same com-
munity provided Denise Scott Brown’s
fledgling design ½rm with its ½rst com-
mission: the ½rm served, essentially,
as the advocacy planners for the oppo-
sition groups.)

The rise &
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Dædalus Spring 2009

Christopher
Klemek

Meanwhile, in Cambridge, Massa-

chusetts, planning student Chester
Hartman, sympathetic to Davidoff’s
critiques of the overly aesthetic focus
of studio training, had left the Harvard
Graduate School of Design to research
a PhD on slum clearance in Boston’s
West End. In 1964 he became involved
with several Boston-area community
groups opposing the Inner Belt high-
way through Cambridge and urban re-
newal projects in Allston. He set up
Urban Planning Aid, Inc., a pro bono
advocacy planning practice with Lisa
Peattie, Robert Goodman, and others.
This “counter-planning force,” in
Hartman’s words, assisted neighbor-
hoods including Roxbury and the
South End.4

Also in 1964, C. Richard Hatch or-
ganized the Architects Renewal Com-
mittee in Harlem (arch), a neighbor-
hood-based advocacy planning ½rm
led by young African American urban-
ists. Hatch was soon joined by J. Max
Bond, a Harvard-trained architect with
previous experience in France and Gha-
na, and eventually the staff grew to over
a dozen. The group’s initial projects in-
cluded advising tenants on their rights
and surveying the neighborhood’s hous-
ing stock, promoting both rehabilita-
tion and in½ll housing. Davidoff sat on
the arch board, a connection which
the organization’s publications made
explicit:

We at arch believe strongly in the advo-
cacy planning concept. We believe that
neighborhood involvement coupled with
technical sensitivity to community needs
is essential to the planning process if it is
to be at all relevant to Black and Spanish-
speaking people.5

One of arch’s leaders, Arthur Symes,
put it this way: “Architecture and plan-
ning are just too important to be omit-

ted from the lives of people who happen
to be poor.”

These assorted experiments in New

Left urbanism flourished not only be-
cause of a shift in the Zeitgeist, but also
because of the support of powerful pa-
trons (at least for a time). Private phi-
lanthropies, particularly the Ford Foun-
dation, provided early seed grants for
arch and other urban neighborhood
organizations. And from 1964 onward,
under various Great Society initiatives
to tackle poverty, civil rights, and urban
problems, federal funds supported the
activities of numerous community or-
ganizers via the Labor Department’s
Of½ce of Economic Opportunity (oeo)
or the Model Cities program of the new-
ly formed Department of Housing and
Urban Development. When New York
City elected the liberal Republican John
Lindsay as a reform-oriented mayor in
1965, he championed measures to de-
volve power and accountability to
“neighborhood city halls,” and he lent
his support to the West Village Houses
in particular, helping the community
group obtain permits from unsympa-
thetic city of½cials.

Just as New Left urbanism gained
powerful political patrons at the local
and national levels, it also became en-
sconced in the major institutions of
professional urbanists as well. In sum-
mer 1964, a group of activism-oriented
urbanists founded Planners for Equal
Opportunity (peo). Charter members
included Paul Davidoff, Herbert Gans,
Chester Hartman, Marshall Kaplan, and
Walter Thabit. peo immediately began
to agitate professional organizations,
training programs, and planning prac-
titioners for greater inclusiveness.6
In 1964, the planning program at

Brooklyn’s Pratt Institute gave commu-
nity advocacy its ½rst permanent institu-

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tional role through a program, funded
by the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, to
consult residents in the Bedford-Stuyve-
sant neighborhood. By 1965, Penn had
abolished the traditional studio method
from its planning curriculum. In 1966,
Harvard decided to incorporate advo-
cacy planning into its curriculum, and
the Graduate School of Design asked
Chester Hartman to return as a facul-
ty member and set up the Urban Field
Service, a student version of his Urban
Planning Aid practice.

Thus radical “anti-planning” advoca-
cy, once avant-garde, came to be seen as
mainstream, as traditional technocratic
expertise in urban policy fell into disre-
pute. This paralleled, and even slight-
ly anticipated, the eroding support for
the foreign policy of Secretary of De-
fense Robert McNamara and Washing-
ton’s “best and brightest”–no surprise
then that the student movement, so gal-
vanized by antiwar sentiment, took up
community planning as a complemen-
tary cause. As sit-ins on campuses na-
tionwide expressed grievances related
to Vietnam, curricula, and governance,
they also frequently included the plight
of poor and minority residents from
their respective college towns. Advoca-
cy planning, with its theoretical roots
in graduate schools of ½ne arts, and
its practical beginnings in disparaged
neighborhoods, made its way into the
moral consciousness of the collegiate
middle class.

A high-water mark in popular support

can also signal the start of a receding
tide. Any full account of the major social
movements of the 1960s–student, anti-
war, women’s rights, and civil rights–
must incorporate the powerful backlash
that their more radical wings provoked.
Dramatic campus sit-ins, for example,
hardened ideological lines and alienated

many liberal faculty members from stu-
dents, and many whites took violent ur-
ban riots as justi½cation for abandon-
ing any sympathy for the plight of poor
blacks.

Advocacy planning was swept up in
the same shifting tides. There were cer-
tainly lasting achievements, large and
small: Mayor Lindsay endorsed Walter
Thabit’s Cooper Square alternative plan
in 1968; it was of½cially adopted by the
city in 1970. The Pratt Center’s commu-
nity work under Professor Ron Shiffman
continued uninterrupted for decades.
Other outcomes were more ambiguous:
arch helped organize opposition to Co-
lumbia University’s plans for redevelop-
ing Morningside Park into a campus ex-
tension; the protests succeeded in stop-
ping the project, though large-scale
counterproposals that arch developed
were never constructed. The West Vil-
lage Houses ½nally broke ground in 1974,
but of½cial foot-dragging and rising con-
struction costs had stripped the project
down to bare bones. Bankrupt by the
time the project was completed, the
community organization lost control
of the development it had planned as
the city foreclosed and passed owner-
ship to outside investors.

In Philadelphia, the South Street ex-

pressway proposal was eventually
dropped. Denise Scott Brown’s role as
a consultant for the community’s anti-
crosstown ½ght had consisted primari-
ly of promoting appreciation for that
neighborhood’s messy vitality; in pub-
lic forums she prevailed on policy-mak-
ers to see the area as something to be
preserved rather than eradicated. She
did so by executing hardly any design
and very little planning, despite her ½ne
arts training. Of such advocacy plan-
ning she said, “Although it underrates
both artistry and analysis, it is really
the only moral method of planning

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Dædalus Spring 2009

Christopher
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and I have tried to follow it as a practi-
tioner.”7 However, almost no compara-
ble opportunities surfaced subsequently,
and her ½rm ultimately made its name
through designs for high-pro½le private
clients like Ivy League universities and
major cultural institutions. Neighbor-
hood groups, at least those in poor areas,
simply did not command the resources
to retain professional planners.

Just like public defenders, advocacy
planners, as Davidoff envisioned them,
would need to rely on the commitment
of public funding to sustain their activi-
ties on any permanent basis. Initially,
such funds were available as a result
of various Great Society programs. But
policy intellectuals like Daniel Patrick
Moynihan soured on the ideal of “max-
imum feasible participation” that had
animated the oeo’s support for neigh-
borhood initiatives. Sporadic riots, sus-
tained rises in crime, and accompany-
ing fears of social decay helped feed a
sense of crisis and despair. Moynihan,
along with other influential “neocon-
servative” social scientists, including
Edward Ban½eld and Martin Anderson,
suggested that issues surrounding ra-
cialized urban poverty might fare bet-
ter under a policy of “benign neglect.”
President Nixon obliged, declaring,
in 1973, a general moratorium on pub-
lic housing outlays and related urban
spending, and, by 1974, ending pro-
grams like Model Cities and the oeo.
Some urban aid continued in the form
of “block grants,” but advocacy plan-
ning initiatives could no longer count
on signi½cant federal funds. Mean-
while, Mayor John Lindsay’s propos-
als for empowering neighborhoods
through “little city halls” were consis-
tently frustrated by resistance from
traditional partisan power centers in
New York politics, and they did not
survive after he left of½ce in 1973.

This political sea change had ana-
logues in the urbanist establishment.
Paul Davidoff left Penn in 1965, teach-
ing briefly at Hunter College before
turning from 1969 onward to indepen-
dent work on racial integration in sub-
urbia. Chester Hartman, after vocally
supporting the Harvard student strike
and criticizing the administration and
his planning faculty colleagues, was
½red in 1970 through an acrimonious
process that rejected his teaching ap-
proach as “political strategy more than
. . . city and regional planning.” And
what of the peo’s attempts to shift the
professional establishment? One of the
peo’s founders remarked at the sudden
demise of an institution “that had been
an important force in planning issues . . .
but which essentially had withered away
by the early 1970s.”8 Advocates of New
Left urbanism found themselves, after a
brief moment at the center, at the mar-
gins once again. And U.S. city residents,
having pressed for a more humane strat-
egy of urban renewal, were left instead
with basically none at all.

The paths of similar movements

abroad led in both overlapping and
divergent directions. In London, re-
sistance to the urban renewal order ap-
peared at least as early as the 1959 plan
to redevelop Piccadilly Circus, which
was delayed and eventually dropped.
A more systemic freeway revolt was
manifested citywide by the late 1960s,
under the banner of “Homes before
Roads,” and gained traction within the
Labour ranks by 1971. When that par-
ty won control of the Greater London
Council (glc) in 1973, the new of½cial
policy became “Stop the Motorways.”9
This shift abruptly halted work on the
West Cross Route, notably leaving the
section of the M41 begun near the Shep-
herd’s Bush area of London with an ele-

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vated highway spur to nowhere. All of
this paralleled nimby-style develop-
ments in the United States.

By the mid-1970s, though, communi-
ty groups were poised to move beyond
nimby opposition, and advocacy plan-
ning began taking hold in the United
Kingdom just as its influence waned in
U.S. cities. For example, residents op-
posed a redevelopment plan for Lon-
don’s Covent Garden neighborhood.
A lead planner on that very redevelop-
ment proposal, Brian Anson, with
strong attachments to the working-
class community, defected from the
glc and organized residents to devel-
op alternative plans for their neighbor-
hood. He brought together locals with
students from the Architectural Associ-
ation to make counterproposals for re-
using abandoned industrial buildings.
After the national government inter-
vened to stop the clearance scheme
and provide historic preservation des-
ignations, the glc incorporated some
opposition group members into a citi-
zen participation body, and in 1979 the
redevelopment of a former printing
factory closely followed the ideas de-
veloped by Covent Garden residents.10

More extensive examples flourished in

Canada, particularly in Toronto. There,
practically the entire civic reform move-
ment could be understood as a large-
scale experiment in New Left urban-
ism, encompassing consecutive munic-
ipal administrations that gained power
throughout the 1970s. Once again, free-
way revolts provided the spark: the re-
jection of Toronto’s urban renewal or-
der was catalyzed by an expressway
proposal for the Spadina Road corridor,
which prompted a grassroots rebellion
that included Jane Jacobs, who had re-
cently immigrated to Toronto. In con-
trast to U.S. examples, however, scat-
tered opposition groups citywide united,

even crossing class lines, behind a slate
of nonpartisan, anti-renewal candidates.
While such alignments formed in U.S.
cities only as fleeting ad hoc opposition
to speci½c projects, the Toronto reform
movement gained a foothold on city
council in 1969 and soon came to domi-
nate, capturing the mayoralty by 1972
under a slogan of “community organiz-
ing.” This urban regime change empow-
ered a series of administrations to trans-
form–not just oppose–traditional ur-
ban policies; a primary objective be-
came preservation of the character of
Toronto’s “core area” against threats
from both destructive public policies,
as well as private market forces. The
new planning ideals were demonstrat-
ed most clearly in a forty-½ve-acre pub-
lic/private redevelopment project for a
former industrial area near the water-
front. The St. Lawrence Neighborhood,
largely redeveloped between 1974 and
1979, featured new construction that
extended Toronto’s traditional street
grid, mixing uses, building types, and
incomes, while avoiding displacement
and demolition. The experiment went
a long way toward realizing the sort
of humane urban renewal that citizen
groups had advocated in New York.
Not coincidentally, Jane Jacobs was a
key advisor to the project.11

Contrasts within Anglo-American ur-

banism should not be overdrawn, par-
ticularly in the long view. Just after the
Covent Garden episode, grassroots plan-
ning was completely marginalized in
London’s Docklands, the signature re-
development project under Margaret
Thatcher, whose administration was
even more hostile to leftist urbanism
than Nixon’s had been. Toronto’s re-
form movement eventually dissipated
back toward traditional party rule. And
by the 1980s, preserving neighborhoods
–not just architecturally, but by assur-

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Dædalus Spring 2009

Christopher
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ing affordability for a mix of income
groups–was dif½cult all around; com-
munities in London, Toronto, and New
York all wrestled with the challenges
of gentri½cation. Nevertheless, each of
these cities witnessed vigorous expres-
sions of a more democratized urban

politics through the advocacy planning
initiatives of the 1960s and 1970s. Those
experiments with New Left urbanism,
some modest, others more ambitious,
have left behind tangible legacies in the
built environment of these cities.

ENDNOTES
1 Raymond A. Mohl, “Stop the Road: Freeway Revolts in American Cities,” Journal of Urban

History 30 (5) (2004): 674–706.
2 Christopher Klemek, “Placing Jane Jacobs within the Transatlantic Urban Conversation,”
Journal of the American Planning Association 73 (1) (2007): 49–67.
3 Denise Scott Brown, “A Worm’s Eye View of Recent Architectural History,” Architectural
Record 172 (2) (1984): 69–81.
4 Chester W. Hartman, Between Eminence and Notoriety: Four Decades of Radical Urban Plan-
ning (New Brunswick, N.J.: Center for Urban Policy Research, 2001), 6, 18–20.
5 Architects’ Renewal Committee in Harlem report, East Harlem Triangle Plan (Avery Archi-
tectural & Fine Arts Library, Columbia University, 1968).
6 Walter Thabit, “A History of peo: Planners for Equal Opportunity” (unpublished man-
uscript, City Planning Dept., Cornell University, 1999).
7 “Urban Concepts: Architectural Design Pro½le 83,” Architectural Design 60 (1–2)
(1990): 14.
8 Hartman, Between Eminence and Notoriety, 29, 380.
9 Mick Hamer, Wheels Within Wheels: A Study of the Road Lobby (London: Routledge, 1987),
60–63.

10 Brian Anson, I’ll Fight You for It: Behind the Struggle for Covent Garden (London: Jonathan

Cape, 1981).

11 Christopher Klemek, “From Political Outsider To Power Broker in Two ‘Great American
Cities’: Jane Jacobs and the Fall of the Urban Renewal Order in New York and Toronto,”
Journal of Urban History 34 (2) (2008): 309.

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