Five Downtown Strategies: Policy Discourse and Downtown Planning Since 1945

Abstract

Americans have planned for their downtowns within a continually changing framework of images and assumptions about the nature of central business districts. During each decade since World War II, discussion of downtown problems and possibilities has been dominated by a distinct set of assumptions that has conditioned academic research, federal policy, and local planning. From decade to decade, experts on downtowns have chosen different themes as central to the interpretation of downtown growth, change, and policy needs. As the understanding of the situation has changed, so have the preferred planning solutions and public interventions.This argument about the importance of understanding the history of "downtown" as an intellectual construct can be contrasted with three major approaches that have dominated the analysis of downtown planning and policy in the United States over the last half century.A number of writers have analyzed downtown policy as an expression of interest-group or class politics. In this interpretation, downtown is one of several arenas in which different groups contest for control of urban land patterns. Most common, the battle for downtown is seen as a one-sided contest between the city's large corporations, banks, and land owners on one side and small businesses and low-income residents on the other. Influential examples include Clarence Stone's work on Atlanta, Arnold Hirsch's study of Chicago, Chester Hartman's work on San Francisco, and Chris Silver's history of Richmond. Gerald Suttles's recent examination of contemporary Chicago in The Man-Made City recycles the same approach with sympathy for the goals of gentrification and land conversion rather than the more common concern with the social costs of downtown JOURNAL

Downtowns, Past and Present

“…By emphasizing the importance of programs and policies-and their underlying discourses-that have been carried out in downtown areas throughout the twentieth century, many historians and urban scholars have supported this hypothesis of a specificity constantly under renewal. 7 While senior levels of government in Canada and the United States have contributed greatly to the expansion of the suburban way of life by financing the construction of road and freeway networks, access to private property ownership, and the provision of public services, particularly in the area of education, their involvement in the revitalization of downtowns has also been far from negligible.…”

Silicatescape – preserving building materials in the old urban center landscape: The case of the silicate brick and urban planning in Tel Aviv-Jaffa

“…Jewish speculators who joined the Arab owners of the quarries did not allow the price of kurkar bricks to fall. 6. The inferior quality of the kurkar caused it to absorb moisture and crumble [32,33].…”

“…In the past few years, research on historical remains on the urban landscape has been gaining momentum, focusing primarily on three issues: 1. the representative role of the remains, their symbols and values [3e5]; 2. the remains location and distribution in urban areas [6,7]; and 3. the functional changes and the integration of the remains in planning in the urban renovation process [8].…”

Regime Approaches to Obscenity Policy: 1960S to 1980S

“…The third approach taken by cities in response to the growing number of adult theaters was to encourage private development in depressed downtown neighborhoods (Abbott, 1993). Since adult theaters clustered in the downtown of most cities, extensive development often led to a wholesale demolition of this nuisance industry.…”