Title Mapping decline : St. Louis and the fate of the American city / Colin Gordon

Published Philadelphia : University of Pennsylvania Press, [2008] ©2008

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Description 1 online resource (299 pages) : color illustrations, maps (chiefly color) Series Politics and culture in modern America Politics and culture in modern America. Contents Our house : the twentieth century at 4635 North Market Street -- Local politics, local power : governing greater St. Louis, 1940-2000 -- "The steel ring" : race and realty in greater St. Louis -- Patchwork metropolis : municipal zoning in greater St. Louis -- Fighting blight : urban renewal policies and programs, 1945-2000 -- City of blight : the limits of urban renewal in greater St. Louis -- Conclusion: Our house revisited : the twenty-first century at 4635 North Market Street 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 Decline examines 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 Decline is 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 Analysis American History American Studies General Social Science Urban Studies Bibliography Includes bibliographical references and index Notes Print version record Subject Inner cities -- Missouri -- Saint Louis -- History -- 20th century Urban renewal -- Missouri -- Saint Louis Slums -- Missouri -- Saint Louis African Americans -- Missouri -- Saint Louis -- Social conditions -- 20th century Poor -- Missouri -- Saint Louis -- Social conditions -- 20th century HISTORY -- United States -- 20th Century. African Americans -- Social conditions Inner cities Poor -- Social conditions Slums Social conditions Urban renewal SUBJECT Saint Louis (Mo.) -- Social conditions -- 20th century Subject Missouri -- Saint Louis Genre/Form History Form Electronic book LC no. 2008010809 ISBN 9780812291506 0812291506

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