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Legacies of Liberalism

One thing that modern U.S. historians can agree on is that postwar urban renewal was an unmitigated disaster. In her Bancroft Prize-winning book Lizabeth Cohen has broken that consensus. She has given us a comprehensive history of urban renewal by focusing on the career of Ed Logue, a widely admired urban planner in the postwar period who has been largely forgotten today. Logue embodies the contradictions and complexities of postwar liberalism. He was idealistic about how expert-driven change funded by the state could create a more egalitarian society. And he was attentive to community input, although not always fully responsive to it. But Logue, and other city planners, underestimated the structural inequalities that undergirded segregation and never directly challenged the power elite. The urban renewal plans that resulted were often improvisational and always controversial. But Cohen effectively argues that they cannot simply be dismissed as failures. The book is divided into three parts, allowing Cohen to expand on the two cities and one state Logue’s urban planning impacted: New Haven, Boston, and New York. These projects also reflect the changing nature of urban renewal, from top-down federally funded programs in New Haven and Boston to public-private partnerships at a smaller scale in New York. Focusing on the career of one individual, with all its false starts and complicated motivations, stands in for the complexity of American liberalism. And it moves us away from the oversimplified contest between the villainous urban planner Robert Moses and the saintly critic Jane Jacobs, a particularly useful intervention made by Cohen. As Cohen points out, Jacobs was admired equally by progressives who valued the culture and politics of mixed-income and mixed-used neighborhoods and conservatives critical of big-government interventions into cities. For example, Cohen points out that the arch-neoconservative William F. Buckley appreciated Jacobs’s criticisms of large-scale urban renewal projects. While Moses and Logue were often compared during their lifetimes, Logue insisted that he was more focused on “social change” rather than large-scale