Introduction

Abstract

Recent scholarly interest in urban renewal has established its place in the social and political history of the postwar United States. The contributors to this special section argue that equal attention is now needed to the intellectual debates that marked urban renewal’s conception, implementation, and undoing. Investigating renewal’s conflicted origins and untidy demise through the history of ideas can restore some of the historical specificity and contingency to understandings of a policy that has long been portrayed as simply a foreordained failure.