Sidewalk Narratives,Tenement Narratives

Abstract

This essay argues that the settlement movement was inextricably bound up with the life and death of urban renewal. It traces the origins and development of the urban narratives that motivated and sustained settlement workers’ complex involvement in the physical and figurative processes of remaking the neighborhoods in which they lived. More specifically, the essay examines several settlement leaders’ deployment of a “sidewalk narrative” and “tenement narrative” to both advocate slum clearance and public housing and to unravel the logic of urban renewal. When we assess settlement leaders’ roles in shaping the narratives underpinning urban renewal, we become less concerned with blaming them for redevelopment’s social injuries or in excusing them because of their good intentions.