Reflections on the Late 1960s

Accompanying this reappraisal of Conant (1968) from what was then Urban Affairs Quarterly, the journal's editors have asked about my perspective on the issues it raised, how urban politics became my academic focus, what the intellectual environment was like when this happened, and how the field has subsequently unfolded. Events in June of 1967 accelerated my shift into urban studies from an undergraduate concern about the Vietnam War and the importance of international relations. Passing through my suburban Ohio hometown after graduating from my Southern Minnesota College and on the way to doctoral studies at Harvard, a serious riot broke out in the Avondale neighborhood of Cincinnati. It was kindled, as the Cincinnati Enquirer (Curnutte 2017) later observed, by years-long frustration about the lack of jobs, poor housing and what black leadership said was constant police harassment of African Americans. From a hill just across a valley, several of us watched the Reading Road commercial district burn down on June 12^th. It was one of many riots that swept through Louisville, Boston, Tampa, Atlanta, Newark, Detroit, and Milwaukee in that long hot summer, changing urban trajectories and commanding national concern.

Upon arriving in Cambridge, a dense urban setting even though a relatively small city, many of my professors had already been using urban case studies to understand American politics. My professors included James Q. Wilson (later my supportive thesis advisor, along with Barrington Moore, Jr.) and Edward Banfield (who grimly tolerated my criticisms of his Unheavenly City, 1970). Given rising protests over the Vietnam war, the election of the first Black mayors in major cities, and the widespread outbreak of urban unrest, it was an incredibly fertile and exciting time to learn from these thinkers, who had been the young Turks of their generation, criticizing power elite theories of urban and American politics.

Pluralism was their reigning intellectual paradigm, based in part on Robert Dahl's Who Governs? (1961), Wallace Sayre and Herber Kaufman's Governing New York City (1960), and Banfield's Political Influence (1961), all published in 1960 or 1961. (Dahl's Yale students were also influential: Nelson Polsby published his first book in 1963 and Aaron Wildavsky and Raymond Wolfinger had also made their presence known.) They argued that no inner elite dictated policy outcomes, that each policy area featured a distinctive array of interests, and that all segments of the urban population had meaningful ways to influence policy outcomes.

While these professors viewed cities as American democracy writ small, they also worried about the obviously distressing urban trends of suburbanization, urban industrial decline and the shift to services, and racial and demographic change. As one response, the Ford Foundation had made a large grant to Harvard and MIT to establish the Joint Center for Urban Studies in 1959. With this support, the Joint Center commissioned people like Martha Derthick to write half a dozen city case studies that Wilson and Banfield then synthesized in their City Politics in 1963. (The Joint Center also sponsored Nathan Glazer and Daniel Patrick Moynihan's Beyond the Melting Pot in 1964.) Irving Kristol, Daniel Bell, and Nathan Glazer launched The Public Interest in 1965 to plumb various aspects of urban dysfunction and the ways that well-meaning liberal policies had made things worse. (Glazer had moved from Berkeley to Harvard in 1969, joining Bell in the Sociology Department.) Moynihan had presided over the Joint Center just before my arrival there in 1969 and Herb Gans was a quiet but influential presence there.

Widespread urban protest, sharp divisions around the war, and conflicts generated by racial inequality led us new graduate students, the leading edge of the baby boom, to conclude that pluralism was an inadequate theoretical paradigm, including its conclusions about urban governance. None of these books had seriously contemplated that racial protest would challenge the urban order or that the injustices inflicted by urban renewal across inner city neighborhoods would lead to a community revolution (Daniel Bell and Virginia Held in The Public Interest of the summer of 1969) which included federal funding for militant organization by the urban poor through the Community Action Program. The collective reaction of these elder scholars to these events ranged from a need for “benign neglect” (Moynihan) to the conclusion that cities were now no more than sandboxes or reservations (George Sternleib (1971) and Norton Long (1971) in the Fall 1971 issue of The Public Interest on “Is the Inner City Doomed?”). Banfield's 1970 Unheavenly City contained a chapter titled “Rioting Mainly for Fun and Profit.”

Spurred by the anti-war movement, the urban uprisings, and the upswelling of community organizing and new social movements including feminism, my generation hoped that they might yield a more just and inclusive political order and we debated furiously about how to achieve that end. My intellectual path toward a critical, alternative scholarly perspective on urban political movements and city politics was cemented by three opportunities. One was spending time at Joint Center as a V.O. Key Fellow, where a younger group of researchers like Chester Hartman were studying the negative impacts of urban renewal on residents of the West End in Boston and Gary Marx was contributing to the Kerner Report on racial division as a source of urban unrest. Equally important, a graduate student friend involved me in the national evaluation of OEO’s Community Action Program, where my focus was on measuring the impact of community organizing on fostering organizational change. (This led to my dissertation, “Community Organization and City Politics.”) Then-Harvard professor Hartman and MIT Professor Lisa Peattie had founded Urban Planning Aid (the country's first advocacy planning group) and were supporting a rent control bill, which introduced me to campaign field work.

The Harvard and MIT SDS chapters were attacking the universities’ roles in the town's redevelopment. Leaders from Roxbury picketed the Joint Center for having received $6 million from the Ford Foundation (north of $50 million in today's dollars) while doing nothing about ghetto poverty in Boston. Protests against the war also shut down Harvard in 1969 and involved repeated mass marches on Washington, D.C., adding to the sense of political turmoil. Parallel developments in Europe, led by counterparts like Manuel Castells, were stimulating a New Left urbanism. Frances Piven and Richard Cloward's 1971 Regulating the Poor and David Harvey's Social Justice and the City (1973) provided further inspiration.

This climate of intellectual fermentation prompted some of us to forge a more critical form of urban studies centered around political economy. In contrast to the post-World War II young intellectuals, we focused on the rise of Black protest and empowerment, movements against racism and segregation, and critiques of the damaging impacts of federal urban redevelopment politics. While this also unfolded elsewhere, it was a particularly generative moment in Cambridge. Perhaps responding to the force of our arguments, but certainly in dismay over the attacks on their influence, almost all the older scholars moved away from doing urban studies, a development that had substantial but ambiguous long-term consequences for the field of urban studies and the practice of urban policy.

In political science, subsequent work like my “Post-War Politics of Urban Development” (1975) and Contested City (1983) or Clarence Stone's Regime Politics (1989) provided an alternative account that focused on how pro-growth political coalitions dominated economic and physical development policies in urban settings. To this day, studying how racial and economic divisions form central challenges to urban politics and city policies remains central to the urban subfields of the disciplines of political science and sociology, although this currently takes the form of studying the roles of race, ethnicity, migration, and citizenship in political science.

The quest for progressive national urban policies and local governing coalitions has been fraught. Federal urban policy backed away from intervening directly to reshape urban space in service of development interests in favor of softer, more market-oriented approaches. On the positive side, authorities today would not try to send a new highway through the middle of Queens, development projects receive much more debate, and public officials recognize the value of neighborhoods in ways they did not before the “community revolution.” The new forms of community development, however, have been quite effective in reshaping cities to promote economic growth and neighborhood change in ways that rarely serve the poor. Ironically, our 1970 evaluation of the Community Action Program, which found that funding community organizing was highly effective in promoting positive institutional changes in urban settings, arrived at an OEO now led by Donald Rumsfeld, who promptly shelved spending for this activity, never to be restored by any level of government.

More broadly, the conservative backlash to urban unrest, Black and Latino empowerment, community mobilization, and anti-war protest spurred the national political realignment that propelled Republican victories in six of the ten presidential elections held since 1967. The quest for full democratic inclusion in urban politics has traveled an uneven road. In New York City, for example, multi-ethnic progressive coalitions have at times succeeded, as in the administrations of David Dinkins and Bill de Blasio. Yet relatively conservative coalitions governed the city from 1977 through 2013 and have given us such national figures as Rudolph Giuliani and Donald Trump. Our growing political polarization has taken a geographic form, with denser and more diverse urban settlements becoming heavily Democratic, the exurban white periphery becoming heavily Republican, and a middle ground forming somewhere in the rapidly changing suburbs. City-based initiatives offer hope for new policy directions, especially when they cross city lines. The conflicts of the late 1960s thus remain with us in new forms.