Saving Americas Cities, Lizabeth Cohen
Saving Americas Cities, Lizabeth Cohen
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Saving America's Cities
Ed Logue and the Struggle to Renew Urban America in the Suburban Age

Author: Lizabeth Cohen

Narrator: Keith Sellon-Wright

Unabridged: 16 hr 23 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Tantor Media

Published: 06/23/2020


Synopsis

Winner of the Bancroft Prize

In twenty-first-century America, some cities are flourishing and others are struggling, but they all must contend with deteriorating infrastructure, economic inequality, and unaffordable housing. Cities have limited tools to address these problems, and many must rely on the private market to support the public good.

It wasn't always this way. For almost three decades after World War II, even as national policies promoted suburban sprawl, the federal government underwrote renewal efforts for cities that had suffered during the Great Depression and the war and were now bleeding residents into the suburbs. In Saving America's Cities, Lizabeth Cohen follows the career of Edward J. Logue, whose shifting approach to the urban crisis tracked the changing balance between government-funded public programs and private interests that would culminate in the neoliberal rush to privatize efforts to solve entrenched social problems. A Yale-trained lawyer, rival of Robert Moses, and sometime critic of Jane Jacobs, Logue saw renewing cities as an extension of the liberal New Deal. He worked to revive a declining New Haven, became the architect of the "New Boston" of the 1960s, and, later, led New York State's Urban Development Corporation, which built entire new towns, including Roosevelt Island in New York City.

About Lizabeth Cohen

Lizabeth Cohen is Howard Mumford Jones Professor of American Studies in the Department of History at Harvard University. She is the author of Making a New Deal: Industrial Workers in Chicago, 1919-1939, which won the Bancroft Prize and the Philip Taft Labor History Award and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. She has written many articles and essays and is coauthor (with David Kennedy) of The American Pageant. She lives in Belmont, Massachusetts, with her husband and two daughters.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Owen on July 17, 2022

Currently ploughing through books on mid-century American big planning, and this is so far the most interesting. Logue was a new deal democrat and administrator (rather than planner or architect) who ploughed through some very Jane Jacobs-antagonising stuff in New Haven and Boston; but what I found......more

Goodreads review by Katie on January 22, 2020

Lizabeth Cohen is a really clear and cogent writer, which makes her a great fit for something as byzantine and multi-faceted as urban renewal. I think her reasons for choosing Logue as a subject make a lot of sense--he was distinctive in that he worked in several major cities over a long span of tim......more

Goodreads review by Gerry on January 06, 2024

Saving America’s Cities is the grandiose title of Lizabeth Cohen’s biography of urban planner Ed Logue. A progressive, integrationist and forceful visionary Logue had a four-part career in New Haven, Boston, New York State and in the South Bronx. His modus operandi in the first three was to hitch hi......more

Goodreads review by Stephen on August 31, 2019

Saving America's Cities is a thoroughly researched biography/history of Ed Logue, a prominent leader in urban renewal and redevelopment. Logue began his career in rebuilding cities in New Haven, moving on to head the Boston Redevelopment Authority (BRA) and the New York State Urban Development Corpo......more

Goodreads review by Russell on October 22, 2019

I have always wondered if anyone would ever write a comprehensive history of American urban renewal. This is perhaps the closest we will get to such a thing. Ms. Cohen notes, "I have taken a biographical approach in this book in hopes that it will help engage readers." Ed Logue's career serves as a......more