Philadelphia

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policy system cut

 

Philadelphia

Boston would up pursuing neighborhood slum clearance for public housing during the 1950’s, as did Baltimore, Detroit, St. Louis and Cleveland, so did Philadelphia. Philadelphia, like Boston had to sweep a decaying, but long-standing, political machine out of office—and convince a state legislature to allow it to run its own affairs. The Boston ward-machine policy system was at war any business not will to work with its style. Philadelphia’s business elite included several wings, a Progressive housing/planning wing and Vault-like corporate elite eventually became involved with a newly established policy system that swept the machine out.

 

Interstate and highway construction was quite extensive and disruptive. Philadelphia CBD redevelopment was, like Pittsburgh’s Renaissance I, privately-led and financed, or paid for by the National Parks Service. Urban-renewal financed redevelopment did not get into gear until the mid-1960s when “eds and meds” took advantage of federal funding to launch significant campus-style projects.  Urban renewal was the justification and economic development strategy that united business elites and provided cohesion sufficient to overturn the long-standing machine, and then operate a reform policy system. Policy System change, anti-machine, and urban renewal were joined at the hip. The combination of housing and CBD was characteristic, resulting from planner’s early dominance over the new policy system’s political leadership, each sharing values and policy assumptions. In the first decade of Philadelphia’s post 1950 renewal, planners were in charge and led the way. Compared to Dallas or Houston, for example, this is night and day. As in Boston. CBD focused urban renewal only took off after pressure from the Citizens Seminar and later the Vault—indeed the Boston Redevelopment Authority separated from planning in 1957. It is likely that its linkage with planning led to the neighborhood slum clearance focus. As time went on a tension developed between planning and the urban redevelopment agency which pursued commercial, industrial, transportation-related and eds and meds redevelopment throughout the central city.

 

 

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