An Americas story: hemispheric perspectives on postwar urban renewal

It is commonly assumed that urban renewal in the United States following World War II was a home-grown solution applied to cities suffering from the departure of residents, retail, and capital investment as a result of suburbanization led by the White middle class. This essay argues that influences from abroad, particularly from Latin America, were also crucial to how urban renewal evolved over time from the late 1940s into the 1970s. Simultaneously, U.S.-American strategies of urban planning helped shape Latin American cities. The essay focuses on a prominent urban redeveloper of the era, Edward J. Logue, and the circle of like-minded planners with whom he interacted over his long career. As a result of their involvements in the developing world, similar modernist planning schemes and architectural structures appeared on both sides of the U.S. border, until pushback from communities during the 1960s challenged the lack of attention to local cultures and materials and to community participation in planning. Attacks on modernization theory, not least by the dependency theory popularized by Latin Americans, undermined the hegemony of universalistic modernist schemes for a time, until neoliberalism facilitated a resurgence of less regulated and restrained private interests.