The status symbol among U.S. cities these days is the bombed-out look.
Every self-respecting city seems to want to be hideous with rubble and raw earth, crawling with helmeted workers, snorting earthmovers and angular cranes. These are the signs and portents of the biggest civic building boom the U.S.—or any other country—has known. It goes by the name of urban renewal, but it might also be called emergency surgery. The metaphor is thoroughly consistent. Considerable pain is involved, and sometimes shock. There is inevitable destruction of healthy tissue, the operation is sometimes a failure, and the patient is really sick or he wouldn't be there in the first place.
Death at the Heart. Professional critics such as Lewis Mumford have long warned that the U.S. city in general had something more than a slight case of congestion and aching joints. But most people thought of the problem only in terms of slum clearance and better housing for the poor—a worthy but not exhilarating objective. Only gradually did it become clear that the sickness of the cities was a kind of heart disease; they have been dying at the center, where the great stores and great buildings and great enterprises are supposed to be. The suburban sprawl, in leeching the center city's lifeblood, was imperiling the whole urban organism. Suddenly everybody—bankers, businessmen, politicians, newspapers and civic associations of all shapes and sizes—found themselves united in a new concern for the city in a mustering of community forces unparalleled in recent times.
Boston, for instance, has laid waste to 60 slum acres in the center of town and is erecting there a $200 million Government center; Washington has turned a 560-acre jungle south of the Capitol into a paradise of gracious living; New York City has so much private building that the streets are all but impassable, and with the help of Government funds, has rehoused a population that, taken together, would make the 28th largest city in the U.S. Chicago has 27 redevelopment and four conservation projects that in five years will have transformed 514 city blocks; even Los Angeles, a laggard among the U.S.'s major cities, has 17 projects on 917 acres under way. St. Louis has miles of riverfront teeming with bulldozers and unfinished dreams; San Francisco is ripping and riveting at the rate of about $1,000 a minute; Cleveland is trying to turn itself completely around to re-embrace the waters of Lake Erie (see color pages).
The process involves a delicate meld of drawing board and bulldozer, budget and ballot box, bludgeon and crystal ball. Technically, every time an enterprising builder tears down an old building and replaces it with a new one, it is urban renewal. But only in recent years has the process been conceived in terms of an overall plan to reshape the city.