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In the years since 1930 the great surprises have come from a contradictory movement of events. On the side of novelty the integrated national economy proved surprisingly unstable and its collapse during the Great Depression brought forward an American
version of European social democracy, the welfare capitalist state. The simultaneous rush to a totally urbanized society where people live in dispersed metropolitan settlements also created a social condition without historical precedent.
Aged by hindsight we can now see that the failure of the national private business economy commenced with the collapse of agricultural prices in 1921. From that date began the rapid emptying out of rural America, and the rush of Midwestern and Southern farmers and farm laborers to the cities. The long slump in farm prices which endured from 1921 to 1941 destroyed most private credit and forced the federal government to become the manager of farm incomes and the guarantor of farm debts. The agricultural policies adopted became an engine for rural population clearance. First to move were those closest to the Midwestern cities. Then from World War 2 on the Afro-American farm laborers and farmers of the South moved north and west in large numbers. By 1980 cities beyond the old slave South had large, even majority black populations.
The collapse of the world's financial markets in 1920 and the ensuring decade of massive unemployment and poverty forced Americans to create their own version of the social democratic state. In the Great Depression urban construction workers constituted the largest group of unemployed; bitter strikes and violence in factory and mining towns cried out for federal amelioration. In response President Franklin Delano Roosevelt's New Deal established the core institutions of the American welfare state, a species of welfare capitalism. Finally, it established a set of rules to govern labor union and business conflict and bargaining. Since the New Deal of the 1930s the social benefits have been made more generous and a kind of medical insurance has been instituted.
These federal interventions stabilized the private economy so that the trends of the previous era toward corporate forms of business and mechanization of production raced onwards. Like the social democratic nations of Europe, the United States has become a bureaucratic society with corporate business that is a species of politics among private firms, among labor unions, and within the regulating and subsidizing federal government. New urban forms have always assisted in the development of new economies, and in recent decades the dispersed metropolitan region of many scattered centers has been the host to the bureaucratic economy. Near universal automobile ownership and the parallel construction of highways made the new urban structure possible.
The states and the federal government began a partnership for the construction ofrural and national roadways in 1916, and in 1956 the federal government assumed 90 per cent of the expense for building a new national and metropolitan highway system (the interstate routs). These roads and highways enabled employers to seek cheap land with good truck and automobile transportation out on the fringe of cities. At the same time home owners seeking gardens and the popular styles of detached suburban houses moved out onto tracts of fringe land twenty to fifty miles from the old core cities. These trends began to set strongly during the twenties, were delayed by the Great Depression and World War II, but since that time have refashioned every American city. Offices, factories, and stores are now scattered along metropolitan streets and highways, or clustered into office "parks", industrial "parks", and shopping "malls" at important highway intersections. Suburban houses of automobile-commuting workers spread out all over the metropolitan region, even at the outer fringes merging with retirement and recreation complexes. Urban work in America is now dominated by the activities of an automobile commuter who works in a bureaucratic metropolitan factory office or retail setting.
Such a novel urban style contributed to the "Urban crisis" of the 1960s. The exodus from the old dense cities at the center of the metropolitan regions had multiple affects. Overcrowding of buildings came to an end, vacancies appeared in all neighborhoods, rents and sales prices fell, and owners of the less desirable properties failed to maintain or abandoned their property.
Special urban programs worsened this novel situation and its concentration of the disabilities of property. A series of projects assisted by federal funds, beginning with the Housing Act of 1949, has been instituted to renew the old office and rental centers of American cities. These urban renewal projects involved massive clearance of slum housing near the downtowns, neighborhoods where blacks had gathered in search of cheap rents. Still more massive clearance of homes in black neighborhoods attended the building of the urban segments of the interstate highways. By 1960 every black ghetto had been threatened or moved by public programs, and every one suffered from the loss of inner city jobs to the outer metropolis. Wages were low, and inner city jobs too few for the newcomers.
Such were the background conditions for the "urban crisis" of the 1960s. The immediate cause of the black riots and rebellions that broke out in every city was the frustration of the black citizens expressed in the civil rights movement. In 1954, after thirty years of legal attacks on segregation, the United States Supreme Court ruled that the cities and towns of the nation must end their segregated schools. From this date there followed an ever growing blackled civil rights campaign. Despite city and federal programs to offer special aid to the poor. President Johnson's "War on Poverty" hopes ran far beyond achievements, and for several years American cities were wracked by black riots and rebellions. Today Afro-American politics has returned to conventional electoral forms with blacks running for and being elected to public office.
The succession of events since World War II made the American city, for the first time in the nation's history, the subject of continuing federal attention. The vast metropolitan regions created special problems of land management and water and air pollution. The economic collapse of many core cities and the black rebellions produced new special interest groups of voters and landowners. The city now took its place alongside agriculture and business as a special interest seeking federal aid and privileges.
Americans sought to combine functional clarity and precision with traditional forms drawn from the legacy of European architecture. In contrast, the emigre architects who fled totalitarianism in Europe in the 1930s — the creators of the international style, as it came to be called-practiced an aesthetic functional purism that would be serviceable for all conceivable building types. Their goal was a prototypical architecture that, once crystallized in form, could be used anywhere.
By 1975 it was no longer enough for the building merely to do something, however elegant its structural purity; it was now to say something, to proclaim and celebrate a particular human intention in a particular place. So in erecting a new municipal office building in 1978—1982, the city of Portland, Oregon, selected the competition entry of Michael Graves. Even though couched in an ornamental language rather esoteric and mannered, the color and embellishment nonetheless celebrated the fact that this was a civic building-distinct from the often anonymous office towers-and thus established a civic identity.
So what Americans want is pragmatic perfection. They came to the New World in the beginning for a measure of perfection and found they had to shelter themselves in a most rudimentary manner. The conflict between the real and the ideal has continued from that time to the present. Americans will continue to build with the goal of achieving maximum performance; they will also seek a perfect attunement to the landscape. A people fascinated by speed and change, their edifices and habitations will preserve the impression of memory and permanence-a new architecture, yet old. The National Urban Coalition is an organization that works to solve urban problems in the United States. It seeks to identify the most urgent problems of urban areas, to make the nation aware of the problems, and to begin action on them. The National Urban Coalition was formed in 1970. It includes representatives of business, labor, and minorities; and leaders of civic, community, and religious organizations. These individuals try to find solutions to problems in economic development, education, employment, housing, and health care for urban residents. The coalition is made up of approximately 40 local affiliates in about 20 states and Washington, D.C. It is financed by the corporations, foundations, government contracts, individuals, labor unions and religious groups. A committee made up of national leaders establishes policies for the national group. Urban League is an organization that works to end racial discrimination and to increase the economic and political power of blacks and other minority groups in the United States. It was founded in 1910.
The league has local divisions in a total of about 115 cities and 34 states. The divisions conduct community programs that provide health care, housing and community development, job training and placement, AIDS education, and other services. The league works to influence national policy by testifying before legislative bodies and by issuing reports on such matters as equal employment opportunities, income maintenance, and welfare reform. It also conducts research on the problems of minority groups and publishes its findings.
Urban renewal refers to city programs to eliminate slums and replace them with improved residential, commercial, or industrial areas. Urban renewal programs also try to upgrade areas that show signs of becoming slums and to improve the environment generally. Urban renewal flourished in the United States from the 1950s to the 1970s. During that period, the federal government gave cities financial and technical aid to plan and carry out urban renewal programs.
The first major attempt at slumming clearance was made by the federal government in the 1930s. The Housing Act of 1937 set up the U.S. Housing Authority to help clear slums and provide public housing for needy families. The Housing Act of 1954 introduced the categorical grant to help cities fix up older housing. The US government's direct participation in urban renewal was largely eliminated by the Housing and Community Development Act of 1974. This law replaced categorical grants with block grants.
Also during the 1970s, many cities tried a renewal program called urban homesteading. This program involved abandoned houses owned by the city. It offered these houses, at low cost, to people who would repair and live in them. During the 1980s, several states created areas called "urban enterprise zones" to attract new businesses to slums. Businesses within the urban enterprise zones receive tax cuts and freedom from such regulations as rent controls and zoning laws. But both the homesteading and enterprise zone programs have not always been successful in attracting interest because the areas involved are in such undesirable locations.
