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Ville Radieuse
and Parker and Unwin’s curvilinear, low-rise
Garden Suburb. (Holyoak, 1993: p. 59)
Despite the abundance of Corbusian rhetoric enthu-
siastically imported by city architects, this develop-
ment pattern replaced only about half of the number
of dwellings. In Birmingham alone there was an
exodus of nearly 50 000 working-class residents to
new suburbs and to expanded and new towns nearby
(inelegantly referred to as ‘overspill’). With regard to
the new inner city housing, Holyoak reports that
there was:
… plenty of evidence that the rehoused residents
… were at first very pleased with their new condi-
tions. They had modern homes with kitchens,
bathrooms and central heating, modern schools
for their children to attend, and grass and trees
about them. But the losses were also being docu-
mented in books such as 
Family and Kinship in
East London
(Young and Willmott, 1992) and 
The
Forgotten People
by the Vicar of Ladywood (Power,
1965), who described the changes taking place
around his (Birmingham) church. Of course, there
was simply the sudden, traumatic disappearance of
a familiar landscape. But there was also the break-
up of complex kinship structures; the emergence
of single-class areas; the inconvenience caused by
the zoning of land uses, which eliminated such
things as corner shops; and above all, the fragmen-
tation of the community’s collective sense of its
own identity. (Holyoak: p. 60)
Holyoak reminds us that ‘distance lends enchantment,’
and the nostalgia we feel when looking at old
photographs of vanished neighborhoods must be
balanced by the memory of the physical poverty that
these images also represented. Yet what speaks to us
most directly in old photographs of children playing
in the street and housewives gossiping on the doorstep
is the ‘quality of immediacy evident in the physical
environment’. Holyoak defines this as:
… the close juxtaposition of the private and public
realms, with the private shaping the public, the
concentration of people together to produce a
social intimacy, and the close relationship of those
various places which form aspects of the same life –
house, shops, pub, school, church and work.
(Holyoak: p. 60)
Immediacy carried to excess can lead to overcrowding,
as in the case in the industrial slums, but this feeling
of shared togetherness in public space carried an
important component of neighborhood cohesion.
The absence of this type of shared space where fresh
bonds of community could be nurtured in the new
housing areas fostered feelings of alienation among
families only a few years after they moved into their
new homes.
While Birmingham and other British cities were
tearing down their old neighborhoods in the name of
progress, American cities were pursuing their own
brand of civic improvement by means of the wrecking
ball. Issues of racial and societal segregation in both
nations are too intricate to mention with any depth
in the context of this book, but the struggle by
American blacks for equality and civil rights during
the 1960s added an unavoidable racial dimension to
the intentions and process of urban demolition and
slum clearance in American cities. Charlotte, North
Carolina, in the American South was typical in this
regard.
Over the 25 years between 1949 and 1974, the
American Federal Urban Renewal Administration
provided large sums of money to cities for ambitious
urban redevelopment. The federal program’s original
intention was to improve housing conditions for the
CHAPTER ONE
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PARADIGMS LOST AND FOUND
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urban poor by clearing slums and building new
homes. Cities used federal government money to clear
away decrepit neighborhoods and then sold the land
to developers at bargain prices so the private sector
could build affordable new dwellings. At least, that
was the theory.
American mayors and their councils loved the pro-
gram because it didn’t require them to spend much
local money. Developers also liked it, as they were
able to buy prime development land very cheaply. It
wasn’t long before lobbying by municipalities and the
development industry persuaded Congress to expand
(or loosen) the objectives of rehousing the poor to
include other urban uses. During the 1950s, increas-
ing amounts of land cleared of human shelter could
be developed for non-residential (i.e. more profit-
able) purposes.
North Carolina-based historian Tom Hanchett
chronicled Charlotte’s actions during the urban renewal
era in his book 
Sorting Out the New South City
, in
which he explains how and why Charlotte ‘… used
more than $40 million in federal money to flatten
inner city neighborhoods and replace them with glis-
tening new developments’ (Hanchett: p. 249). One
area in particular was the focus of these efforts,
Brooklyn, a densely built black neighborhood in
Charlotte’s Second Ward, immediately to the east of
the central business district (see Figure 1.5). Taking
advantage of still looser federal guidelines that
allowed housing to be demolished for almost any use
deemed ‘better’ by the city, Charlotte’s business and
political leadership (they were essentially the same
thing) sent a fleet of bulldozers into the black neigh-
borhood. Between 1960 and 1967, the city razed
almost every structure to the ground.
Local media heartily endorsed this demolition.
The head of the Charlotte Redevelopment Authority,
an urban administrator who had been hired away
from the city of Norfolk, in Virginia, was profiled in
a Charlotte newspaper with an enthusiastic headline:
‘Heart of Norfolk Blitzed in Urban Renewal.’ The
article stated approvingly, that ‘… this 250 year old
seaport has never been bombed by an intercontinen-
tal ballistic missile, although it sometimes seems a lit-
tle that way’ (Hanchett: p. 249). In Charlotte, a
similar orgy of demolition ‘… made no pretense at
creating better quarters for the residents. Not a single
new housing unit went up to replace the 1480 struc-
tures that fell to the bulldozer. Urban renewal dis-
placed 1007 Brooklyn families’ (Hanchett: p. 250). It
wasn’t only homes that were destroyed, it was black
businesses, too. ‘The old district’s density and central
location had provided a warm environment for 
small shops … Urban renewal displaced 216 Brooklyn
businesses. Many never reopened’ (Hanchett: p. 250).
Along with homes and businesses, the social fabric of
the community was comprehensively dismantled.
Churches, social clubs, the one black high school in
Charlotte, the city’s only black public library were all
pounded into rubble. An entirely self-sustaining
community was effectively wiped out (Rogers, 1996).
Having cleared the land, the city constructed a pala-
tial government district with a high-rise city hall, new
law courts and jails, and a showpiece park. Other devel-
opment included sundry offices and a large church for
an all-white congregation. The city widened streets
throughout the area, providing easier access between
the city center and the wealthy white suburbs to the
east. The scale of the destruction differed dramatically
between black areas and others where the population
was white. In white areas not far from the Brooklyn
neighborhood the city used much more restraint,
demolishing only a few blocks here and there.
These blatant racial politics were not uncommon
in American cities at that time, and certainly added
DESIGN FIRST: DESIGN-BASED PLANNING FOR COMMUNITIES