A new exhibit on the 'slum clearances' that dominated mid-century urbanism is a warning about the dangers of wanting city life to snap to an ideological grid, writes JDavidsonNYC
Photo: Evans/Three Lions/Getty Images During World War II, a coterie of American men, secure in the righteousness of their cause, the necessity of their means, and the efficacy of their tactics, methodically destroyed Germany’s cities. A decade later, some of the same men, still just as confident of their purpose and certain of their methods, demolished their own cities, too.
The exhibit is studiously dispassionate but also charged with rage. Using maps, charts, photographs, and hand-drawn master plans that recall the era’s visual language, MASS traces the march of insane rationalism. The slow-motion cataclysm began after the war, when the federal government, eager to modernize and high on industrial might, passed the Housing Act of 1949. Over the next 25 years, Washington handed cash to 1,700 municipalities.
It was a war waged with euphemisms — renewal, revitalization, congestion — a dehumanizing managerial vocabulary for an ostensibly humanitarian project. Urban doctors saw the challenge in medical terms: Blight, in the parlance of the time, was an infectious disease that, if left uneradicated, would spread, turning pleasant streets into veins of despair.
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