Published in the Journal of Urban History 37, no. 3 (May 2011)
“Planning’s End?” examines the widely-discussed movement against midcentury urban renewal in a largely overlooked setting: not the streets or city halls of American cities, but the classrooms, studios, and corridors of American universities. In response to the extensive redevelopment of New Haven in the 1950s and 1960s, students at the Yale School of Art and Architecture, and especially in the Department of City Planning, marshaled an extensive critique of their expanding university’s role in this top-down reconstruction. In the plight of impacted communities they found a parallel to their own frustrations as students. Envisioning a more “relevant” design pedagogy that deemphasized the role of the professional and lent greater power to the grassroots, students forced the hand of Yale president Kingman Brewster, Jr., who sought to protect the expertise and bureaucratic process he viewed as essential to liberalism. In their confrontation lay a fundamental shift in the order of urban redevelopment–and thus in the order of the modern city–in the last years of the 1960s.
