Inner City

Social problems related to industrialization, immigration, criminality, and poverty were initially perceived as problems of the city in its entirety and were later associated more with the inner city. With the rapid post-World War II expansion of a distinctive suburban realm, the concept of “inner city” achieved wide currency. The identification of the inner city with social problems is a primarily North American phenomenon, even if exported to other settings such as Great Britain. The inner city was perceived as the converse of the suburbs. Thus suburbs were clean, safe, modern, and mainstream middle class, but the inner city supposedly was dirty, dangerous, outdated, poor, and inhabited by minorities. Indeed, the inner city most often served as a backdrop for film noir.

Clearly, depicting the inner city as a homogeneous entity overtaken by social problems was a gross oversimplification. In most metropolitan regions, the inner city was a complex entity, containing both poor areas and elite enclaves. Still, on the whole, the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s were not kind to the inner city. As suburban growth proceeded apace, many inner-city districts lost their middle-class populations and thus underwent a steep filtering-down process. Accelerating socioeconomic decline was a reduction in employment as manufacturing relocated to the suburbs, thus severing the symbiotic relationship previously existing between working-class neighborhoods and close-by sources of employment.

As the condition of their housing deteriorated and perception increased about their poor adaptability to a modern, car-oriented lifestyle, many inner-city neighborhoods became a refuge for residents denied access to other parts of the metropolitan region because of low income and racial segregation. This is when the inner city became synonymous in the media and popular imagination with social pathology. Not without justification, the inner city was portrayed as overridden with poverty, crime, addiction, school abandonment, and teenage pregnancies. As social status declined, so did the housing stock, sometimes to the ultimate abandonment stage. In some cases, as in Detroit and Newark, the inner city still bears the scars of the 1960s riots. Analysts associate inner-city living conditions with the transgenerational reproduction of an “underclass.”

Inner-city problems became a target for public policy, such as the urban renewal program, first launched by the 1949 Housing Act, whose purpose was to replace “slums” with public housing and commercial development. But relocation problems and difficult living conditions in public housing projects prompted a revision of policies. The Model Cities program of the 1960s attempted to correct some of the problems of urban renewal by making more room for public participation. Also victimizing the inner city was its location between downtown and the suburbs, which [Page 496]caused it to be sliced by expressways. Whereas land uses in the suburbs adapted to the presence of expressways, in the inner city these highways generally involved a destruction of the built environment and attendant displacement of residents.

Two books contributed to reversed thinking about the inner city. The Herbert Gans 1962 study of Boston's West End revealed the existence of rich social networks in a neighborhood awaiting renewal. Most influential perhaps was Jane Jacobs, who in 1961 wrote a strong defense of the traditional inner city against the then rising popularity of urban renewal. In The Death and Life of Great American Cities, she celebrated the role that the original inner-city landscape, particularly the commercial street, played in fostering intense social interaction. She contrasted the high level of activity she observed along her Greenwich Village street with the desolation and high criminality experienced in areas changed by urban renewal. The message of these two works was clear: The social environment of traditional inner-city neighborhoods was generally superior to that provided by urban renewal projects.

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