Progressive City

Principles and Characteristics

The urban progressives of the late twentieth century did not explicitly derive their principles from the reformers of the Progressive era. Yet, the political impulses of the two projects were similar. Just as the earlier movement had sought to build cross-class reconciliation and public institutions to harness the destabilizing energies of unbridled capitalist development (and thereby also offer a political alternative to corporate plutocracy and labor radicalism alike), late-twentieth-century visions of the progressive city searched for a middle ground between the stark alternatives offered by Marxist urbanism (capitalist versus socialist city) and laissez-faire capitalism (entrepreneurial versus welfare city). Articulating a set of governance principles that balanced private- and public-sector interests, growth and equity, efficiency and reform, these conceptions of the progressive city also repositioned the urban planner in an important yet intermediary role. Neither the elite technical expert associated with postwar urban renewal nor the activist planner borne aloft by the populist energies of the 1960s movements, the progressive planner was now seen as an inventive but pragmatic professional who sought to balance economic imperatives, social equity, and the public interest.

This notion of the progressive city achieved its fullest empirical development in the work of Pierre Clavel. Like many observers of U.S. cities, Clavel argued that the post-World War II political coalitions that once had united developers, construction [Page 611]unions, and middle-class residents behind federally supported urban renewal and executive-style mayoral leadership were eventually undermined by economic and demographic changes. The movement of jobs and mobile residents to suburbs and newer cities, along with the northward migrations of Black and Hispanic populations, resulted in older-city populations of the 1970s that were smaller, poorer, and increasingly dissatisfied with the shrinking economic returns and interest-group politics of the established liberal coalitions. Whereas mounting economic problems and fiscal constraints encouraged many cities to reemphasize private sector-led business strategies, a number of urban leaders during the 1970s and 1980s—Nicholas Carbone in Hartford, Connecticut; Dennis Kucinich in Cleveland, Ohio; Gus Newport in Berkeley, California; Ruth Goldway in Santa Monica, California; Bernard Sanders in Burlington, Vermont; and perhaps most visibly, Harold Washington in Chicago, Illinois—used government ownership or planning capacities as well as citizen participation to expand the benefits of economic development for constituents less well served by market processes and interest-group bargaining.

These progressive administrations varied considerably, as Clavel and others acknowledged, both in the type of initiatives they pursued and in the results they achieved. In Hartford, Carbone's early efforts focused on enhancing public control over the building of the civic center, initially to direct jobs to local and minority residents but ultimately to create taxing and leasing mechanisms that might enhance the city's leverage over real estate development. In Berkeley, the emphasis was on support for housing cooperatives and for neighborhood collectives that provided social services, along with shifting the local tax burden to businesses and higher-income users. Burlington's progressives were stymied at first by political opposition, but Sanders eventually gained sufficient support to expand the city's subsidized housing programs and to enlarge neighborhood participation in waterfront development. Santa Monica's major initiative was rent control. It was enacted in response to escalating development pressures, although later measures also focused on tourist-sector development to generate jobs and revenues.

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