On the Appearance of the Comedy LP, 1957-1973

Between 1955 and 1965, the Rockefeller Foundation responded to the urban crises created by the pre- and post-war housing shortage and heavy-handed urban renewal strategies by sponsoring urban design research projects by Kevin Lynch, Jane Jacobs, E. A. Gutkind, Ian McHarg, Christopher Tunnard, Ian Nairn, Edmund Bacon, Christopher Alexander and others. Drawing on documents from the Rockefeller Foundation Archives, this paper considers the state of urban design theory after World War II and outlines the major sponsored research projects. The work of Jane Jacobs, who was closely involved with the Foundation's urban design research programme, is examined in greater detail, while the early research of Gyorgy Kepes and Kevin Lynch, which became The Image of the City (1960), will be considered in a subsequent paper.

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The Death and Life of Urban Design: Jane Jacobs, The Rockefeller Foundation and the New Research in Urbanism, 1955–1965

The history of the city in twentieth-century Latin America can be seen as a long contest over the exercise of urban public space. While the nature of this space is often less physical than it is social and situational, the struggle between different elements of the city to manipulate its politics and control its daily life has often been violent, leaving deep imprints in the collective memories of places as culturally and physically diverse as Mexico City, Buenos Aires, Havana, Bogota, and Rio de Janeiro. If approached from the perspective of contested space, the urban milieu offers an intriguing site for the historian interestedin exploring changing relations of power, class conflict, opposing visions of the future, breakdowns of social order, gendered spaces, health and disease, visual culture, spectacle and symbolic codes, and ultimately, the creation of community. Yet until the 1980s, most Latin American historians who were interestedin these themes confined their studies to the countryside. As late as 1975, Jorge Hardoy (1975:44) could write that “the urban history of the second half of the nineteenth century and the early decades of the twentieth is virtually unknown, in spite of the extremely rich material left to us by innumerable travelers, scientists, and men of state.” While historians and social scientists working from the 1950s through much of the 1970s delineated the complex relations between peasant villages and national states, the ideologies of rural rebellion, and the sources of identity and community in a countryside transformed by the demands of export capital, cities in twentieth-century Latin America were accorded secondary treatment, sometimes at the level of popular anecdotal narratives.

Spectacle, Fear, and Protest: A Guide to the History of Urban Public Space in Latin America

The Canadian urban landscape is filled with single-detached houses built in the post-World War II period. Whether one-storey, one-and-a-half-storey, two-storey or split-level, they were built by families across the country from efficient plans featuring minimal square footage. Many plans were designed by Canadian architects and included in catalogues published by the Central (now Canada) Mortgage and Housing Corporation (CMHC) during the first two decades after the Second World War. In setting up a Small House Design Scheme for the particular purpose of urbanizing communities smaller than those in the big cities, the corporation acted as mediator between architects and homeowners who could not afford professional services. This endeavour was inscribed in a larger effort made by CMHC to educate Canadian homeowners and builders in architectural matters. This dissertation argues that the postwar houses, despite their small size, are a major arena for the expression of modernism defined as it were by ideals of an egalitarian democracy and by scientific rationalism embraced by Canadian leaders at the time and projected unto the Canadian society. In this respect, the CMHC catalogues were vehicles to educate and convince ordinary Canadians of the values of modernism. While these plan books are the principal primary sources in this study, a rich collection of written documents and architectural drawings, as well as numerous oral histories collected from CMHC employees, architects and homeowners complete the picture. CMHC followed the model of the United States Federal Housing Administration, yet architects working for the corporation brought in distinctly British architectural and urban planning ideals. American and British models thus highly influenced the views which CMHC imposed on Canadians and which were underlined by concepts such as those of 'modern space' and 'modern family'. In looking at prescribed models for family ideals in the era and by means of interviews with people who purchased postwar houses (and/or their children), this study addresses how the transformations which occurred in the house plan are connected with social changes in postwar Canada. In terms of the architectural models which were circulated in the postwar years, this study looks at the roles of federal and provincial agencies, as well as professionals like architects and builders. It systematically explores the designs in the CMHC catalogues to uncover when and why changes occurred in the postwar house plan; it engages the role of the media - such as popular magazines, television shows and film documentaries – as a milieu liaising between the ideals and realities of the era in promoting modern life-styles based on traditional values. Lastly, it considers the opinions of the original inhabitants in an attempt to locate the intersection of real and ideal lives within these houses. With its focus on Canadian sources, this analysis is inscribed in a larger assessment of the North American architectural profession, postwar material culture and house…

Building small houses in postwar Canada: Architects, homeowners and bureaucratic ideals, 1947-1974

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Forgetting How to Hate: The Evolution of White Responses to Integration in Chicago, 1946-1987

1. City and Nation 2. East and West 3. Peasants and Provincials 4. Death and Disorder 5. Appearance and Reality Notes Bibliography Index

The city of Mexico in the age of Díaz

List of Illustrations 1. The City at Its Peak 2. The Downtown 3. The Neighborhoods 4. The Suburbs Notes Index

Michael Johns

Papers

The city of Mexico in the age of Díaz

Moment of Grace: The American City in the 1950s