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Book Review
Canada and the United States
Zane L. Miller and Bruce Tucker. Changing Plans for America's Inner Cities: Cincinnati's Over-the-Rhine and Twentieth-Century Urbanism. (Urban Life and Urban Landscape Series.) Columbus: Ohio State University Press. 1998. Pp. xxi, 227. Cloth $32.00, paper $15.95.
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Zane L. Miller and Bruce Tucker have gone after big game. What began as a modest effort to explain the success of an anti-preservation movement in controlling the future of one inner city neighborhood becameonce the authors placed that struggle in the context of a "long string of cultural transformation programs" (p. xv)a detailed chronicle of an intellectual odyssey that reflected a mid-century shift in perceptions and visions of the city. Between 1920 and 1950, planners, politicians, civic leaders, and interests concerned with urban revitalization spoke of "slum clearance," according to the authors; focused on the welfare of the city as a whole, they pursued a social mission that fostered "cosmopolitanism" (defined, in part, as a stable, peaceful pluralism sustained in a city segregated by class and race). After 1950, Miller and Tucker contend that an articulated concern for conserving the "inner city" replaced the earlier goal of demolishing "slums" and was characterized by a brand of "cultural individualism" that had lost sight of a broadly defined public interest. The new mode of thinking championed individual and neighborhood autonomy while furnishing continued intellectual cover and comfort to a racially segmented city. Cincinnati's Over-the-Rhine district, an older, centrally located, declining area of mixed uses and peoples is the venue for the narrative. |
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