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An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. As you have access to this content, a full PDF is available via the ‘Save PDF’ action button.

An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. As you have access to this content, a full PDF is available via the ‘Save PDF’ action button.

Urban informality is often discussed and debated by scholars of cities in the Global South, but the term is used with much less frequency in studies of US cities. Looking at the daily functions of American cities, however, it is clear informality plays just as central a role in the US as in other cities around theworld, whether in the housing sector, jobs, or land use. This article will discuss the longer historical arc leading to the present day with a focus on specific historical moments in Los Angeles history. I begin with the emergence of formalization and land titles in an era of colonization, continuing to a discussion of early-twentieth century land rights specifically in the communities of Chavez Ravine, and end with an exploration of urban informality in Skid Row.

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Forschungen zur Stadtgeschichte und zur Geschichte der Entwicklungszusammenarbeit sind bisher selten miteinander in Verbindung gebracht worden. Welche analytischen Perspektiven aber eroffnen sich an der Schnittstelle dieser beiden Forschungsfelder? Ausgehend von einer Zusammenschau neuerer Forschungen benennt die Einleitung Anliegen und Forschungsfra- gen dieses special issue und fuhrt in die einzelnen Beitrage ein. Der Blick auf die Geschichte urbaner Entwicklungspolitik, so wird argumentiert, ermoglicht nicht allein ein besseres Ver- standnis der Kategorie „Raum“ als Zielobjekt und Handlungskontext von Entwicklungspolitik. Sie eroffnet auch neue Einblicke in die Rolle transnationaler Akteure wie Architekten und Stadt- planer. Nicht zuletzt zeigt die Geschichte urbaner Entwicklungspolitik, wie Entwicklung zum big business wurde.

The language of newfound social mission belies a longer particularly in intergovernmental organizations like the United Nations (UN). UN administrators and itinerant advisers worked under the mantle of human rights broadly conceived, embracing "community development" and connecting their self-proclaimed expertise with home grown efforts to improve the everyday lives of ordinary folk. UN workers struggled to make sense of very different cultural and material contexts, and they often failed to understand the local logics underpinning what they perceived as a uniform global housing crisis. Local populations, meanwhile, hardly possessed the weapons to realize their vision of property rights or community life in the face of overwhelming modernization campaigns. Slum clearance efforts in the Philippines illustrate the ways in which architects' and planners' "social engagement" became a form of international political relations. In 1966, UN Physical Planning and Housing Adviser Morris Juppenlatz attempted to organize a Central Institute for the Training and Relocation of Urban Squatters, or CITRUS, in the Philippines.

Gentrification is integral to the functioning of global cities: international developers raze old housing and renovate industrial lofts for elite service workers seeking central-city accommodations. In the process, local real estate markets heat up and working-class residents find themselves priced out, displaced more often than not to peripheral sites of the global metropolis. In Californian communities in downtown and the east side of Los Angeles, the Mission in San Francisco, and Barrio Logan in San Diego, however, residents rejected this process of involuntary movement, instead arguing for the value of historically rich, rooted communities. In what appeared to be a wave of anti global activism beginning in the 1980s, residents worked to regain control over their local communities through a variety of strategies including the deliberate deployment of local culture and arts, and the increasingly savvy use of media and public relations. With these tools, anti-gentrifiers asserted ownership without property titles, housing rights without mortgages, and community buy-in without cash deposits. Anti-gentrification movements thus constituted a direct challenge to the workings of the global city while also feeding into a global movement to restore political power to the grassroots.

Perhaps no single neighborhood in San Francisco has garnered more attention or is better known than the Mission District. Renowned for its rich cultural assets and organized political action, “the Mission” is shorthand for heated present-day conflicts between gentrifier and long-time resident, rich and poor, global and local. Ocean Howell’s Making the Mission: Planning and Ethnicity in San Francisco, however, reminds us that the Mission’s distinctive identity took shape in a much earlier period. Even before the most recent organizing in the 1990s, or even before the 1960s, Mission residents fought for the right to plan their own neighborhood. Since at least the late nineteenth century, planning was not something abstract that happened to the neighborhood; rather, it was something residents did in order to make the neighborhood. Making the Mission shifts the focus in planning history by taking the agendas of neighborhoods as actors seriously. Instead of stating that San Franciscans rejected planning when they turned away from Daniel Burnham’s grand plan, for instance, Howell argues that this moment represented a victory of other planning visions over Burnham’s. Put another way, neighborhoods were not merely backdrops for the evolution of the city. Rather, residents were critical actors who played ongoing roles in the evolution of their neighborhood and, collectively, in the city as a whole.

sources of wealth washed over San Francisco in the 1990s, public housing residents became further isolated, most notably in cases such as North Beach Place. ‘Affective activism’ strengthened ties between housing residents, but it could also accentuate the distance between tenants and their surrounding neighbourhoods. Influenced by the activism of the 1960s and 1970s and San Francisco’s reputation for liberalism and political protest, tenant organizations (the Ping Yuen Residents Improvement Association [1966], the North Beach Place Tenants Association [NBPTA, 1964], and the Valencia Gardens Tenant Organization [1971]) responded to growing concerns with crime and with the SFHA’s physical neglect of its housing units. Tenant organizations not only represented the interests of residents, but also enabled connections to other community organizations beyond housing. In the 1980s, the NBPTA drew on the support of nearby organizations such as the Telegraph Hill Neighborhood Association and the Chinatown CDC who helped oppose proposals to displace North Beach Place residents. Moreover, tenant organizations provided political experience and training for residents and led to some tenant activists later assuming political office. The combined efforts of these organizations built a community and enabled residents to draw HOPE VI funding and to some extent influence construction. Of course, as Howard acknowledges, not all residents viewed these organizations so benignly or placed full support behind them. It would have been useful to hear more from dissenters, although Howard does not pursue this line of inquiry. Ultimately, the importance of ‘affective activism’ lies in its relation to the ambivalent history of HOPE VI – the US government programme that since 1992 massively reduced the number of public housing units and at the same time replaced public housing projects with mixed income developments. After nearly 25 years, HOPE VI’s results remain mixed. Planners’ and officials’ failure to understand the importance of tenant activism and the social and support networks employed by residents has undermined housing reform efforts and led to the growth of poverty and crime in inner-ring suburbs. Many former public housing residents have turned to support networks in working-class suburbs, straining social service provision and increasing poverty rates in already struggling towns. Howard’s work identifies these complicated networks and demonstrates how they shaped not only residents’ lives, but also the city’s built environment.

Cold War concerns gave Americans immediate reasons for caring about overseas living standards. In particular, the US government began funding overseas housing assistance in China, Taiwan, Burma, and South Korea from the late 1940s to the 1950s and '60s. In an effort to combat communism and establish market-based housing systems, American experts endorsed heavy-handed, sustained state involvement in these countries' housing production, distribution, and management. Paradoxically, Cold War imperatives drove US advisors to set up self-help programs that depended heavily on state funding and management, and that were subsequently praised for showcasing capitalist housing at its best. Put simply, the success of aided self-help programs depended on the strength of the state. This approach to national housing policy left American advisors unaware of local needs and customs, leading in turn to inaccurate assessments of policy success or failure.

As decolonization movements gained ground in the late 1950s and 60s, Americans attempted to exert indirect influence in politically sensitive areas of the world through the ostensibly neutral category of "tropical housing." Shelter in hot, humid climes could be best improved through aided self-help housing, according to US housing officials, and families only invested in home improvement if they were homeowners. Beginning in the American territory of Puerto Rico, American housing experts attempted to build a "tropical" model for the world. "Tropical" territories and nations like the Philippines and Singapore responded to American advisors and aid with housing programs that included elements of mass homeownership, but in ways that were wholly foreign to American experiences and intentions.