Urban Affairs Review

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The Materiality of Urban Discourse: Rational Planning in the Restructuring of the Early
Twentieth-Century Ghetto
Christopher Mele
Urban Affairs Review 2000; 35; 628
DOI: 10.1177/10780870022184570

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Citations http://uar.sagepub.com/cgi/content/refs/35/5/628

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Mele / URBAN DISCOURSEURBAN
AND RATIONAL
AFFAIRS PLANNING
REVIEW / May 2000

THE MATERIALITY
OF URBAN DISCOURSE
Rational Planning in the
Restructuring of the Early
Twentieth-Century Ghetto
CHRISTOPHER MELE
University of Buffalo

The author uses poststructuralist advances in discourse analysis to examine the ways the circula-
tion of symbolic representations and characterizations of the city are useful to understanding
urban restructuring. He defines the relationship between discourses about the city and the mate-
rial or spatial practices that transform the built environment, and then he examines how stake-
holders translate, adapt, and employ discourse about the inner city to facilitate changes in its
social and physical environment. The employment of urban discourses serves to define
urban restructuring as normal and beneficial, to legitimize the process of urban restructuring—
especially its accompanying social costs—and to facilitate a new place identity.

In the conclusion of his 1989 work, The Condition of Postmodernity, David

Harvey proposed four directions for further research in urban studies. Among
them was

a recognition that the production of images and of discourses is an important

facet of activity that has to be analyzed as part and parcel of the reproduction
and transformation of any symbolic order. Aesthetic and cultural practices
matter, and the conditions of their production deserve the closest attention.
(P. 355)

In the decade since its publication, urbanists have begun to address the pro-
cesses in which rhetoric, images, symbols, and representations that cohere as

AUTHOR’S NOTE: An earlier version of this article was presented at the Comparative Histori-
cal Symposium on Imagining Spaces, University of Buffalo, 9 April 1999. I thank Cindy Cooper,
Dennis Judd, and the anonymous reviewers for their suggestions on revisions and the Baldy Cen-
ter for Law and Social Policy for funding the research for this project.
URBAN AFFAIRS REVIEW, Vol. 35, No. 5, May 2000 628-648
© 2000 Sage Publications, Inc.

628

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 Mele / URBAN DISCOURSE AND RATIONAL PLANNING 629

conventions simultaneously reflect and shape social practices within specific

spaces and time frames (Hastings 1999). Among such work, a shared
epistemological sentiment holds that the focus on discourse is relevant to the
study of the city insofar as it informs analyses of social, cultural, political, or
economic processes; that discourse “produces something else (an utterance,
a concept, an effect), rather than something which exists in and of itself and
which can be analyzed in isolation” (Mills 1997, 17). Yet variations abound.
An analytical focus on discourse prevails in those studies that examine the
city as a site of complex processes of identity construction and fragmentation
(Ghani 1993; Chambers 1993; Robins 1995). Here, attention is paid to the ur-
ban in its diverse and often conflicting representational forms (city as text)
that both produce and are products of the formation of a wide range of
subjectivities, including ethnic, racial, gender, and sexual identities (Imrie,
Pinch, and Boyle 1996, 1257). Critics argue that such approaches (over)em-
phasize the symbolic and discursive forms of the city at the expense of the tra-
ditional domain of urban sociology—the relationship between spatial (or
material) processes and structural relations of power, including class and
other bases of inequality (Imrie, Pinch, and Boyle 1996, 1258). Imrie, Pinch,
and Boyle (1996) cautioned against those cultural studies approaches that
privilege the mapping of symbolism, language, and images about the city at
the expense of (or, at the very least, in ignorance of) political economic pro-
cesses that structure the everyday experiences of urban dwellers in general
and disadvantaged residents in particular. Badcock (1996) noted that the fas-
cination with identity and performance in urban studies tends toward a schol-
arly indifference to the social consequences of spatial practices, such as un-
even development and displacement. In this article, I develop the argument
that the circulation of prevailing discourses about the city is intrinsic to politi-
cal economic processes of sociospatial change, such as community abandon-
ment and redevelopment. Drawing on poststructuralist advances in discourse
analysis, I identify the ways symbolic representations and characterizations
of the inner-city ghetto are employed by stakeholders either engaged in re-
structuring or committed to resisting it. To demonstrate the significance of
urban discourse to processes of spatial restructuring, I present a case study of
private efforts to redevelop the immigrant working-class ghetto on the Lower
East Side of New York in the 1920s-1930s.

DISCOURSE AND URBAN RESTRUCTURING

As past research indicates, consideration of the significance of discourses

about the city does not require an abandonment of the analytical focus on

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630 URBAN AFFAIRS REVIEW / May 2000

urban form and spatial practices. In its earliest formulations of urban spatial
processes, human ecology posed cultural sentiments and symbolic attach-
ments to place on par with economic competition (Park, Burgess, and
McKenzie 1925). The equivalent importance accorded to cultural and eco-
nomic factors was short-lived, however, as human ecology turned almost
exclusively to the analysis of competition over the resource of urban land.
The subsequent neglect of “nonrational factors,” including sentiments, iden-
tities, and shared meanings that characterize or represent place, figured in the
earliest critiques of human ecology’s economism (Alihan 1938). In the
mid-1940s, Walter Firey (1945, 1947) sought to rescue cultural factors from
the ecologists’ disregard. Drawing on empirical work in Boston, Firey
claimed that the “symbolic-sentiment relationship” in which social groups
formed longstanding allegiances to place exerted influence on “locational
processes that seem to defy a strictly economic analysis” (Firey 1945, 141).
Decades later, Gerald Suttles (1984) further elevated the significance of cul-
tural representations of place to ecological theory. Although commending
Firey for the consideration of symbolic variables, Suttles criticized the view
of culture as a residual category that was brought in to resolve exceptional
cases in which economic factors alone could not explain outcomes in land
use. “Amenities, aesthetics, social character and services” contribute to the
characterization of place, which, in turn, influences land-use decisions
(p. 287). Suttles appealed to human ecology’s origins in which cultural forms
were integral, rather than residual, to locational processes. Its analytical
power upgraded, the concept nonetheless remained imprisoned within a
human ecology framework that ontologically separates images, rhetoric, and
symbols from the more empirically verifiable market factors of land rents,
housing demand, and property values.
Poststructuralism and the “new urban sociology” (Gottdiener and Feagin
1988) approach the significance of cultural symbols, signs, and images to
urban spatial processes from a vastly different angle. Discourses and sym-
bolic representations, which frame collective meanings and attachments to
place, cannot be divorced from sociospatial practices but exist in relationship
with them (Foucault 1972). That said, rather than assume a crude functional-
ist coherence between cultural representations of the city and political eco-
nomic restructuring processes, the relationship between the symbolic and the
material must be problematized as a point of analysis (see Lofland 1991;
Bridger 1996; Mele 2000). First, the authorship or construction of place rep-
resentations must be recognized as complex and transitional. In earlier for-
mulations (Firey 1945; Strauss 1961), characterizations of place emerged
from within place over time and partly through consensus. They are said to
represent accurately a locale’s dominant features. More recent work has

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 Mele / URBAN DISCOURSE AND RATIONAL PLANNING 631

problematized place images, symbols, and discourses about (rather than of)
the city, focusing on the integral role of the media, the state, and developers in
their production and subsequent manipulation (Gottdiener 1997; Zukin
1995). As such, the characterization of place reflects dynamics of power rela-
tions rather than an exclusively pluralist concurrence among locals. Second,
through their repeated expression and circulation within society, character-
izations of place form dominant themes that emerge from mutual references
and citations across sources (Hall 1997, 232; see Foucault 1972). These sets
of interpretive cues together form state-sanctioned knowledges, reputations,
parables, and popular legends that impart significance to certain kinds of
typifications of place over others. Finally, place representations are not tem-
porally fixed but shift in relation to transformations in dominant ideologies as
they pertain to the city.
Given these considerations, place representations have particular rele-
vance to political and economic processes of urban restructuring. Character-
izations classify and essentialize place, presenting it in symbolic forms legi-
ble to the visitor, the potential resident, the curious voyeur, or, in short, the
interested public. Widely circulated images, rhetoric, and symbols together
do not exist simply as descriptions but also as ready explanations of existing
social, economic, and political conditions and the potential for radical
changes in them. Prevailing images, rhetoric, and symbols culturally define
the parameters of the desirable and undesirable, the feasible and impossible,
and the legitimate and illegitimate as they pertain to a locale’s present cir-
cumstances and future possibilities. Although these characterizations are by
no means fixed or uncontested, they influence public disposition toward pre-
scriptive and proscriptive actions and policies that seek to remedy, improve,
or neglect an urban area’s existing social problems and overall condition.
Through historical analysis, it is possible to demonstrate the ways real
estate actors, state institutions, and community stakeholders engage prevail-
ing place characterizations in the selection and implementation of urban
restructuring practices (see Mele 2000). It is wrong to impute causality for
the forms of political economic restructuring, such as capital investment or
disinvestment in the built environment, directly from observations of domi-
nant discourses about urban places. It is possible, however, to examine how
stakeholders, driven by their own interests in neighborhood change, trans-
late, adapt, and employ prevailing symbols, images, and rhetoric about the
city to facilitate restructuring practices that portend dramatic changes in the
social and physical environment. In particular, the deployment of popular,
scientific, and state-sanctioned characterizations serves three related pur-
poses for the restructuring efforts of the real estate sector and state actors and
potential resistance by residents.

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632 URBAN AFFAIRS REVIEW / May 2000

1. Employing discourse to define urban restructuring as normal and bene-

ficial. Drawing from larger representations of the inner city, the real estate
sector and state actors define existing neighborhood conditions as problem-
atic or unacceptable and urban restructuring as ideal or necessary. Concomi-
tantly, proposed political economic spatial practices appear as the best and
most credible solution to social problems. The characterization of an urban
area is largely dependent on the land-use interests of real estate developers
and the state and their assessment of challenges to such plans from existing
residents. Constructing the status quo as intolerable and restructuring as logi-
cal (and even natural) often neutralizes residents’protest of the social costs of
changes to their community.
2. Employing discourse to legitimize the process of urban restructuring,
especially its accompanying social costs. Through references to cultural dis-
courses about the city and its potential, urban investment or disinvestment
practices may appear as natural, rational, and logical, but in the material
realm, such actions produce land-use changes that uniformly displace the
poor and ethnic and racial minorities. Proclamations of existing social condi-
tions and problems authored by institutional sources, such as planning agen-
cies or civic leaders, tend to validate and legitimize the frequently coercive
practices that accompany restructuring. These official discourses are
employed to legitimize residential displacement and serve to elide or excul-
pate many other social costs of private development and restructuring. Resi-
dential displacement is conceptualized—indeed, naturalized—as an “unfor-
tunate but necessary” consequence of progressive change. Within such
discourse of a neighborhood’s realizable potential, the political economic
interests that drive land-use changes are sublimated to a more noble abstrac-
tion of community betterment. The expected outcome of investment and
development is coded in signs and rhetoric of an improved “quality of life”
for all without specifying the intended class, race, or ethnicity of desired resi-
dents. Urban development is made more persuasive and acceptable when
promises of local improvements such as enhanced neighborhood appearance
and increased public safety are universalistic and appeal across social bound-
aries. Depending on the believability of such claims, they may divert resi-
dents from collective action and deflate otherwise potent forms of local
resistance.
3. Employing discourse to facilitate or reject the invention of a new place
identity. The attraction of new consumers of restructured urban space is dic-
tated not only by the physical renovation of living spaces but also the invented
symbolic characterization of place as desirable. That is, pouring considerable
amounts of real estate capital into a working-class minority neighborhood
alone will not change, for instance, longstanding perceptions of fear or

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 Mele / URBAN DISCOURSE AND RATIONAL PLANNING 633

danger that exist within public discourse about “the ghetto.” In episodes of
renewal, the reinvention of place as alluring becomes essential to attract
higher forms of consumption and valorize property. Preferred place identi-
ties are constructed through embracing or rejecting elements of the neighbor-
hood’s past and present. Ideal neighborhood identities introduce and incul-
cate the real possibility of “neighborhood comeback” or “renaissance” to
targeted consumers (Gold and Ward 1994; Philo and Kearns 1993; Wright
and Hutchison 1997). Likewise, the persistent attachment to existing place
identities among residents may frustrate efforts to develop a desirable, mid-
dle-class image. A discursive onslaught that characterizes a locale’s present
circumstances as problematic and poses an alternative, “improved” future
encodes the commonplace activities of existing and maligned residents with
political meaning. The everyday cultural practices of locals become subver-
sive with potential symbolic and material consequences.
In the remainder of this article, I present a case study of the relationship
between discourses of social reform and rational planning and efforts to rede-
velop the immigrant working-class ghetto on the Lower East Side of New
1
York in the 1920s-1930s. These decades, sandwiched as they are between
the earlier immigrant epoch and the later state-interventionist New Deal era,
are characterized by their experimentation in ways of containing and solving
problems associated with the ghetto. Throughout the second half of the nine-
teenth century and in the initial decades of the twentieth century, cheaply
built tenements housed hundreds of thousands of immigrant newcomers, pro-
viding a somewhat lucrative economy for Lower East Side real estate specu-
lators and landlords. In the 1920s, locational shifts in manufacturing and the
rise of corporate services in Manhattan brought into question a sustainable
working-class housing market, highlighting its worst elements and, in effect,
demanding a resolution to the increasingly conspicuous differences between
the Lower East Side and the more modernizing sections of Manhattan.
The passage of the Immigration Act of 1924 further hampered the working-
class immigrant housing economy. When the number of new immigrants was
reduced substantially, the most glaring elements of the ghetto—the rapid rise
and fall of teeming ethnic and religious enclaves and the tenement system—
were laid bare. Density levels on the Lower East Side declined from 867 per-
sons per acre in 1910 to 536 in 1925 (Grebler 1952, 49). In 1928, the vacancy
rate for east-side tenements was estimated at 14%, and by 1930 it increased to
20% (Wasserman 1994, 100). Between 1910 and 1940, the area experienced
a 60% decline in population. As modern and more commodious garden
apartments appeared in newer neighborhoods in the city, tenements proved
glaring liabilities to their owners. In addition, the Lower East Side’s reputa-
tion among middle- and upper-class New Yorkers remained fixed on its

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nineteenth-century image as an Old World, ethnic, working-class ghetto.

That stigma worked against notions of a simple renewal or modernization of
the housing market.
In response to the increasing symbolic and material obsolescence of the
Lower East Side, real estate actors engaged in various efforts to further prof-
its or limit their financial losses, both independently and collectively. These
included renovation of existing tenements, new construction, massive
upscale development projects, speculation, temporary withdrawal (board-
ing-up units) and housing abandonment. The justification and legitimation
for these actions (including the concomitant social costs to remaining work-
ing-class residents), I argue, were framed in relation to the larger discourse of
rational planning of the city. In the following sections, I first outline the cen-
tral features of the shift from social reform to rational planning discourse. I
describe the shift from nineteenth-century social reform to twentieth-century
rational planning as the prevailing discursive convention through which insti-
tutions and authorities posed both the problems of the ghetto and solutions to
them. These conventions, I argue, differed in their characterization of the
ghetto, and each provided a distinct mode of speaking about and on behalf of
the immigrant working class. In particular, I emphasize the disappearance of
the immigrant working class as the subject of improvement as philanthropic
and social reform discourse gave way to the professional and scientific study
of the city. Next, I specify the connections between the shift in discourses and
the material practices of restructuring on the Lower East Side. I demonstrate
how rational planning discourses were employed by state institutions and
private developers to legitimate efforts to eliminate the immigrant working-
class ghetto during the 1920s-1930s. Finally, I suggest that residents’ attach-
ments to place formed countervailing representations to intended neighbor-
hood change.

REFORMISM AND RATIONAL PLANNING

Since the early nineteenth century, the working-class spaces in the United
States have been characterized repeatedly as spaces of disorder, pathology,
and chaos and, simultaneously, as spaces of possibility, progressive transfor-
mation, and promise. Although this dual framework has remained remark-
ably constant throughout two centuries, both the content and social implica-
tions of discourses about the ghetto have changed. Characterizations of the
ghetto are time-bound conventions that consist of an array of images, symbols,
and rhetoric that cut across moral, cultural, aesthetic, and linguistic dimen-
sions. The pathology of the ghetto in the early twentieth century, for example,

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 Mele / URBAN DISCOURSE AND RATIONAL PLANNING 635

was defined in relation to its architecture, the cultural habits of its residents,
and the leisure activities of working-class men, women, and children. The
promise of a future, improved postghetto conjured up idealized images of
orderliness, tidy households composed exclusively of related individuals,
and aesthetically pleasing parkways and streetscapes. The 1920s-1930s
movement to modernize the urban ghetto through its elimination and whole-
sale private redevelopment emerged from various and disparate sources,
including nineteenth-century social reformism and turn-of-the-century uto-
pianism and the new discipline of scientific and rational planning. In the sec-
tion that follows, those features of reformism, utopianism, and rational plan-
ning that constituted modernization discourse of ghetto improvement in the
1920s-1930s are examined. As will be seen, the social reform axiom that
urban social problems required spatial solutions remained resonant in newer
proposals to improve the ghetto. Yet the subject of nineteenth-century
reformism—the immigrant resident—is largely absent from these plans and
is replaced in both utopianism and rational planning by a focus on the neigh-
borhood unit. This shift in the focal subject of improvement discourse, I
argue, has significant implications for how urban development was to pro-
ceed on the Lower East Side.
Nineteenth-century social reform was fraught with inherently contradic-
tory ideologies and practices. Various progressives and social reformers
explicitly linked the problems of the immigrant ghetto to structural factors
such as the exploitative housing market, graft and corrupt political adminis-
tration, the exploitation of women and children in the labor market, and the
absence of educational and social programs (Hofstadter 1963, 2). Yet, the
link was tentative at best as explanations of social problems and solutions to
them rarely focused primarily on their structural causes. Reflective of an
underlying uneasiness with an expanding working class, social problems
within the ghetto were conceived and pronounced as lapses in individual and
community morals.
Reformers and reformist commissions often (mis)read local immigrant
practices, ranging from loitering in candy stores (Schoener 1967, 58) to dif-
ferent sexes sharing the same tenement room, as evidence of rampant devi-
ance. Reformers showed respect at times for the autonomy of immigrant cul-
tures they sought to uplift, and they also uniformly called for the ghetto’s
eventual dissolution through improvements to the built environment.
Housing reformers were critical of the practices of the real estate industry
that produced the tenement, yet they hardly contested the underlying logic or
the “right” of real estate entrepreneurs to profit in the housing market.
Instead, calls for improvements in the ghetto-built environment were articu-
lated as health and moral necessities: Ventilation would advance hygiene,

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636 URBAN AFFAIRS REVIEW / May 2000

increases in the number of rooms would prevent prostitution and incest, and
an upgrading of cleanliness and comfort would deter drunkenness (Veiller
[1903] 1970, 90). The reformists’ obsession and meticulous detailing of
urban social problems and the immigrant lifestyle elevated awareness of the
plight of the ghetto poor among the general public and politicians alike. Jacob
Riis’s ([1890] 1971) How the Other Half Lives and similar accounts exposed
the harsh treatment in garment sweatshops and the reprehensible conditions
of the tenement apartments. Throughout the close of the nineteenth century,
reformers continued to campaign for better working-class living standards
and were successful in the passage of legislation that improved housing for
the immigrant working class. Reformers’ consistently posed spatial solu-
tions to the social problems of disorder, immorality, and chaos, and their
interventionist intentions rarely shifted away from core (albeit often contra-
dictory) concerns of restraining, uplifting, and transforming the immigrant.
The focus on the immigrant subject faded with the transition from social
reform to rational planning. As a result of successes in housing legislation
and increasing public interest in the future of the urban ghetto, the reform
movement itself was transformed with the advent of the twentieth century. As
Christine Boyer (1983, 60) has argued, nineteenth-century social reformers’
meticulous (if misrepresented) attention to the details of ghetto living and
their success in fostering the passage of housing and other forms of legisla-
tion helped bring about “the beginning of the idea that the American city
might be disciplined by the progressive development of human knowledge,
state regulatory mechanisms, and public welfare provisions.” In addition, a
professionalization of the study of the city was well under way at the close of
the nineteenth century. The passage of civil service laws led to a bureaucrati-
zation of the administration of services (Abu-Lughod 1999, 89). Career civil
engineers, architects, and social workers were appointed to newly founded
commissions and offices formed to scrutinize and improve transportation,
housing, health, and other services. The battle against urban vice was sub-
jected to a science of social problems, moving it away from the exclusive
domain of moral reformers. Reform investigative committees, such as the
Committee of Fifteen, were charged with the gathering of “hard” evidence of
vice, including the production of affidavits, estimates of the numbers of pros-
titutes and clients, and the exact geography of prostitution and gambling
(Wagner 1971, chap. 7). A conviction in the capacity to control the urban
environment led to new and often extravagantly utopian ways of thinking
about the city and its future. New York City’s rapid residential and commer-
cial expansion into the outer boroughs opened opportunities for planners and
architects to apply principles of efficiency and rationality to architectural
experimentation (see Plunz 1990).

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 Mele / URBAN DISCOURSE AND RATIONAL PLANNING 637

Despite similarities to its precursor, social reform, rational planning

emerged as a different, coherent framework for understanding the ghetto and
posing solutions to its problems. The new science of the city initially shared
the reformers’ assumption that improvements to the built environment
offered the best antidote to social disorder, class unrest, and the moral short-
comings of ghetto dwellers (Ward 1989). Over time, however, the profession-
alization of social reform and its increasing association with state institu-
tions, the emerging scientific discipline of planning, and the bureaucratized
application of technological innovations in transportation and construction
together ushered in a new discourse of rational planning for the improvement
of the urban ghetto.
Rational planning doctrine comprehended the city as a highly differenti-
ated spatial grid of observable and compartmentalized facts, functions, and
processes that could be manipulated (i.e., improved) through scientific man-
agement (Friedmann and Weaver 1979). The individual neighborhood existed
as a single unit within a matrix of other units, each specialized in form and
function and connected via transportation and communication networks.
Attention formerly directed at social conditions of the ghetto was redirected
toward “simplistic relations and elements that could be regulated, such as the
flow of traffic and the disorderly and conflicting arrangements of land uses”
(Boyer 1983, 69). In the search for order over chaos, residential, commercial,
and industrial spaces were envisioned as discrete and separate entities. Ratio-
nal planning also differed from social reform in the vantage from which the
ghetto was observed, analyzed, and engineered. Whereas the social reform
perspective viewed the culture, economy, and social life of the ghetto from
within (e.g., from the vantage of settlement houses), rational planning con-
ceived of the ghetto from outside and above. Distance from the object lent
itself toward a comprehensive, objective view of the neighborhoods as parts
of a larger whole or system. Local variations (conceptualized as chaos) were
rendered invisible and, subsequently, inconsequential to the development and
implementation of rational, efficient regional planning. Such a perspective
shifted problem solving from ways to improve conditions within each neigh-
borhood to the most efficient means to integrate neighborhoods into a larger
functional spatial system. In addition, the approach of rational planning priv-
ileged a neighborhood’s future possibilities over its present circumstances,
employing an ends-dictates-the-means form of logic to reconfigure the urban
landscape. “The past is an impediment, a history that must be transcended,”
wrote James Scott (1998, 95) in his survey of knowledges and practices per-
taining to the modernist city; “the present is the platform for launching plans
for a better future.” Absent a concern with a neighborhood’s existing form and
function, the landscape exists as a “clean slate” for limitless possibilities.

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638 URBAN AFFAIRS REVIEW / May 2000

The most significant feature of rational planning discourse is the marked

departure from the nineteenth-century reformist axiom of improvement
directed toward the moral and material “lifting up” of the impoverished
working-class tenant. As can be seen, the subject of nineteenth-century social
and moral reform practices and purposes remained steadily fixed on the
working-class immigrant. The improvement of the physical environment of
the ghetto, after all, was tied to a larger concern with shaping the character of
the immigrant that included public education, wholesome forms of leisure,
and an elimination of Old World values. Within rational planning discourse,
the decades-old reformist agenda of curing the social ills of community and
its residents was made subordinate to the challenge of making the “best use”
of poorly used and costly urban land. Utopian claims of social progress and
the practical emphasis on individual neighborhoods as functional units
existed in relation to the lack of consideration to existing needs of residents
within affected communities. Viewed as a whole, rational planning discourse
characterized residents, their everyday practices, and cultures as idiosyn-
cratic, obstructionist, or irrelevant to future plans. The jaundiced view of the
present and future circumstances of working-class residents was of consider-
able importance to restructuring efforts on the Lower East Side.
The central advocate of the development and implementation of coordi-
nated rational planning in New York was the Regional Plan Association
(RPA). Quasi-public organizations such as the New York City Improvement
Plan (1907) and the Committee on the City Plan (1914) brought together
local banking and industry leaders and political officials to fabricate a
land-use agenda that would benefit particular businesses and industries. In
1922, the Russell Sage Foundation formed the Committee on the Plan of New
York and Its Environs. Over the ensuing decade, numerous studies on land
use, transportation, parks, and housing in the 31-county New York region
were commissioned and published together as a regional master plan. In
1929, the RPA was incorporated and charged with developing ways to imple-
ment the master plan (Jackson 1984, 328). The RPA, originally comprising
12 banking and business elites, held significant influence among the area’s
governors, mayors, and developers, and the 1929 plan served as a broad guide-
line for regional development for nearly 40 years. The hyperrational regional
plan embodied the central postulates of rational planning, viewing the New
York region as a system of networked spatial components (Adams et al.
1931). On the Lower East Side, real estate organizations and quasi-public
planning groups came to dominate the public discourse of improving the
ghetto, posing the problem solutions to the obsolete ghetto in rational ways
that would uniformly profit landowners. “Official” problem-solving com-
mittees and panels were formed with representation of banking executives,

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 Mele / URBAN DISCOURSE AND RATIONAL PLANNING 639

captains of industry, and often social reformers who rarely acknowledged the
potential social costs of private solutions.

A FUTURIST LOWER EAST SIDE:

DISCOURSE AND RESTRUCTURING EFFORTS

The increasing circulation of rational planning ideas, agenda, and ideol-

ogy among architects, planners, government institutions, and organizations
such as the RPA provided an increasingly coherent template for a spatial
solution to the woes of landowners and developers on the Lower East Side. In
the vision of a reinvented Lower East Side, the clean lines and sharp angles of
the modernist skyscraper would replace dilapidated tenements; a strictly resi-
dential zone would replace the haphazard mix of industry, apartments, and
commerce; and futuristic highways that integrate the district to other parts of
the metropolis would displace overcrowded, narrow streets and alleyways. A
futurist architectural exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, for example,
called for modern high-rise apartments to be erected along a widened Christi
Street in the heart of the east side (Holden 1932). Plans were drawn up for a
park and highway along the East River that would shuttle high-rise apartment
dwellers to and from their midtown or Wall Street offices. A Second Avenue
“speedway” would comprise a below-ground automobile highway from
Houston Street to the Harlem River. South of Houston Street to Canal Street,
the speedway would convert to a parkway along the cleared Chrystie-Forsyth
site. Using the parkway-speedway, motorists could travel from the Lower
East Side to the Upper East Side in minutes. Although these plans were either
scaled down dramatically in their implementation or never realized, they gen-
erated an enthusiasm among certain segments of the real estate industry
mindful of the area’s increasing obsolescence.
The organized elements of the local real estate industry, especially the
East Side Chamber of Commerce, quickly discarded their former attach-
ments to the working-class housing market and warmly embraced the notion
of a modern, upscale community. The chamber, whose members included a
faction of local landlords and outside developers and area merchants, as well
as influential planners and businesspeople from across the city, ardently lob-
bied for state intervention to realize plans to transform local land usage.
Another influential actor, the Lower East Side Planning Association, whose
board consisted of numerous bank executives but no residents or settlement
workers, was founded in 1931 (Wasserman 1994, 104). These organizations
proposed slum clearance, followed by the construction of massive apartment
communities for middle-class, “white-collar” residents (Wasserman 1994;

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640 URBAN AFFAIRS REVIEW / May 2000

Lasker 1931). In the late 1920s, the target for new east-side tenants was the
former Lower East Siders who had entered the ranks of the middle classes.
Planners and real estate developers soon broadened the scope of potential
renters of upscale Lower East Side housing, however, to include all
white-collar workers employed in lower Manhattan. “Are not these the logi-
cal future residents of the East Side—these thousands of middle-class folk
who daily take a journey of ten to twenty-five miles in crowded subways?”
(Lasker 1931, 587).
Although the RPA, other organizations, and planners investigated the fea-
sibility of the futurist automotive-based community design for the Lower
East Side (Perry 1936), other groups of property owners, landlords, and
developers were readapting the neighborhood’s past walk-to-work appeal for
the modern era. Fred F. French, who had successfully employed the
walk-to-work residential concept in the development of Tudor City in the
midtown Manhattan office district, proposed a similar venture for the Lower
East Side. Approximately 14.5 acres of property were amassed to erect a pro-
posed $150 million Knickerbocker Village to house 30,000 middle-class ten-
ants (Wasserman 1994, 107). Although Depression-era economics forced
French to downsize, Knickerbocker Village was built, and it attracted lower-
middle- and middle-class white-collar workers from across the New York
region. Two mid-scale high rises, Ageloff Towers on Avenue A and 3rd Street
and Stuyvesant Apartments on Second Avenue and 10th Street, were con-
structed in the late 1920s. Although neither project was on the scale of what
ardent supporters of neighborhood modernization had in mind, both were sit-
uated on multiple lots and incorporated up-to-date apartment layouts. Rent
levels for Ageloff and Stuyvesant apartments were higher than those for sur-
rounding cold-water flats. In contrast to the surrounding tenements, clerks,
professionals, and other white-collar workers filled the buildings. Ageloff
and Stuyvesant, both privately developed, were but two examples of what
planners and developers had envisioned as a residential neighborhood for
office workers employed in the new skyscrapers of the Wall Street area, just
south of the district.
Rational planning discourse provided a restructuring template of a
hypermodern, futuristic Lower East Side that was well suited for large devel-
opers, speculators, and property associations. The template did not provide
for other, less grandiose forms of restructuring the built environment that
many individual landlords and small property associations viewed as feasi-
ble. Many landlords continued to operate tenements for low-income resi-
dents at a loss (save for a brief periods of demand brought about by short-term
housing shortages), others abandoned structures permanently (leading to
foreclosure and possibly demolition) or temporarily (e.g., board them up), or

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 Mele / URBAN DISCOURSE AND RATIONAL PLANNING 641

some chose to rehabilitate and modernize buildings in hope of attracting a

higher socioeconomic stratum of tenants. Drawing on rational planning dis-
course, local and regional planning associations sought to delegitimize these
other options, demonstrating them to be inefficient and illogical. Individual
landlords, family trusts, estates, and other forms of fragmented property
ownership were singled out as the chief obstacles to comprehensive redevel-
opment. East-side landlords were “notoriously unenterprising” and “given to
holding on and doing nothing in the hope that some happy combination of
circumstances may one day bring them a boom market” (RPA 1931, 6). The
appeal to the rational planning model as the only viable solution to housing
market problems also facilitated the call among developers for state interven-
tion in the private development of housing. Alternative state-subsidized in-
centives, such as assistance to individual landlords or piecemeal redevelop-
ment programs, were dismissed outright as irrational or failing to submit to
the progressive notions purported by planners and state institutions.

Both rehabilitation and small block development fail completely to achieve the
full advantages to be derived from a program operated by a public housing
agency, with the power of eminent domain and large sums of money to spend.
They are predicated on the old method of building a city, and they fail to recog-
nize the stupidity of the past, the needs of the future, or the possibilities of exist-
ing opportunities. (Post 1938, 233-34)

A FUTURE WITHOUT WORKING-CLASS IMMIGRANTS?

DISCOURSE, DISPLACEMENT, AND RESISTANCE

As has been seen, certain elements of the real estate sector appealed to
rational planning edicts as the most plausible and profitable route to Lower
East Side development. Such appeals were an effort to solidify a uniform
restructuring agenda among developers and property owners and to rein in
nonconforming practices, such as tenement rehabilitation. In this case, the
deployment of discourse to facilitate massive redevelopment hardly trans-
lated into corresponding spatial practices. Striking variations in property
ownership meant that assembling the requisite number of parcels for
large-scale middle-class housing complexes was very difficult to orchestrate.
As evidenced by their diverse investment actions, most landlords remained
unconvinced of the possibility of a futurist, rationally planned Lower East
Side. Whereas property owners differed in their assessments of the future,
they demonstrated greater consensus in ridding the neighborhood of its past
and present image as a working-class immigrant ghetto. Demographic
changes after 1925 made the Lower East Side less a place for newly arrived

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642 URBAN AFFAIRS REVIEW / May 2000

immigrants. Nonetheless, the Lower East Side retained its popular reputation
as an Old World neighborhood and the cultural urban center for numerous
ethnic and religious cohorts whose members no longer resided there. This
reputation was sustained by nostalgic attachment among locals and tourists
and strongly contested by redevelopment forces. The neighborhood’s immi-
grant identity also formed a countervailing discourse maintained by residents
resistant to neighborhood change.
Hordes of former residents, visitors, and tourists who frequented the
Lower East Side to observe religious practices, engage in rituals of remem-
brance, and buy ethnic goods and commodities perpetuated the neighbor-
hood’s image as an immigrant quarter (Wasserman 1990, 1994). Immigrant
institutions continued to operate and serve both locals and those who had
exited the neighborhood and wished to immerse themselves in a diverse cul-
tural environment. Although their readership was geographically dispersed,
Yiddish newspapers, for example, maintained their offices along East Broad-
way. Shoppers from throughout the city continued to frequent specialty
stores along Orchard Street, produce markets on Essex Street, and delicates-
sens on Second Avenue. After a day of shopping, eating, and remembering,
“spectators” left behind the tenements and cluttered streets and returned to
the relative comfort of their newer uptown homes. These pilgrimages rein-
forced attachments to memories of place, elevated the neighborhood’s sym-
bolic significance, and reinforced its ethnic, Old World character and reputa-
tion among the larger public. Indeed, the weekend onslaught of nostalgia
seekers and religious worshipers gave the feel of a vibrant neighborhood and
disguised the anemic residential housing market.
Nostalgia did little to profit the owners of tenements or to entice invest-
ment in local real estate from developers and financial institutions. The
neighborhood’s Old World image also made the prospect of attracting a sig-
nificant cohort of middle-class residents more difficult. The neighborhood’s
prevailing image—frozen as it was in an earlier time—was increasingly
unsubstantiated by the social and economic realities of a changing
Manhattan. Despite different paths taken to recapture the profitability of the
local housing economy, landlords, developers, lending institutions, and plan-
ners alike concurred that the area’s working-class presence, both materially
and symbolically, was a significant obstacle to renewal. The absence of con-
sideration of the housing concerns of immigrant working classes in rational
planning discourse proved invaluable to the real estate sector’s efforts at
displacement. Rational planning’s preoccupation with the urban future—
specifically, a modern, efficient city devoid of any traces of congestion and
disorder that characterized the working class present—provided an aperture
for speaking about or on behalf of existing residents. Absent the traditional

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 Mele / URBAN DISCOURSE AND RATIONAL PLANNING 643

reformist concern with the improvement of the ghetto populace, these char-
acterizations were uniformly unflattering and dismissive. Portrayals of resi-
dents as adversaries to progress and modernity provided the basis of legiti-
mation for spatial practices such as residential displacement and
exclusionary zoning.
In their self-proclaimed roles as caretakers of the neighborhood’s future,
real estate organizations, slum committees, chambers of commerce, and
business elites began to concoct sharp distinctions between the Lower East
Side of the past (of the heroic, struggling immigrant) and the present (the
failed, undeserving ghetto dweller). Drawing on assimilationist rhetoric, a
narrative based on the contrast between previous residents (normal, success-
ful) and current ones (dysfunctional, unsuccessful) began to appear adjacent
to calls for middle-class residential development. The former immigrant resi-
dents, once chided for their base and uncivil ways, were now rehabilitated
and ennobled by virtue of their exodus from the Lower East Side. The depar-
ture of older immigrant groups from the impoverished ghetto signaled irre-
futable evidence of social mobility and success. Consequently, current resi-
dents who clung to arcane immigrant lifestyles constituted failures of
assimilation. By the late 1920s and early 1930s, those left behind were char-
acterized as the “marooned” and “the queer, the unadjusted, the radical, the
bohemian, and the criminal”—“the slum is the neighborhood of lost souls”
(Gries and Ford 1931, 31-32).

Like a migrating flock of blackbirds resting and feeding temporarily, so groups

of immigrants as well as individual families and isolated individuals stop in
this transitional area on their way up or down the social scale. Each of these
waves leaves a residue of poverty-stricken, socially unadjusted, maladjusted
defectives and delinquents which gradually accumulate into a slum popula-
tion. (Gries and Ford 1931, 31)

Emphasizing spatial effects on social behavior, the slum figured as “a breeder

of crime” and a preferred destination for “human derelicts who foundered in
more respectable sections [of the city]” (Perry et al. 1929, 128). Such depic-
tions of immigrants in general and Lower East Siders in particular were typi-
cal in nineteenth-century proclamations of the ghetto problem. What is im-
portant to note in the 1920s and 1930s versions are the distinctions made
between past and present cohorts and the absence of countervailing charac-
terizations of moral redemption or eventual assimilation.
Dividing the mythical dignified ghetto of the past from the ignoble and
dispensable slum of the present was conveniently welded to contemporary
rational planning arguments for comprehensive redevelopment. Spatial prac-
tices, such as the widening of streets, building of highways, and demolition of

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644 URBAN AFFAIRS REVIEW / May 2000

factories and immigrant marketplaces, entailed the displacement of work-

ing-class homes, workplaces, and consumption spaces. Within a discursive
framework that marginalized present residents and land uses, related social
costs, such as residential displacement from the bulldozing of large tracts of
tenements, were viewed as inconsequential. As one proposal for moderniza-
tion concluded, “We are confident that a large portion of the group displaced
by slum clearance will be able to find suitable accommodations elsewhere”
(Gries and Ford 1931, 10). Forced evictions tied to renovations and modern-
ization of tenements were outweighed by the larger benefits of abstract
notions of civic good and decency that were to accompany redevelopment.
Drawing on the prevailing discourse of rational planning (and silencing crit-
ics), these practices were uniformly embraced by developers, politicians,
planners, and some social reformers as progressive solutions void of any
implications for existing community life.
In an endeavor to diminish the material and symbolic vestiges of immi-
grant identity, developers, planners, and local businessmen appealed to the
city’s relatively new powers of land-use zoning to regulate street commerce.
The Lower East Side Planning Association lobbied to zone the area exclu-
sively for residential use as a means to eliminate its cheap, “honky-tonk”
image. Several streets retained a bazaar atmosphere where shoppers (includ-
ing many former Lower East Siders) haggled over prices for cheap goods and
produce with open-air pushcart operators. Delancey Street, East Broadway,
and Second Avenue remained congested working-class shopping and enter-
tainment thoroughfares frequented by former Lower East Siders, current res-
idents, and visitors from across the region (Lower East Side Planning Associ-
ation 1932, 47). A vibrant atmosphere of popular entertainment and the
bustle of street commerce were incompatible with the upscale image commu-
nity planners and developers had in mind.
The marginal characterization of residents and spatial practices that
threatened their livelihood did not progress unchecked. Planners, developers,
and social workers sympathetic to efforts to redevelop the Lower East Side
grew frustrated at the intensity of locals’ attachments to neighborhood cul-
tural institutions, street life, and Old World social practices (Wasserman
1990). Consequently, the everyday lived experience of immigrants was polit-
icized insofar as it confounded the efforts of power holders to substitute a
middle-class identity for the existing working-class one. Lower East Siders
also engaged in organized forms of resistance. Residents mobilized against
the zoning issue that was viewed a pretense for a larger plan to displace them
and reconstruct the east side for middle- and upper-class tenants. Long-term
residents resisted the notion of their community’s being reinvented for out-
siders or “uptowners” (Wasserman 1990, 128-29). As late as 1938, residents

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 Mele / URBAN DISCOURSE AND RATIONAL PLANNING 645

and their affiliated organizations turned out to protest the rezoning of a sig-
nificant portion of the Lower East Side. The East Side Tenants Union, local
settlement houses, the Lower East Side Public Housing Conference, and the
American Labor Party challenged proposed changes that ostensibly
excluded working-class housing and other land uses. Those who remained in
the tenements continued to demand decent housing conditions and combat
efforts that would further stigmatize and eventually displace the work-
ing-class community. As landowners and planners sought to redevelop,
rent strikes, an honored tradition on the east side, remained frequent
(Schwartz 1986). In the 1930s, as the Depression took hold on the city’s
economy, rent strikes were prevalent not only on the Lower East Side but
across the city (Naison 1986, 96).

CONCLUSION

A survey of restructuring efforts on the Lower East Side in the 1920s-

1930s provides a venue to interrogate the relationship between discourses
about the city and material practices of city development. The images, sym-
bols, and rhetoric that comprised rational planning discourse were intrinsic to
the ways stakeholders positioned and framed their efforts to transform the
east side. The configuration of restructuring actions and policies drew on
contemporaneous notions of the inner city and notions of social progress to
best justify, explain, and legitimize neighborhood transformation as neces-
sary and desirable. The persistence of nostalgia for the immigrant Lower East
Side and the everyday practices of remaining residents formed a countervail-
ing representation that frustrated the imposition of new images of a middle-
class neighborhood.
The absence of the immigrant subject in rational planning discourse
reflected larger political and economic changes within New York in which
the immigrant quarter was both symbolically and materially obsolete. As can
be seen, the political economic strategies of restructuring the ghetto in the
1920s and 1930s did not cohere directly to the images and symbols that circu-
lated within rational planning discourse. Despite considerable consensus for
development among key stakeholders in the real estate sector and the first
signs of supportive intervention from the state, neither the built form of the
ghetto nor the area’s working-class residents disappeared.
The lure of early suburban-style housing developments pushed the effort
to rebuild (rather than renovate) the older warrens of the inner city; open
spaces, wider streets and avenues and parks, docks, and other amenities were
deemed essential to compete with new communities in the boroughs and

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646 URBAN AFFAIRS REVIEW / May 2000

“first-ring” suburbs. The sweeping aside of the old built environment and
remaining residents (characterized as failures of assimilation) would, it was
hoped, erase the neighborhood’s outstanding symbolic association with pov-
erty and ethnicity. The onset of the Great Depression, however, not only
placed nearly all urban development plans on hold, it also ushered in a period
of intensive and often contradictory state intervention in which the local and
national governments embarked on the construction of publicly subsidized
middle-class developments and low-income housing. As urban joblessness
increased and city coffers dwindled during the Depression, a futurist dis-
course premised on massive rebuilding was difficult to sustain. In short, the
utopian vision of the city as codified in rational planning discourse and pro-
mulgated in the restructuring efforts of Lower East Side planners, real estate
organizations, and large developers failed.
The failure of a comprehensive implementation of rational planning on
the Lower East Side suggests the importance of an empirical examination of
the relationship between prevailing discourses and place representations and
neighborhood restructuring efforts. Discourses about the city are fluid, not
fixed. As social conventions that cohere temporally and express dimensions
of power, they are subjected to competing discourses such as the countervail-
ing claims of residents. Hence, place representations prove instrumental to
urban restructuring insofar as one is able to document the ways in which dif-
ferent stakeholders employ such discourses. Such an approach specifies both
the possibilities and limitations for cultural forms to influence urban spatial
practices, moving one beyond a simple cultural framing of a political econ-
omy of neighborhood change.

NOTE

1. According to Ward (1989, 95), the term slum was used to describe areas within cities that
housed minorities whose assimilation into the mainstream of American life was
likely to be more difficult than that of earlier immigrants from northwestern Eu-
rope. . . . The initial American use of the term “ghetto” was associated with the settle-
ment of Eastern European Jews in northeastern cities towards the turn of the century.

Hence, ghetto is used to describe the Lower East Side during the 1920s and 1930s.

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Christopher Mele is an assistant professor of sociology at the University of Buffalo. He is

the author of Selling the Lower East Side: Real Estate, Culture and Resistance in New
York City (University of Minnesota Press, 2000).

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