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Reinventing Boston: the Changing American City

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Reinventing Boston: the Changing American City REINVENTING BOSTON: THE CHANGING AMERICAN CITY United States in the World 24, Fall 2010 Tuesdays and Thursdays, 1:15 pm-2:30 pm, Harvard Hall 104 Weekly Sections: To Be Arranged Christopher Winship David Luberoff Diker-Tishman Professor of Sociology Executive Director [email protected] Rappaport Institute for Greater Boston 620 William James Hall [email protected] 617-495-9821 Taubman 352, KSG, 617-495-1346 Office hours: By Appointment Office hours: By Appointment Josh Wakeham Head Teaching Fellow [email protected] 618 William James Hall In the 1970’s, Boston was marred by racial violence and its economy was rapidly collapsing. Boston, as was claimed at the time about many other American cities, was dying. Given this situation, how is it that Boston has come to reinvent itself and become one of America’s most successful and vibrant cities in the 21st century? Today, Boston, like many other cities, faces a variety of challenges brought on by the worldwide economic downturn. Can Boston maintain its success in coming years? And what, if anything, can Boston’s reinvention teach us about cities in general? This course seeks to answer these interrelated questions via a unique combination of lectures by both scholars and civic leaders, a wide array of readings, student observations of Boston neighborhoods, and student research on the city’s neighborhoods, leaders, and institutions. Taken together, the lectures, readings, neighborhood visits, and research should give students not only a better understanding and “feel” for Boston but also a better understanding and appreciation for cities in general. COURSE OVERVIEW This course seeks to help students understand how economic, social, and political factors have combined to produce what has become known as Boston’s Renaissance. The premise is that change has been driven from the bottom up through racial, ethnic, and socio-economic changes in the city’s neighborhoods and from the top down by both the demise of the region’s manufacturing economy and the rise of an innovative, knowledge-based economy in its stead. Moreover, the region’s existing and new institutions (and the leaders of those institutions) have played a major role in responding to and shaping these changes, sometimes with astonishing success and sometimes with spectacular failure. These successes and failures have produced a variety of images about Boston’s past, present, and future that shape (and perhaps distort) how current, new, and potential residents view the city and its future. To understand these forces and how they relate to each other, the course is organized into five major sections. An introductory section introduces students to both the city and to key concepts needed to better understand its transformation. We will then turn towards some of the most significant changes and most pressing problems in the city’s neighborhoods in recent decades. Next we will examine the economic transformation of both the city and the region, with a focus on the city’s place in the global economy, and the challenges of maintaining or even expanding that role. We will then turn to the interplay of these “top-down” forces and “neighborhood” concerns in such areas as transportation, housing, the arts, environmental policy, and community development. We will conclude by examining key issues and opportunities facing Boston in the coming years and how some key leaders and institutions are trying to address those challenges. In each major section, the course uses several different methods to help students better understand the city. In overview lectures mainly at the start of the course, the instructors and guest scholars will present basic analytical frameworks for assessing key changes. Most of the remaining classes will feature practitioners — community activists, business leaders, the heads of key institutions, and leading members of the local media — who can give first-hand accounts about how and why Boston has changed, and what they believe Boston’s future is. The course also takes advantage of the fact that students can see and experience many of the changes being discussed in the classroom by requiring students visit many of the city’s diverse neighborhoods, write a paper comparing two neighborhoods and how they have changed or comparing two leaders and/or institutions and how they have affected change in Boston. The lectures and neighborhood visits will be complimented by readings drawn from important scholarly works about cities in general, popular and scholarly works about the city, and short articles on key issues, individuals, and issues being discussed in class and in sections. (As discussed below, sections are a key part of the course because they are the place where students will bring together all elements of the course.) Finally, there will be take-home mid-term exam and a take-home final exam, the latter being due at the end of reading period. For these exams, students will be asked to write one or more essays. Students will be given a choice from a limited set of questions to answer. In answering questions, students will need to synthesize material from across the course. BACKGROUND By the 1970’s many academics and pundits had written America’s cities off. Urban decay was the phrase of coin. Not only had America gone through a process of massive suburbanization in the post- World War II period, but businesses also were fleeing the city, moving either out beyond suburban beltways, to the South, or out of the country entirely. The American city was becoming a doughnut, a vibrant suburban ring with a hollow and increasingly irrelevant urban core. In the 1970’s, this bleak analysis appeared to apply to Boston as much as any city. The current president of the Boston Foundation, Paul Grogan, who will speak to the class, wrote: “Boston participated fully and deeply in the postwar urban decline, with the usual markers: the wholesale exodus of people and then jobs to the suburbs, widespread blight and abandonment, runaway crime, racial conflict, failing schools, and so on the whole sorry catalogue of the unsolved problems of American life.” As Ed Glaeser, a prominent economist here at Harvard, who will also speak to the class, has observed: in 1980 there “would have been every reason to believe that [Boston] would go the way of Detroit and Syracuse and continue along its sad path towards urban irrelevance.” Not only was Boston economically bankrupt, it was the scene of massive social conflict. With the order by Judge W. Arthur Garrity in 1974 that its schools had to desegregate, Boston became the focus of national attention. Throughout the 1970”s Garrity’s ruling was massively protested. School buses carrying African-American children were stoned. The houses of blacks living in white neighborhoods were fire-bombed. Boston had the reputation of being the most racist city in America. Of course the pundits and academics were wrong. In the past twenty-five years America’s cities have blossomed. The downtowns of New York, Chicago, and San Francisco have seen massive investment as developers have built massive new office and condo complexes. Real estate prices have soared. The concern in neighborhoods is now gentrification as opposed to abandonment. The predictions of the 1970’s were furthest-off for Boston. In the 1980’s, greater Boston became one of the major centers of the high-tech boom. It developed a financial industry that is only dominated by Wall Street. Housing prices soared, increasing by factors of 10- to 20-fold. Multi-million dollar condos 2 are now being built downtown. Furthermore, Boston became increasingly diverse and race relations improved dramatically, as illustrated by the fact that in November 2006, Massachusetts elected Deval Patrick, its first African-American governor, the second African-American governor in the United States. Not only did Patrick take Boston in the general election, he also beat Tom Reilly, a popular Irish-American politician in the Democratic primary in Boston and virtually every other community in the state as well. The global economic downturn of the last year has not spared the city or the region and, as in other places, Boston’s leaders are seeking ways to both provide needed services and position the region for economic growth when the national and global economies begin to improve. In short, Boston’s recent history is a story of fortunes made in the last several decades in high-tech, finance, venture capital, and commercial real estate. But it is also a story about grass-roots organizations and their success at rebuilding Boston’s inner-city neighborhoods (though much still needs to be done). In addition, it is a story about political transformation, the establishment of a new political order and how that new order will respond to Boston’s current economic and social problems. COURSE REQUIREMENTS Below is a basic breakdown of the course requirements and the weight given to each requirement in determining your course grade: Assignment Percentage Midterm Essay 10% 5 Neighborhood Memos 15% Long Research Paper 25% Take-Home Final Essay 25% Exam Section (and Lecture) 25% Participation Midterm Essay Exam During the week of October 19th, there will be a take home midterm essay exam. The exam will be based on the material covered in the readings and course lectures. You will be expected to write a 5- page response to one of several essay questions. The exam will be due in your section’s Dropbox on the course website by Monday October 25th at noon. Neighborhood Memos One of the on-going assignments for the course is that you must go out and visit various neighborhoods throughout Boston and provide a descriptive account of your experiences and observations.
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