Fordham Urban Law Journal Volume 20 | Number 4 Article 1 1993 Race, Space, and Place: The Relation Between Architectural Modernism, Post-Modernism, Urban Planning, and Gentrification Keith Aoki University of Oregon School of Law Follow this and additional works at: https://ir.lawnet.fordham.edu/ulj Part of the Land Use Law Commons Recommended Citation Keith Aoki, Race, Space, and Place: The Relation Between Architectural Modernism, Post-Modernism, Urban Planning, and Gentrification, 20 Fordham Urb. L.J. 699 (1993). Available at: https://ir.lawnet.fordham.edu/ulj/vol20/iss4/1 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by FLASH: The orF dham Law Archive of Scholarship and History. It has been accepted for inclusion in Fordham Urban Law Journal by an authorized editor of FLASH: The orF dham Law Archive of Scholarship and History. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Race, Space, and Place: The Relation Between Architectural Modernism, Post-Modernism, Urban Planning, and Gentrification Cover Page Footnote Keith Aoki, Assistant Professor, University of Oregon Keith Aoki, Assistant Professor, University of Oregon School of Law; B.F.A. Wayne State University, 1978; M.A. Hunter College, 1986; J.D. Harvard Law School, 1990; LL.M. University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Law, 1993. I would like to acknowledge my deep gratitude to Mona Tillman Aoki, for her indispensable research assistance, encouragement, and patience. I would also like to thank Duncan Kennedy, Morton Horwitz, Terry Fisher, and Larry Koldney for their more- than-generous suggestions and overall encouragement, without which this piece would not exist. Additionally, I would like to thank Gregg Tillman for his valuable input to this paper. Finally, I would like to thank Frank Medici, Jonathan Moss, Ceci Scott, and the rest of the staff of the orF dham Urban Law Journal for all of their many long hours of effort. This article is available in Fordham Urban Law Journal: https://ir.lawnet.fordham.edu/ulj/vol20/iss4/1 RACE, SPACE, AND PLACE: THE RELATION BETWEEN ARCHITECTURAL MODERNISM, POST-MODERNISM, URBAN PLANNING, AND GENTRIFICATION Keith Aoki t Introduction Gentrification in United States urban housing markets of the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s continues to be a controversial and complex phe- nomenon.' During the past twenty years, gentrification's effects on the core cities of the U.S. have been analyzed and evaluated many times over.2 Descriptions of gentrification have spanned the ideologi- t Keith Aoki, Assistant Professor, University of Oregon School of Law; B.F.A. Wayne State University, 1978; M.A. Hunter College, 1986; J.D. Harvard Law School, 1990; LL.M. University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Law, 1993. I would like to acknowledge my deep gratitude to Mona Tillman Aoki, for her indispensable research assistance, encouragement, and patience. I would also like to thank Duncan Kennedy, Morton Horwitz, Terry Fisher, and Larry Koldney for their more-than-generous sugges- tions and overall encouragement, without which this piece would not exist. Additionally, I would like to thank Gregg Tillman for his valuable input to this paper. Finally, I would like to thank Frank Medici, Jonathan Moss, Ceci Scott, and the rest of the staff of the Fordham Urban Law Journal for all of their many long hours of effort. 1. See Peter Marcuse, Gentrification, Abandonment and Displacement: Their Link- ages in New York City, 28 WASH. U. J. URB. & CONTEMP. L. 195, 198-99 (1984). Gen- trification occurs when new residents-who disproportionately are young, white, professional, technical, and managerial workers with higher education and income levels-replace older residents-who disproportionately are low income, working class, and poor, minority and ethnic group members, and elderly-from older and previously deteriorated inner-city housing in a spatially concentrated manner, that is, to a degree differing substantially from the general level of change in the community or region as a whole. See also Business Ass'n of Univ. City v. Landrieu, 660 F.2d 867, 874 n.8 (3d Cir. 1981); Michael H. Lang, Gentrification, in HOUSING: SYMBOL, STRUCTURE, SITE 158 (Lisa Taylor ed., 1990); see infra parts V.A-B. 2. See, e.g., ROGER MONTGOMERY & DANIEL MANDELKER, HOUSING IN AMERICA: PROBLEMS AND PERSPECTIVES 162 (2d ed. 1979); see also DANIEL FUSFELD & TIMOTHY BATES, THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF THE URBAN GHETTO (1984); ROLF GOETZE, UNDERSTANDING NEIGHBORHOOD CHANGE 11-26 (1979); CHARLES L. LE- VEN ET AL., NEIGHBORHOOD CHANGE: LESSONS IN THE DYNAMICS OF URBAN DECAY 34-47 (1976); William Alonso, The Population Factorand Urban Structure, in THE PRO- SPECTIVE CITY 32, 39 (Arthur Solomon ed., 1980); Lawrence Kolodney, Eviction-Free Zones: The Economics of Legal Bricolage in the Fight Against Gentrification, 18 FORD- HAM URB. L.J. 507 (1990); Peter Marcuse, To Control Gentrification:Anti-Displacement Zoning and PlanningforStable ResidentialDistricts, 13 REV. OF L. & SOC. CHANGE 931, 935 (1985); Molly McUsic, Reassessing Rent Control: Its Economic Impact in a Gentrify- ing Market, 101 HARV. L. REV. 1835 (1988); Neil Smith, Toward a Theory of Gentrifica- tion: A Back to the City Movement by Capital,Not People, A.P.A. JOURNAL, Oct. 1979, at 699 700 FORDHAM URBAN LAW JOURNAL [Vol. XX cal spectrum, from laudatory embraces of gentrification as the solu- tion to urban decline to denunciatory critiques of gentrification as another symptom of the widening gulf between the haves and the have-nots in America.3 This Article critiques gentrification, adding an additional explanatory element to the ongoing account of the dy- namics of American cities in the 1990s. The additional element is the relevance of a major aesthetic realignment in architecture and urban planning from a modernist to a post-modernist ideology in the 1970s and 1980s. This shift involved an aesthetic and economic revaluation of historical elements in older central city buildings, which acceler- ated the rate of gentrification, displacement, and abandonment. This Article describes how certain shifts in the aesthetic ideology4 of urban planners and architects affected suburban and urban spatial distribution in the United States during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. These ideological shifts arose from deeply embedded American attitudes toward city and rural life that had emerged in American town planning and architectural theory and practice by the mid-nineteenth century. Part I of this Article examines the emer- gence of an anti-urban Arcadian strand in nineteenth century Ameri- can town planning rhetoric.5 This anti-urban Arcadian strand was one of many factors behind the late nineteenth to the early twentieth century expansion of the suburbs beyond the urban core. Part II traces the parallel rise of a utilitarian efficiency-based 543; Michael Stone, Housing and the Economic Crisis: An Analysis and Emergency Pro- gram, in WHAT Is To BE DONE? (Chester Hartman ed., 1983). 3. See Lang, supra note 1, at 158. 4. See Clifford Geertz, Ideology As A CulturalSystem, in THE INTERPRETATION OF CULTURES 193 (1973): Culture patterns-religious, philosophical, aesthetic, scientific, ideological-are "programs"; they provide a template or blueprint for the organization of social and psychological processes.... .. It is ... the attempt of ideologies to render otherwise incomprehensible social situations meaningful, to so construe them as to make it possible to act purposefully within them, that accounts for the ideologies highly figurative na- ture and for the intensity with which, once accepted, they are held .... Whatever else ideologies may be-projections of unacknowledged fears, disguises for ulterior motives, emphatic expressions of group solidarity-they are, most distinctively, maps of problematic social reality and matrices for the creation of collective conscience. Id. at 216-20. 5. See HELEN GARDNER, GARDNER'S ART THROUGH THE AGES 212-13, 621-23, 651 (Horst de la Croix & Richard G. Tansy eds., 6th ed. 1975). Arcadia was an ancient rural Greek district which has come to represent rustic and bucolic values. Arcadianism in the arts is a tradition with deep roots stretching back to Classical Greece and Rome. See BARBARA NOVAK, AMERICAN LANDSCAPE PAINTING IN THE NINETEENTH CEN- TURY (2d ed. 1979); DAVID WATKIN, THE ENGLISH VISION: THE PICTURESQUE IN ARCHITECTURE, LANDSCAPE AND GARDEN DESIGN (1982); infra parts I.A-B. 1993] RACE, SPACE, AND PLACE strand6 in urban planning, examining the impact of new early twenti- eth century technological and engineering developments, such as automobiles, highways, electricity, and skyscrapers, on U.S. urban and suburban spatial distribution. Ironically, these new developments combined with the anti-urban Arcadian strand of American town planning to begin producing spatial distributions which were strictly segregated along economic, social, cultural, and racial lines. Part III examines the role of the massive and continuous twentieth century northward migration of displaced southern black agricultural workers as yet another factor with major consequences on spatial ar- rangements in U.S. urban and suburban areas. The pervasive rise of various land use controls, zoning, and urban renewal programs exem- plifies the response of both suburban and urban planners to this steady northward migration. Zoning and urban renewal became vehi- cles for maintaining homogeneity in the face of strong countervailing social pressures for change. Both were premised on deep-rooted, value-laden nineteenth century assumptions, which favored the Arca- dian ideal, as embodied by the single family suburban house, over ur- ban pathology. Part IV discusses the paradoxical synthesis of the Arcadian and utilitarian strands in the theory and practice of twentieth century ar- chitectural modernism. The widespread effects of the adoption of modernism as the "official style" of the midcentury bureaucratic/cor- porate state is also discussed in this Section.7 Part IV also discusses the concomitant rise of the post-World War II suburban tracts, inso- far as their rise represented a synthesis of the Arcadian and the utili- tarian approaches.