The city remade: Public housing and the urban landscape in St. Louis, 1900--1960 (Missouri)

The haunting image of the destruction of the Pruitt-Igoe public housing project in St. Louis has prompted a cottage industry of scholarship dedicated to answering the question: “why did it fail?” In this dissertation, however, I begin with what I feel is ultimately a more important question: “why was Pruitt-Igoe built in the first place?” I contend that this now classic blast image—and indeed the common focus on the deteriorated physical landscapes of our cities—tends to obscure the social forces, ideas, and decisions that shaped these landscapes over the course of the twentieth century. I further contend that in order to understand the intensity of postwar reconstruction efforts in American cities, we must place them into the broad historic contexts of local politics, social conflict, urban decline, disinvestment, and racial anxiety. This dissertation examines the long and elusive search for an urban order in St. Louis that culminated in vast postwar slum clearance and public housing projects such as Pruitt-Igoe. The dominant intellectual framework of Liberal planning sought to resolve deeply-rooted problems in the built environment through a reconfiguration of that environment, rather than by confronting the forces that produced the problems in the first place. While the vast postwar projects like Pruitt-Igoe rose up to symbolize the ascendancy of modern municipal planning, in the end their spatial organization reveals profound commitments both to racial segregation and to a remaking of the urban landscape in the image of wealthy downtown business interests. Moreover, while public housing was the end result of decades of experimentation in the reconfiguration of urban space, by the time planners and civic leaders gained the tools to shape their city, the city was undergoing rapid transformations over which they could exert little control.