List of Maps, Figures, and Tables
Preface
Introduction. Our House: The Twentieth Century at 4635 North
Market Street
Local Politics, Local Power: Governing Greater St. Louis,
1940-2000
"The Steel Ring": Race and Realty in Greater St. Louis
Patchwork Metropolis: Municipal Zoning in Greater St. Louis
Fighting Blight: Urban Renewal Policies and Programs, 1945-2000
City of Blight: The Limits of Urban Renewal in Greater St.
Louis
Conclusion. Our House Revisited: The Twenty-First Century at 4635
North Market Street
Notes
Index
Mapping Decline, illustrated with more than 75 full-color maps, traces the ways private real estate restrictions, local planning and zoning, federal housing policies, and urban renewal encouraged "white flight" and urban decline in St. Louis, Missouri.
Colin Gordon is Professor of History at The University of Iowa and author of Dead on Arrival: The Politics of Health Care in Twentieth- Century America and New Deals: Business, Labor, and Politics in America, 1920-1935.
"Colin Gordon combines intellectual rigor, a compelling argument,
and extensive archival research with the latest geographic
information system digital mapping techniques. Dozens of color
maps, together with numerous figures and tables, allow the reader
to examine the data with fresh eyes. Gordon's focus on a single
city, a single neighborhood (Greater Ville), and even a single
house (4635 North Market Street) gives his comprehensive analysis
an immediacy and power that it might otherwise lack. And the prose
is so thoughtful, so well written, and so engaged with recent
scholarship that scholars on the topic will be fascinated."—Kenneth
Jackson, Political Science Quarterly
"Knowledgeably argued, exhaustively researched, and accessibly
written, Gordon's book also employs the latest in digital mapping
technology. . . . For brick-and-mortar urban specialists . . .
Mapping Decline is nothing short of monumental."—Urban History
"A searing indictment of policymakers, realtors, and mortgage
lenders for deliberate decisions that sacrificed their own city of
St. Louis on the altar of race. Colin Gordon's use of cartography
to visualize this painful pattern of injustice and bad sense is a
forceful exemplar for a new kind of history: one told visually as
well as textually; analyzed spatially as well as chronologically.
Written with empathy, Mapping Decline is a new milestone on the
road toward a necessary reckoning of the precise responsibility for
the extended urban crises of the twentieth and twenty-first
centuries."—Philip J. Ethington, University of Southern
California
"Colin Gordon has infused the 'old' story of urban decline with new
energy and urgency. His mapping of St. Louis's evolution is a
powerful indictment of the distorting, segregating, and wasteful
effects of public policy over several generations. Yet the book is
not just about history. Incredibly, as Gordon shows, current
national and state policies and governmental fragmentation continue
to undermine the recovery of American cities at the precise moment
when they matter again—economically, environmentally, and
socially."—Bruce Katz, Brookings Institution
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