Making the Mission
Subtitle: planning and ethnicity in San Francisco
By: Ocean Howell
Series: Historical studies of urban America; Historical studies of urban America
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: 2015
Language: eng
Number of pages: 392
ISBN-13: 9780226141398
Subjects: Urban renewal; Hispanic Americans; History; Ethnic relations; Community development
Description: "In the aftermath of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, residents of the city's iconic Mission District bucked the city-wide development plan, defiantly announcing that in their neighborhood, they would be calling the shots. Ever since, the Mission has become known as a city within a city, and a place where residents have, over the last century, organized and reorganized themselves to make the neighborhood in their own image. In Making the Mission, Ocean Howell tells the story of how residents of the Mission District organized to claim the right to plan their own neighborhood and how they mobilized a politics of place and ethnicity to create a strong, often racialized identity--a pattern that would repeat itself again and again throughout the twentieth century. Surveying the perspectives of formal and informal groups, city officials and district residents, local and federal agencies, Howell articulates how these actors worked with and against one another to establish the very ideas of the public and the public interest, as well as to negotiate and renegotiate what the neighborhood wanted. In the process, he shows that national narratives about how cities grow and change are fundamentally insufficient; everything is always shaped by local actors and concerns."--Book jacket.
Table of contents: title: Neighborhood power in twentieth-century San Francisco. Neighborhood power in the "White Man's Territory," 1906-29 ; Make no big plans: the city beautiful meets improvement clubs ; Neighborhood capitalism: urban planning, municipal government, and the Mission Promotion Association ; The Mission and the spatial imagination: discourse, ethnicity, and architecture; title: The New Deal in the Mission: revitalizing community, eroding local power. A new population, not a new public: Latino diversity in San Francisco and the Mission District ; Economic equality, racial erasure: the spatial and cultural interventions of federal public works agencies ; "no-lining" and neighborhood erasure: Washington, D.C., and downtown San Francisco come to the Mission; title: Progress for whom? Transportation planning, urban renewal, and multiethnic coalition-building, 1945-60. The motoring public and neighborhood erasure: the culture and practice of postwar transportation planning ; Latino as worker: the changing politics of race in the city and the neighborhood; title: Return to the city within a city: multiethnic coalitions and urban renewal, 1961-73. A "salvable neighborhood": urban renewal, model cities, and the rise of a social planning regime ; Who holds final authority?: The San Francisco Redevelopment Agency and the Mission Council on Redevelopment ; The return to the city within a city: The Mission Coalition Organization and the devolution of planning power; title: Conclusion.