Capital Dilemma

Growth and Inequality in Washington, D.C.

Derek Hyra, Sabiyha Prince

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317501138
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Urban Planning & Landscaping

Capital Dilemma: Growth and Inequality in Washington, DC uncovers and explains the dynamics that have influenced the contemporary economic advancement of Washington, DC. This volume's unique interdisciplinary approach using historical, sociological, anthropological, economic, geographic, political, and linguistic theories and approaches, captures the comprehensive factors related to changes taking place in one of the world's most important cities.

Capital Dilemma clarifies how preexisting urban social hierarchies, established mainly along race and class lines but also along national and local interests, are linked with the city's contemporary inequitable growth. While accounting for historic disparities, this book reveals how more recent federal and city political decisions and circumstances shape contemporary neighborhood gentrification patterns, highlighting the layered complexities of the modern national capital and connecting these considerations to Washington, DC's past as well as to more recent policy choices.

As we enter a period where advanced service sector cities prosper, Washington, DC's changing landscape illustrates important processes and outcomes critical to other US cities and national capitals throughout the world. The Capital Dilemma for DC, and other major cities, is how to produce sustainable equitable economic growth. This volume expands our understanding of the contradictions, challenges and opportunities associated with contemporary urban development.

Part I
20th-Century Development, Social Inequality, and Change

1
Exceptionalism and the National Capital in Late 20th-Century Paris and Washington, DC

Christopher Klemek

For more than 100 years—including the first three-quarters of the 20th century—the French and American republics denied the most basic democratic rights to all the citizens living in their capital cities. As French filmmaker Chris Marker declared tartly in his provocative 1962 cinematic essay, Le Joli Mai: “Le maire de Paris aurait du pain sur la planche, mais il n’y a pas de maire à Paris” (“The mayor of Paris would have a lot to do, but there isn’t a mayor in Paris”). Surprisingly, urban historians have largely avoided Paris and Washington, DC, considered either too unrepresentative—or just too unwieldy—to fit into the field’s established interpretations. And more generally, capital cities have occupied their own distinct niche of scholarship, segregated even from the mainstream narratives of relevant subdisciplines like urban planning, urban political theory, or urban history.

Add to this the largely insular frame for US urban analysis. American cities, so the arguments go, are not comparable to others in the industrialized world—because of their car-centric transport, sprawling unregulated land use, racial/political/economic balkanization, or some combination thereof. Furthermore, Washington, DC is supposedly exceptional even among US cities, a unique administrative district relatively insulated from market forces. Thus DC history is commonly understood, or more often dismissed, with an extreme formulation of the attitudes broadly afflicting US urban history, a strong sense of exceptionalism. But perhaps the frame of reference dictated by that US urban context is misleading. Just how distinctive is Washington, DC among the major global capitals? How uniquely American were the movements and outcomes witnessed there? And what is the particular role of any urban capital’s population within the modern nation-state?

While long a hallmark of colonial “Atlantic” history, scholars of modern America have recently joined in the effort to place aspects of the US experience in a broader, global context (Klemek, 2011; Wagner, 2012). It’s a good time to add two congruent capital cities to that comparative mix. While Paris and Washington, DC will ultimately remain special-status communities, unique in many ways, they are simultaneously urban crucibles of volatile inequalities—not only economic, but also of status, power, and identities—in ostensibly egalitarian republics.

Dangerous Classes and Disenfranchised Capitals in the Age(s) of Revolution

The City of Light has long functioned as a bloody civic theater of battle. Absolutist Louis XIV moved the seat of power from Paris to Versailles to insulate his court from the intrigues of the capital. A century later, in one of the watershed events of the Age of Revolutions, Parisian women marched his grandson all the way back to the city in a demonstration rich with symbolism—but also with very real consequences—culminating in his public execution there. Over the 19th century, the relationship between the French nation-state and its capital city would be characterized by several more rounds of authoritarian assertion punctuated by revolutionary mobilization. The Second Empire renovation of Paris’s iconic grands boulevards represented an unprecedentedly ambitious attempt by Napoleon III’s prefect Georges-Eugène Haussmann to bring an unruly industrial city to heel, economically, politically, and urbanistically. The ultimate confrontation came when the Versailles-based government of Adolphe Thiers launched a semaine sanglante to liquidate the Paris Commune in late May 1871. In its bloody wake, Thiers set up a durable republican constitutional order that simultaneously obviated Parisian self-governance. The capital city’s “dangerous classes” had been definitively put down and disenfranchised, but, as military historian John Keegan notes: “The repression of the Paris Commune in 1871 undoubtedly left scars on the psyche of working class Paris which ache to this day” (Keegan, 1978, p. 75).

With some analogies to Versailles, it could be argued that Washington, DC’s origins lay in a reaction against the dangerous classes who harassed late colonial and early republican elites in Philadelphia, New York, Boston, and Charleston. John Adams—the only chief executive, after all, to preside over both the old capital and the new—would subsequently take pains to remind his successor, Thomas Jefferson, about the “terrorism” of 1793 “when ten thousand People in the Streets of Philadelphia, day after day, threatened to drag Washington out of his House, and effect a Revolution in the Government, or compell it to declare War in favour of the French Revolution” (John Adams to Thomas Jefferson). But rather than rejecting such a volatile setting for mass democracy, George Washington’s actions around the establishment of his namesake city bespeak the clear goal of a thriving political and economic capital in his native tidewater. Planned streets and public works of grand European scale paired with his personal advocacy of private canal improvements to catalyze a major maritime port, one certainly intended to support a large urban population (Achenbach, 2004). One of Jefferson’s many contradictions was how he romanticized the revolutionary Parisian mobs (watering the tree of liberty with blood, etc.), but yet dissented from the Federalists’ vision of a strong urban capital. This ambivalence further complicates his contentious supervision of the city planning efforts by the Frenchman L’Enfant (whose father had been no less than a member of the ancien regime’s royal academy) (Berg, 2009).

Through the first half of the 19th century, Washingtonians proved a far smaller and less restive population, especially in comparison with the revolution-prone Parisians, or even the riotous denizens of other American cities. Washingtonians were consistently denied real congressional representation. This issue came to a head over inadequate appropriations for regional transportation infrastructure (the canals), and resulted in the retrocession of the lands Virginia granted to the District. But Washingtonians did enjoy self-governance in the form of a council (after 1802) and a mayor directly elected by citizens (at least White, male, property-owning ones, from 1820 onward).

The great destabilizer of this status quo for DC, as for the entire nation, was slavery and abolition. Civic unrest, such as it was during the antebellum years, sprang from this issue, reflecting anxieties about free people of color, antislavery agitators, escapees, and other challenges to “the peculiar institution.” National and local elites were acutely aware of DC’s tenuous position, located in the heart of the largest slave states, yet with a concentrated and steadily growing free Black population. Unparalleled opportunities for African Americans coexisted with draconian Black codes and the city’s high profile made its conditions an object lesson for both sides of the national debate (Brown, 1972). The Civil War exploded these tense dynamics, with Washington, DC leading the charge not only on the military battlefields of the surrounding countryside, but also by example on the urban home front.

A surge of Civil War refugees and grassroots agitation in the wartime capital produced trailblazing emancipation policies—the “first freed” phenomenon—and this momentum extended through Reconstruction enfranchisement, a Radical Republican mayoral administration, and a short-lived experiment with territorial status (Masur, 2012). But the 1870s suppression of this Black power specter, even Congress’ pretext of government scandal, suggested not a victorious Union capital so much as the rollback of civil rights in “redeemed” areas of the former Confederacy. If anything, DC’s fate was even more severe; its disenfranchisement covered not only freedmen but extended to Whites as well, for a century hence.

The Urban Crucible Cools?

The French state shunned problèmes urbains throughout the Third Republic (1870–1940) so as to avoid waking Paris’s destabilizing demons (Oblet, 2005). At the same time, French urbanism, in concert with other European movements, exhibited real dynamism during the interwar period. This encompassed not only internationally prominent urban development figures like Charles-Édouard “Le Corbusier” Jeanneret-Gris, but also locally influential practitioners such as Maurice Rotival. In terms of statutory structures, in 1919 the government mandated development plans for all towns in France with a population over 10,000, an impetus growing out of the Musée Social (a sort of belle époque think tank for progressive reform) (see Hein, 2002; Rodgers, 2009).

In the ensuing Gaullist state that emerged following World War II, French civil society generally evinced little of the Habermasean “public sphere” debate found among neighboring West German planners; instead, a paternalistic or downright authoritarian strain characterized postwar French planning (urban and otherwise) (Newsome, 2009). In the face of this, however, Paris emerged from occupation manifesting a feisty yet vibrant “democracy of the streets” (Wakeman, 2009). The tension between those two trajectories would build to a crisis point over the ensuing decades.

In 20th-century America, by contrast, cities were the consummate crucibles of liberal policy. With roots going back to Progressive Era reform movements and policy precedents inherited from New Deal programs, federal lawmakers and policy makers gave urban affairs a consistent priority from the late 1940s to the early 1970s, alongside (and often entangled with) the perennial crises of the Cold War and civil rights. Urban renewal—a portmanteau for large-scale, postwar projects in cities that ranged from Title I slum clearance to subsidized business redevelopment and from public housing provision to federal highway construction—engendered relatively little partisan contention. Yet it eventually became a lightning rod for dissent from outside the political elite. With Vietnam-era quagmire analogies seeming uncannily apt, domestic liberalism met its demise in large part when ambitious (and primarily urban) programs like Model Cities and affirmative action lost the battle for hearts and minds among rapidly polarizing constituencies. An open historical question remains whether this arc of events was driven more from the top down or the bottom up (see Clement, 2014; Sugrue, 2004; Von Hoffman, 2014).

Over the first half of the 20th century, the US capital offered a showy canvas for successive generations of urbanists, from Daniel Burnham and Frederick Law Olmstead Jr. to Harland Bartholomew and Louis Justement. In the second half, it would become an important crucible for the grassroots backlash against urban renewal projects in the city’s core, particularly the “freeway revolts,” which occurred in Paris as well. But this was just one of the key dynamics roiling the postwar city, or more accurately, the segregated metropolitan region.

Grassroots and Periphery in Capital Regions

The significance of the urban periphery in both France and the United States had been largely negative, that is, déclassé, through the first half of the 19th century (Blumin, 1989; Merriman, 1991). American cities underwent a rapid inversion of this pattern in the two or three decades preceding 1900, which spilled out into the “streetcar suburbs” and beyond (Schnore & Knights, 1969; Warner, 1962). Paris developed an aggressive private real estate sector during the same period, but it did not produce the radiating zones of affluent neighborhoods described in the Chicago school of sociology’s model of American spatial succession (Yates, 2012). Instead, the banlieue periphery remained largely a working-class “red belt” into the post–World War II period (Fourcaut, Bellanger, & Flonneau, 2007). Eventually, these industrial suburbs would provide foot soldiers for riots in the streets of central Paris (Seidman, 2004).

In 1961, Jane Jacobs endorsed “the wry remark that ‘a region is an area safely larger than the last one to whose problems we found no solution’” (Jacobs, 1961). Rather cynical, perhaps, but at that moment Paris and Washington, DC could have offered her rich fodder for such an assertion. Both experienced a move toward reform of regional governance two decades before home rule was granted within the municipal boundaries. Both reforms grew out of regional planning impulses and institutions that went back generations. Both responded to suburban growth patterns, and both played out most acutely around the question of transportation (Schrag, 2006). Washington, DC planners began to reconsider their suburban growth strategy by the mid-1950s, shifting emphasis from decentralization toward a recentering of the region in an attempt to reestablish the core as its center of gravity (Gillette, 2011). In practice, aside from the Metro rail system, most public policies through the 1950s and 1960s continued to reinforce patterns of suburban White affluence segregated from Black urban poverty. Parisian regional planning largely had the inverse effect: public housing projects concentrated disproportionately at the periphery.

New metropolitan dynamics were palpable in the Washington, DC urban region as early as World War II, most notably when downtown office crowding resulted in a Pentagon site across the Potomac River (Carroll, 2006). After the war, as Andrew Friedman has emphasized, the US global “empire” was ruled inconspicuously from the Virginia suburbs by a Cold War military and intelligence community who lived and worked there (Friedman, 2013). In 1950, the US National Capital Park and Planning Commission published a “Comprehensive Plan for the National Capital and Its Environs” with an emphasis on regional aspects of development (US National Capital Park and Planning Commission, 1950). And from 1957 to 1960, Congress convened a Joint Committee on Washington Metropolitan Problems, whose recommendations spurred John Kennedy’s appointment of the “first Presidential Advisor for National Capital Affairs in 1962, Charles A. Horsky” (Thornell, 1990, p. 49; Joint Committee on Washington Metropolitan Problems). Louis Justement, as a leader in the professional community of architects around Washington, DC, endorsed large-scale redevelopment toward a car-friendly city, via a series of influential modernist proposals and commissions, testimony, and publications, beginning in the late 1940s and continuing through the 1960s (Justement, 1946a, 1946b). Most conseque...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Tables and Figures
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: For a City in Transition, Questions of Social Justice and Economic Viability Remain
• Part I 20th-Century Development, Social Inequality, and Change
• Part II Contemporary Urban and Economic Policy
• Part III Development Impacts in District Neighborhoods and Beyond
• Contributor Biographies
• Index