Urban Renewal: The Record and the Controversy

James Q. Wilson, editor, Urban Renewal: The Record and the Controversy (MIT Press, 1966; paperback edition, 1967, 1968).

This volume, organized under the auspices of the Harvard-MIT Joint Center for Urban Studies, was published in 1966 at the height of the Great Society. Among the authors are influential urbanists including Raymond Vernon, Chester Hartman, Norton Long, William Alonso, Martin Anderson, Herbert Gans, Bernard Frieden, Robert Weaver, and Wilson himself. It includes Wilson’s important essay, “Planning and Politics: Citizen Participation in Urban Renewal,” discussing the then-fashionable notion of citizen participation in government programs.