Urban History

Juvenile justice is a technical term that refers to the specific area of law and affiliated institutions, most notably the juvenile court, with jurisdiction over the cases of minors who are accused of being miscreants. Although the idea that the law should treat minors differently from adults predates the American Revolution, juvenile justice itself is a Progressive Era invention. Its institutional legitimacy rests on the power and responsibility of the state to act as a parent (parens patriae) on behalf of those who cannot care for themselves. Since the establishment of the world’s first juvenile court in Chicago in 1899, this American idea of creating separate justice systems for juveniles has spread across the nation and much of the world. For more than a century, American states have used their juvenile justice systems to respond to youth crime and delinquency. Since the 1960s, the US Supreme Court has periodically considered whether juvenile courts must provide the same constitutional due process safeguards as adult criminal courts and whether juveniles prosecuted in the criminal justice system can receive the same sentences as adults, such as the death penalty or life without the possibility of parole.

Since World War II, the United States has witnessed major changes in lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) politics. Indeed, because the history of LGBTQ activism is almost entirely concentrated in the postwar years, the LGBTQ movement is typically said to have achieved rapid change in a short period of time. But if popular accounts characterize LGBTQ history as a straightforward narrative of progress, the reality is more complex. Postwar LGBTQ politics has been both diverse and divided, marked by differences of identity and ideology. At the same time, LGBTQ politics has been embedded in the contexts of state-building and the Cold War, the New Left and the New Right, the growth of neoliberalism, and the HIV/AIDS epidemic. As the field of LGBTQ history has grown, scholars have increasingly been able to place analyses of state regulation into conversation with community-based histories. Moving between such outside and inside perspectives helps to reveal how multiple modes of LGBTQ politics have shaped one another and how they have been interwoven with broader social change. Looking from the outside, it is apparent that LGBTQ politics has been catalyzed by exclusions from citizenship; from the inside, we can see that activists have responded to such exclusions in different ways, including both by seeking social inclusion and by rejecting assimilationist terms. Court rulings and the administration of law have run alongside the debates inside activist communities. Competing visions for LGBTQ politics have centered around both leftist and liberal agendas, as well as viewpoints shaped by race, gender, gender expression, and class.

Public authorities are agencies created by governments to engage directly in the economy for public purposes. They differ from standard agencies in that they operate outside the administrative framework of democratically accountable government. Since they generate their own operating income by charging users for goods and services and borrow for capital expenses based on projections of future revenues, they can avoid the input from voters and the regulations that control public agencies funded by tax revenues.

Institutions built on the public authority model exist at all levels of government and in every state. A few of these enterprises, such as the Tennessee Valley Authority and the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, are well known. Thousands more toil in relative obscurity, operating toll roads and bridges, airports, transit systems, cargo ports, entertainment venues, sewer and water systems, and even parking garages. Despite their ubiquity, these agencies are not well understood. Many release little information about their internal operations. It is not even possible to say conclusively how many exist, since experts disagree about how to define them, and states do not systematically track them.

One thing we do know about public authorities is that, over the course of the 20th century, these institutions have become a major component of American governance. Immediately following the Second World War, they played a minor role in public finance. But by the early 21st century, borrowing by authorities constituted well over half of all public borrowing at the sub-federal level. This change means that increasingly the leaders of these entities, rather than elected officials, make key decisions about where and how to build public infrastructure and steer economic development in the United States

The convergence of mass politics and the growth of cities in 19th-century America produced sharp debates over the character of politics in urban settings. The development of what came to be called machine politics, primarily in the industrial cities of the East and Midwest, generated sharp criticism of its reliance on the distribution of patronage and favor trading, its emphatic partisanship, and the plebian character of the “bosses” who practiced it. Initially, upper- and middle-class businessmen spearheaded opposition to this kind of politics, but during the late nineteenth and early 20th centuries, labor activists, women reformers, and even some ethnic spokespersons confronted “boss rule” as well. These challenges did not succeed in bringing an end to machine politics where it was well established, but the reforms they generated during the Progressive Era reshaped local government in most cities. In the West and Southwest, where cities were younger and partisan organizations less entrenched, business leaders implemented Progressive municipal reforms to consolidate their power. Whether dominated by reform regime or a party machine, urban politics and governance became more centralized by 1940 and less responsive to the concerns and demands of workers and immigrants.

Urban politics provides a means to understand the major political and economic trends and transformations of the last seventy years in American cities. The growth of the federal government; the emergence of new powerful identity- and neighborhood-based social movements; and large-scale economic restructuring have characterized American cities since 1945. The postwar era witnessed the expansion of scope and scale of the federal government, which had a direct impact on urban space and governance, particularly as urban renewal fundamentally reshaped the urban landscape and power configurations. Urban renewal and liberal governance, nevertheless, spawned new and often violent tensions and powerful opposition movements among old and new residents. These movements engendered a generation of city politicians who assumed power in the 1970s. Yet all of these figures were forced to grapple with the larger forces of capital flight, privatization, the war on drugs, mass incarceration, immigration, and gentrification. This confluence of factors meant that as many American cities and their political representatives became demographically more diverse by the 1980s and 1990s, they also became increasingly separated by neighborhood boundaries and divided by the forces of class and economic inequality.

Zoning is a legal tool employed by local governments to regulate land development. It determines the use, intensity, and form of development in localities through enforcement of the zoning ordinance, which consists of a text and an accompanying map that divides the locality into zones. Zoning is an exercise of the police powers by local governments, typically authorized through state statutes. Components of what became part of the zoning process emerged piecemeal in U.S. cities during the 19th century in response to development activities deemed injurious to the health, safety, and welfare of the community. American zoning was influenced by and drew upon models already in place in German cities early in the 20th century. Following the First National Conference on Planning and Congestion, held in Washington, DC in 1909, the zoning movement spread throughout the United States. The first attempt to apply a version of the German zoning model to a U.S. city was in New York City in 1916. In the landmark U.S. Supreme Court case, Ambler Realty v. Village of Euclid (1926), zoning was ruled as a constitutional exercise of the police power, a precedent-setting case that defined the perimeters of land use regulation the remainder of the 20th century.

Zoning was explicitly intended to sanction regulation of real property use to serve the public interest, but frequently, it was used to facilitate social and economic segregation. This was most often accomplished by controlling the size and type of housing, where high density housing (for lower income residents) could be placed in relation to commercial and industrial uses, and in some cases through explicit use of racial zoning categories for zones. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled, in Buchanan v. Warley (1917), that a racial zoning plan of the city of Louisville, Kentucky violated the due process clause of the14th Amendment. The decision, however, did not directly address the discriminatory aspects of the law. As a result, efforts to fashion legally acceptable racial zoning schemes persisted late into the 1920s. These were succeeded by the use of restrictive covenants to prohibit black (and other minority) occupancy in certain white neighborhoods (until declared unconstitutional in the late 1940s). More widespread was the use of highly differentiated residential zoning schemes and real estate steering that imbedded racial and ethnic segregation into the residential fabric of American communities.

The Standard State Zoning Enabling Act (SSZEA) of 1924 facilitated zoning. Disseminated by the U.S. Department of Commerce, the SSZEA created a relatively uniform zoning process in U.S. cities, although depending upon their size and functions, there were definite differences in the complexity and scope of zoning schemes. The reason why localities followed the basic form prescribed by the SSZEA was to minimize the chance of the zoning ordinance being struck down by the courts. Nonetheless, from the 1920s through the 1970s, thousands of court cases tested aspects of zoning, but only a few reached the federal courts, and typically, zoning advocates prevailed.

In the 1950s and 1960s, critics of zoning charged that the fragmented city was an unintended consequence. This critique was a response to concerns that zoning created artificial separations among the various types of development in cities, and that this undermined their vitality. Zoning nevertheless remained a cornerstone of U.S. urban and suburban land regulation, and new techniques such as planned unit developments, overlay zones, and form-based codes introduced needed flexibility to reintegrate urban functions previously separated by conventional zoning approaches.