Saving America's Cities: Ed Logue and the Struggle to Renew Urban America in the Suburban Age

Lizabeth Cohen

Jun 2020 · Tantor Media Inc · Narrated by Keith Sellon-Wright

About this audiobook

Winner of the Bancroft Prize In twenty-first-century America, some cities are flourishing and others are struggling, but they all must contend with deteriorating infrastructure, economic inequality, and unaffordable housing. Cities have limited tools to address these problems, and many must rely on the private market to support the public good. It wasn't always this way. For almost three decades after World War II, even as national policies promoted suburban sprawl, the federal government underwrote renewal efforts for cities that had suffered during the Great Depression and the war and were now bleeding residents into the suburbs. In Saving America's Cities, Lizabeth Cohen follows the career of Edward J. Logue, whose shifting approach to the urban crisis tracked the changing balance between government-funded public programs and private interests that would culminate in the neoliberal rush to privatize efforts to solve entrenched social problems. A Yale-trained lawyer, rival of Robert Moses, and sometime critic of Jane Jacobs, Logue saw renewing cities as an extension of the liberal New Deal. He worked to revive a declining New Haven, became the architect of the "New Boston" of the 1960s, and, later, led New York State's Urban Development Corporation, which built entire new towns, including Roosevelt Island in New York City.

About the author

Lizabeth Cohen is Howard Mumford Jones Professor of American Studies in the Department of History at Harvard University. She is the author of Making a New Deal: Industrial Workers in Chicago, 1919-1939, which won the Bancroft Prize and the Philip Taft Labor History Award and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.

Keith Sellon-Wright is a seasoned professional with a career in Hollywood spanning over thirty years. He has worked with some of Hollywood's seminal directors, including Christopher Guest and Spike Lee. His television credits include Wings, Frasier, Seinfeld, The West Wing, NCIS, Mad Men, and Parks and Recreation.