Introduction
Many of the forces at work in cities across the US in the mid-twentieth century – suburbanization and white flight, both legal and de facto segregation, and urban renewal – unfolded from policies adopted at both the national and local levels. We talk about urban renewal and gentrification in different ways today, but the official program of Urban Renewal began with the national Housing Act of 1949 and evolved with the Federal Urban Renewal Act of 1954. Under the program, local governments used the power of eminent domain and a combination of public and private funds to assemble and redevelop large blocks of land in urban areas; the newly redeveloped property would often be transferred to private investors at below cost. Urban Renewal targeted those densely populated areas where acquiring enough parcels for major redevelopment was typically too costly and complicated for private developers acting on their own.
While the purposes of the program seemed well-intentioned – combating de facto segregation, improving the quality of housing in inner cities by replacing substandard housing with new construction, and stimulating the local economy – the impacts were harsh. For every three or four units of housing that were demolished, only one was rebuilt, displacing millions nationwide and driving up the demand for housing. The sociocultural and human costs were high, and scholars still debate whether the economic impacts were positive in the long term.
On the first day of March 1966, the voters of Tucson approved the Pueblo Center Redevelopment Project (PCRP) — Arizona’s first major Urban Renewal project. The PCRP targeted the most densely populated eighty acres in the state and the largest population of African Americans, Chinese Americans, and Mexican Americans in the state. To make way for the Pueblo Center’s new buildings, city officials displaced residents and demolished their homes, businesses, and neighborhoods.
This exhibition looks at the visual record of Urban Renewal in Tucson, especially the streetscapes affected by the project. Understanding the impacts of a policy like Urban Renewal is a complicated challenge, because the relationships between power and politics, identity and racism, empathy and resilience, and our natural and cultural landscapes are complex and interconnected. The questions one might explore using primary sources to study an issue like this one are nearly limitless.