Race, Redevelopment, and the New Company Town

This book shows how private interests collaborated with public leaders, and often with neighborhood activists, in order to rebuild several neighborhoods comprising racially and economically-mixed populations in St. Louis. It shows that persons from different races and social classes can live together in redeveloped urban neighborhoods.

Detailed here are the politics and economics of redevelopment in what was one of the nation’s most distressed cities. We see how public and private leaders experimented with a variety of techniques to rebuild the city since 1950. We see the mistakes they made and the lessons they learned from those mistakes, and we see how corporations and institutions came to strike a better balance between their private needs and a broader public interest. Race, Redevelopment and the New Company Town explores some of the most serious challenges confronting those who would rebuild America’s cities and better integrate low-income and minority citizens into the nation’s post-industrial economy.