Local Communities and Separate Space: The Zionist Stance on Jewish Settlement in Arab Cities—The Case of Acre

This article looks at the impact of harsh environmental conditions on the development of the Zionist narrative and the pursuit of Jewish urban settlement in Arab cities, specifically Acre. While overcoming adversity was part of the Zionist farming ethos, settling in areas that were environmentally challenging was one of the factors that kept the Zionist establishment from acknowledging or supporting urban Jewish settlement in Arab towns. In fact, the openly professed ideology of settling in such locations and creating mixed cities was implemented only in the few cases where an economic or political incentive existed. These incentives aside, environmental issues like swampy land and seasonal flooding were major inhibiting factors, not only affecting the scope of Jewish settlement but also the way they were addressed in the Zionist narrative.

Dismantling the Safety-Net Hospital: The Construction of “Underutilization” and Scarce Public Hospital Care

Safety-net hospitals are vulnerable to government financing. After the Nixon administration encouraged states to conduct utilization review to identify medical cost savings, federal campaigns against hospital subsidies placed public hospital systems in perilous states and paralleled efforts in cities to eliminate “underutilized” facilities. New York City mayor John Lindsay sought a political balance between community participation and the technocratic search for underused beds. Subsequent mayors Abe Beame and Ed Koch proved less sympathetic. With community participation limited to symbolic input on hospital administrator hiring, south Brooklyn, the Bronx, and Harlem all suffered closures. This article contributes to literature on urban governance and health care administration by showing how macroeconomic fiscal decision-making overrode local demands and eventually became microeconomic motivators between and within hospitals. Municipal hospitals and Community Accountability Boards debated austerity budgeting’s negative effects on chronic and epidemic disease readiness, while the Health and Hospitals Corporation framed deprivation as patient choice.

The Enclosure of the Ejidos of Bogotá Imperial Wars and the End of Common Lands in Colonial New Granada

The article analyses the enclosure of the ejidos of the city of Bogotá in the second half of the 18th century, one century before the liberal government definitively abolished common property in Colombia. It shows how, as the land demand increased with population and economic growth, not only landowners but also the Crown sought to increase their income at the expense of common lands. Unlike the classic enclosures in England, the Cabildo kept control over the ejidos of Bogotá. By furthering the private use of municipal ejidos without expropriating Cabildos, the Crown sought to activate the agrarian economy safeguarding, at the same time, the local financial structure that sustained the empire. Emphasizing the fiscal nature of municipal ejidos, this article shows how imperial dynamics transformed land use on both sides of the Atlantic and explores the specificities of common-land enclosures in some of the Spanish colonies.

Gay Pride in the Urban New South: Politics, Neighborhood, and Community in Atlanta and Charlotte

Atlanta, Georgia, and Charlotte, North Carolina, serve as urban centers of the Southeast and archetypal New South cities. In the last decades of the twentieth century, city and corporate leaders in Atlanta often welcomed the growth of gay visibility and the resulting queer tourism. While Charlotte’s leaders promoted growth and longed to be like Atlanta, they rebuffed queer visibility. For many queer people, Atlanta lived up to an oft-repeated maxim; it was a city too busy to hate. Charlotte’s pattern of significant and sustained growth throughout the twentieth century led to its well-chosen Chamber of Commerce slogan, labeling the city as a great place to make money, which proved true for many queer people. Still, this financial success did not equal support. City politicians often set aside opportunities to exploit the burgeoning gay market while rejecting Charlotte’s queer citizens wholesale.

A Visualization Tool for 1790s Charleston: Locating an Enslaved Population Using GIS

This article promotes the value of GIS methodologies to integrate and analyze a range of historic sources dating to the eighteenth century, utilizing Charleston, South Carolina as a case study. Data compiled from the 1790 Federal Census, the 1790 Charleston trade directory, and Ichnography of Charleston 1788 provide vital and complementary evidence that allows the population of the city to be located, which in turn provides a means of assessing late eighteenth-century residency patterns and the enslaved urban population. The value of data visualization is explored, underscoring the need for historians to engage with visual representations of data to communicate research results.

Through the Ivory Curtain: African Americans in Cleveland Heights, Ohio, before the Fair Housing Movement

This article examines the largely neglected history of African American struggles to obtain housing in Cleveland Heights, a first-ring suburb of Cleveland, Ohio, between 1900 and 1960, prior to the fair housing and managed integration campaigns that emerged thereafter. The article explores the experiences of black live-in servants, resident apartment building janitors, independent renters, and homeowners. It offers a rare look at the ways that domestic and custodial arrangements opened opportunities in housing and education, as well as the methods, calculations, risks, and rewards of working through white intermediaries to secure homeownership. It argues that the continued black presence laid a foundation for later advances beginning in the 1960s that made Cleveland Heights, like better-known Shaker Heights, a national model for suburban racial integration.

Social and Spatial Governance: The History of Enclosed Neighborhoods in Urban China

COVID-19 calls for a new understanding of urban landscape and associated living. As an emerging topic, lockdown urbanism involves an unpredictable future where lockdown or quarantine may be a come and go new normal for everyday practice, but the topic itself seems to have escaped historical inquiry. This paper attempts to answer why the strict lockdown is suitable for China by revealing a long and complex history of urbanization and its social and administrative organization. The urban fabric is characterized by a system of urban patterns: enclosed communities, the spatial layout and service distribution of the neighborhood, and the formation of the center. It was also animated by daily ritualistic practices, such as the control of time, quotidian lockdown practice (yejin), and individual ties within the enclosed neighborhood. This paper contributes to a better understanding of the deep history of urban form and the order and logic behind lockdown urbanism.

“A Dumping Ground for the South”: Race, Place, and Poverty in Newburgh, New York (1945-1961)

This article explores the urban politics that led to the outbreak of the Newburgh, New York, welfare controversy in 1961. It uncovers the intricate interplay between race, place, and poverty that led to the early backlash against social welfare from the immediate postwar years to the early 1960s. Newburgh officials engineered their welfare reform as a political response to the economic, demographic, and urban transformations the city underwent in the 1950s. Race was central to their concerns as they scapegoated newly arrived African American migrants and blamed them for the city’s population loss and slowing economy. Welfare reform served at once as a tool for migratory, demographic, and racial regulation. The Newburgh story demonstrates that welfare regulation was used by city officials to enforce racial hierarchies in the Jim Crow North and suggests that city politics should be taken into greater account in the history of the American welfare state.

The Diffusion of Participatory Planning Ideas and Practices: The Case of Socialist Yugoslavia, 1961-1982

Although both praised and contested for its advanced conceptual elaboration and ineffective practical implementation, respectively, participatory planning has largely been considered a Yugoslav national legacy and a point of diversification compared with other similar contexts. However, there has been little research on the roots and features of public participation as observed through the lens of international influences on Yugoslav spatial and urban planning. By identifying the main channels (professional networks and events) and nodes (planning organizations and documents) in the diffusion of participatory planning ideas at both the international and national levels, we trace the evolution of citizen participation discourse in Yugoslavia. Based on archival research of the relevant documents (selected articles in professional journals, decrees, and plans), the paper examines the authenticity of the concept of citizen participation in Yugoslavia to, finally, elucidate the specificities of its implementation in the context of socialist self-management.