“Partnership and the Pursuit of the Private City”

Squires describes recurring phases of work of public-private partnership and privatism in U.S. cities, leading to dramatic structural, spatial, and social consequences. In the nineteenth century came public subsidization of canal and railroad building that benefited many studies on the expanding frontier. Urban renewal and the freeway system were the great public spending programs of the mid-twentieth century, stimulating an exodus of jobs and people to the suburbs and devastating many inner cities. Urban renewal also sparked the emergence of the first postwar downtown redevelopment coalitions, who profited from governmental land-grabs of valuable central city neighborhoods through strategies of condemnation and slum clearance.