ABSTRACT
The making of the modern city is a cumulative story of creation and displacement. While the creation side is more often discussed, displacements are also an integral part of modern city life. Displacements ripple through the urban housing market. Jacobs and Moses represent two contrasting visions of the city. One is a close connection to lived experience with a profound sense of community and a palpable feeling of history. The other is the city as centrally planned vision, a concern with mobility and the destruction of history. At the end of the Second World War hundreds of thousands of people moved to Seoul, some of them Korean refugees from Japan. The breakneck urbanization of China has involved displacement on a massive scale. Over a forty-year period Robert Moses built parkways, expressways, roads, parks, playgrounds and housing. There is a long history and deep geography of contemporary urbanism to be written that centers on the threat, traumas and experience of displacement.
