Revisions of the city: Boston's lessons in urban redevelopment from the top-down to bottom-up, 1950-present

This report focuses on three specific areas of Boston: the former West End, the former Scollay Square, and Roxbury demonstrating the possibilities of a "bottom-up" approach to urban redevelopment, led by counterpublics, and the circumstance that fostered top-down renewal prior to this. Furthermore, through the examination of Herbert Gans, Jane Jacobs, and Kevin Lynch a historiographical narrative develops, emphasizing the semantics of urban regeneration. A debate surfaces in the text-whose model of what constitutes a city is the most credible My aim is to reflect on the dangers of wholesale urban renewal practices, while considering critical and academic involvement with a kind of urbanism that does not adequately address acute kinds of difference (race, class, etc.) in establishing specific "images of the city.