The Environmental Roots of Urban Renewal in Boston

This essay argues that discourse related to residents of Boston’s South End as environmental agents justified the removal of minority and working-class residents from the neighborhood, and, in particular, the New York Streets section in the 1950s. It combines analytical approaches of urban ecology and traditional elements of social history to examine how the neighborhood orientated to the city in an economic sense, how residents created a mixed-use neighborhood, how social institutions functioned as contested spaces of cultural production, how settlement house workers created a framework of discourse about the South End, how negative perceptions of working-class and minority residents coalesced across American life, and how city officials activated the discourse to create the first steps of urban renewal in Boston. The conclusion examines how minority groups understood environmental factors to be central to urban renewal and how social justice groups took an environmental focus in their activism