Making Milwaukee Mightier: Planning and the Politics of Growth, 1910-1960

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Description

Progressive Era city planners are best known for grandiose civic designs, boosterish planning reports, and promoting technical exper-tise. Traditionally, Milwaukee has not been regarded as a national standout in these early endeavors; on the other hand, the planners in this city are distinctive precisely because they prioritized solving the social problem of overcrowding in lieu of more conventional planning goals. Another unique characteristic of this period is the long tenure of socialist city government. McCarthy offers fresh new insights into socialism’s have an effect on on Milwaukee, studying the planning and growth policies of all three of the city’s socialist mayors and finding striking continuity in the movement’s metropolitan visions.

While most of its Midwest counterparts saw their urban boundaries frozen, Milwaukee grew dramatically throughout this the most important era in American urban history. Its growth, on the other hand, drew the ire of increasingly more hostile suburban neighbors, resulting in a prolonged conflict between city and suburbs that reached a crescendo in the 1950s, when suburbanization overwhelmed Milwaukee’s capacity to grow. McCarthy concludes his study with thoughtful remark on Milwaukee’s relationship to its suburbs at the beginning of the 21st century.

Making Milwaukee Mightier amplifies the importance of a few historical figures rarely discussed by urban historians, including Charles Whitnall, the city’s most influential planner, and Frank Zeidler, the last socialist mayor in modern U.S. history whose views on urban redevelopment differed greatly from his postwar contemporaries in other cities. McCarthy takes such issues as planning, housing, annexation, and suburbanization—steadily viewed in isolation from one another—and examines the roles each played in the battle for Milwaukee’s growth. He also situates Milwaukee’s metropolitan history nationally and illuminates the city’s role as a forerunner for some of urban The united states’s most unique policies. Urban historians, city planners, practitioners, and those interested in the history of Milwaukee will enjoy McCarthy’s highly original work.


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