Urban Renewal Narratives in Twentieth-Century American Cities : between Propaganda and Critique

By the mid-twentieth century, public discourse in the United States increasingly framed the regeneration of inner cities as both necessary and inevitable, giving rise to the complex phenomenon of urban renewal. Several documentaries, such as The Living City (1952), vividly illustrate this condition: older neighborhoods are shown in such severe decay that their demolition appears unavoidable, with residents consisting primarily of impoverished Black and immigrant communities. Beyond conventional textual sources, audiovisual materials provide a critical lens for examining the contradictions of this transformative period of American urban history. Films and interviews produced by advocates of urban renewal often reinforced a rhetoric of progress at the expense of urban heritage and communities, while independent multimedia projects and later visual studies record the displacement of residents. This essay aims to offer a critical reading of these media narratives, emphasizing the interpretive potential of

heterogeneous sources, with particular attention to the audiovisual archive associated with Robert Moses' speculative and transformative programs in New York City. [Publisher's text]