From the perspective of chambers of commerce boardrooms and mayors’ offices, the institutional arrangements of urban renewal were mutually beneficial for the public and private sectors. City officials expected new development to improve their tax bases and make downtowns more appealing to potential investors. Private-sector partners received public subsidies to enhance their property values and expand their activities. Government officials and civic leaders imbued their activities with a sense of public purpose by describing urban renewal as a way to meet public needs for adequate housing and commercial development. In practice, however, the benefits of urban renewal primarily accrued to a small number of local elites and blue-collar workers in the construction trades. The burdens of renewal fell most heavily on low-income, predominantly African American residents, who were displaced from aging central city neighborhoods and only occasionally provided with suitable replacement housing. Instead of affordable, high-quality housing for all, in the United States, redevelopment partnerships most often produced poorly maintained public housing complexes, office buildings, luxury residences, sports stadiums, and convention centers.14
Canadian, Latin American, German, and British cities also established expansive urban renewal programs after World War II, but, in those places, redevelopment partnerships were typically state led and managed, and public-private cooperation remained ad hoc.15 In Canada, as in the United States, urban renewal programs required a private-sector partner, but federal funds were contingent only on securing advance cooperation between municipal, provincial, and federal governments, rather than between public agencies and private developers.16 Under this scenario, local urban renewal authorities could use federal funds to acquire land through eminent domain and clear it before identifying a site developer, which gave public officials significantly greater freedom to direct where and what kind of investment took place. In the UK, too, public partners had greater control over the nature of redevelopment. Local governments determined redevelopment sites and, in the case of central city commercial regeneration, required developers to include features that public officials had identified as serving a pressing public need, such as a library or a bus station.17
Differences in the institutional arrangements of urban renewal between nations reflected a long tradition of privatism in the United States that was comparatively weak elsewhere in the North Atlantic. The central assumption of privatism—that serving private interests and public welfare was one and the same—was well suited to the political economy and social organization of the early American towns out of which the tradition developed.18 By the twentieth century, however, privatism had come to signify a shared belief between policymakers and business leaders that cities were engines for economic growth through unencumbered individual participation in free markets. Privatist ideology made it difficult for municipalities to allocate resources or regulate growth and development as public officials increasingly came to see the role of government as facilitating the production of private wealth rather than seeking to impose order or control over markets.19
Midcentury urban renewal programs reflected varying degrees of privatism between countries, but, by 1968, the transatlantic urban renewal order foundered in all of them. Trenchant critiques of modernist planning and design by American social critic Jane Jacobs and German-born Harvard professor Herbert Gans circulated internationally. Citizens’ organizations in the United States, Canada, the UK, and Germany successfully mobilized against urban renewal programs and highway projects that displaced residents and destroyed neighborhoods.20 At the same time, privatism’s more pragmatic corollary, privatization, began to gain wide currency as a tactic of governance. In the United States, all levels of government began to outsource public provision of goods and services to the private sector. Over the next two decades, U.S., Canadian, and British governments began to transfer state-owned businesses, agencies, utilities, services, and sites to for-profit or nonprofit enterprises.21
When urban renewal programs collapsed in the late 1960s and early 1970s, the redevelopment partnerships that had carried them out were left in flux. In the United States and Canada, public-private partnerships had relied heavily on federal money to conduct their activities, but both federal governments terminated urban renewal funding in the 1970s. In response to federal retrenchment, some existing partnerships fell apart, others retooled, and new partnerships emerged. Formal partnerships were written into public policy for urban development in the United States, Canada, and England; for economic development in Italy and Holland; and for industrial development in Germany and France. In North Atlantic manufacturing centers, urban development strategies increasingly became predicated on postindustrialism, which had a different kind of public-private partnership at its center. In the 1970s and 1980s, more flexible and more complex growth partnerships supplanted redevelopment partnerships. They took a range of forms, from business-led coalitions to local government-led collaboration to public-private organizations run by a national government. At all levels of government, public officials increased the powers of redevelopment authorities and encouraged entrepreneurial mayors to engage in international interurban competition for jobs.22
Redevelopment partnerships of the urban renewal era laid the foundation for postindustrial urbanism, but in the 1970s and beyond growth partnerships facilitated the wholesale remaking of former manufacturing centers for service- and finance-dominated local economies. Growth partnerships were born out of multiple currents: national governments’ disinvestment in cities, privatization, deregulation, and the devolution of authority over and the responsibility of paying for urban development to the local level. Public officials no longer rhetorically justified government subsidies for private redevelopment by describing individual projects as meeting pressing public needs for decent housing or reduced central city congestion. Entrepreneurial mayors from across the political spectrum, instead, came to believe that free markets, rather than liberal social programs, would allocate resources in a socially just manner.23 In the United States, where growth partnerships first formed, their members sought to create good “business climates” in distressed regions by adopting tactics from successful businessmen’s campaigns that had lured jobs and residents to the rising Sunbelt since the 1930s.24 To attract private investment, growth coalitions incorporated new partners, expanded their activities to include economic development and the physical redevelopment of areas beyond downtown, and offered a broad array of financial inducements to attract development. They expanded local, state, and federal financial inducements for private investment, such as personal tax reductions, discretionary business tax incentives, changes in corporate and banking regulations, and technology development programs.25
As privatist policy orientations and postindustrial planning tactics—sometimes ideological, sometimes pragmatic—traveled together through the North Atlantic, their implementation was contingent on the historical and geographical particularities of cities and regions and on the political, institutional, and cultural differences between nations. In the United States, public incentives to the private sector moved beyond direct federal subsidies. Entrepreneurial mayors combined programs like Richard Nixon’s Community Development Block Grants and Jimmy Carter’s Urban Development Action Grants with federal, state, and local tax incentives, bond issues, and loan guarantees.26 In Britain, changes to the national Town and Country Planning Act in 1968 authorized local public authorities to partner directly with private developers on commercial projects. Under the new regulations, Birmingham subsidized a shopping center and hotel by securing a loan for the developer at public sector loan rates, and subsequently secured government grants to expand the project.27 The mayor of Rennes formalized a decade-old ad hoc partnership in 1984 when he formed CODESPAR, a consortium of unions, business representatives, and public officials, to develop a regional strategic plan for the French city. CODESPAR reoriented economic development around advanced technology and health services and eventually built a high-tech office park.28 Similarly, Hamburg’s Chamber of Commerce and major banks established the Hamburg Business Development Corporation in 1985, a semi-public corporation that used public and private funds to channel investment into the city.29
Canadian municipalities were a bit slower to adopt U.S.-style growth partnerships. Historically, Canadian urban policy emphasized collective over individual good, while a stronger culture of privatism in the United States meant that urban policy was more commonly