Immigrants and the Revitalization of Los Angeles: Development and ...

2.5. Tracing the Lineage of Redevelopment

2.5.1. The Progressive Era:
Containing the Immigrants' Milieu (1880s–1920s)

The emergence of city planning in the U.S. can be directly traced to the progressive era and to the social reform movements that materialized in immigrant slum areas in New York at the end of the nineteenth century (Davis 1967; Hall 2005). During that turbulent time, when the second wave of American immigration was changing the face of urban cities in the U.S., the fields of housing and physical planning arose, which also paved the way for establishing city planning as a profession. The profession of planning began as a result of reform efforts focused on immigrant neighborhoods, as the political and economic elite in cities tried to figure out what to do with the increasing numbers of immigrants. The elite were mainly concerned with four issues: the risk of rebellion in those neighborhoods, the lucrative land values in neighborhoods adjacent to the emerging CBDs in the 1870s, the health risks of the unsanitary conditions in tenements (and especially fear of the spread of tuberculosis), and what they considered as the need to “Americanize” the newly arrived European immigrants. Hence, the sociocultural context of the gaze during the progressive era was one of fear and of trying to contain, control, and establish dominance over the immigrants' milieu.

The second wave of immigration dramatically changed both the social and physical makeup of the United States. This wave, between 1860 and 1930, was comprised of southern and eastern Europeans who were of darker complexion and who were not Protestant, in contrast with the majority of the U.S. population at the time (Jensen 1989). This wave of immigrants settled mainly in eastern industrial cities.