Name: The slaughter of cities
ISBN: 9781587317750

The slaughter of cities

"Melior speramus, resurgens cineribus." We hope for better things, rising from the ashes. This is the motto of the city of Detroit, which was coined by Fr. Gabriel Richard whose parish church of Ste. Anne's was destroyed in the great fire which burned Detroit on June 11, 1805. Ever wonder how our once great cities fell into such disrepair? How were large parts of Philadelphia, Detroit, Chicago transformed from vibrant communities of beautiful homes where people prospered into dark, dangerous places full of deserted buildings where violent criminals have drained the lifeblood of the people who remain? It is said that if one does not know history, then one is doomed to repeat it. Fr. Richard responded to the great fire that almost completely destroyed Detroit by organizing local French farmers to take their canoes up and down the river to collect donations of food for the victims of the fire. When the canoes returned, a meal was cooked and served to the victims. some of the local men used fallen posts of the stockade to give shelter to the homeless. I believe that Mr. Jones is describing the slaughter of the cities not in a morbid sense, but rather in a sense of hope aimed toward their reconstruction. Only by learning how these once-great cities have been brought so low can we hope to see these cities rebuilt. The details of this book are grim, and Mr. Jones provides extensive documents which show the slaughter of the cities was deliberate.

What Hacker News says

wonder_erApr 2023

Huzzah! Another aficionado of land use issues!

Alain Bertaud wrote a book called "order without design". He's an urban economist, and... his book is all a city planner needs to do their job correctly.

Towards the end of the book he talks about the indonesian Kampung, briefly touched upon in this interview here: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-12-11/urban-pla...

I had long wanted to visit this sort of place, so in Bali, I walked into (and around) many, many, many kampungs, and sure enough, they were beautiful, affordable, and served the people that lived in and around them so well.

I believe all 'big' cities have adopted the 'american'/euclidean zoning version of land use policy, which was implemented by southerners in the 1920s to implement a regime of social control, allowing one ethnic group to use the political process to dominate another ethnic group. Jakarta follows the american land use policy, with the expected deleterious effects.

more on the land use policy as social control/ethnic cleansing: https://josh.works/full-copy-of-1922-atlanta-zone-plan

I'd strongly recommend getting a copy of Alain's book. It's the most concise take on land use policy I've encountered, and I've sorta 'read the canon' when it comes to these kinds of things.

Another recommendation: "The Slaughter of Cities: Urban Renewal as Ethnic Cleansing" https://www.fidelitypress.org/slaughter-of-cities

I write about all of this stuff on my website (in my profile) and tiktok. I talk too much about zoning-as-ethnic-cleansing, according to some people, but i don't mind. https://www.tiktok.com/@josh_exists

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iterationxFeb 2014

There was an interesting article recently about teens and social networking, and insight of the article was that teens want to socialize IRL, but there is nowhere for them to go without parental supervision.

I would argue that this approximately true for adults, American cities don't have pedestrian-only town squares, the public transit is abysmal (because long ago they ripped out all the streetcars, which led to the destruction of many social places, like Excelsior Amusement Park and Wonderland Amusement Park),

[warning anecdotal evidence]

The few dynamic social spaces I've known have been

Paved (Hidden Beach),

Pushed out due to rent increases (Loring Bar, Little Nikkis Cafe, CyberX),

Turned into a Bank of America (Filter in Wicker Park),

Out of business due to the smoking ban (The tobacco shop next to Filter in Wicker Park)

Purposefully destroyed by fake art to prevent gatherings (That little area next to the Subway on State Street in Madison, WI (where I used to play hackeysack))

Not to mention that we destroyed all the beer gardens during WW2 (this really happened), because that was too German, you can't drink a bottle of wine in a park like the French do, because I guess the drunks would abuse it, and the parks we do have generally don't also have any commercial activity whatsoever, not even a little kiosk where you can buy a coffee.

That's not even considering the destruction of ethnic neighborhoods by intersecting them with freeways (the old Catholic neighborhood [that no longer exists] that used to surround the Basilica in Minneapolis)

You know we're doing something wrong with urban design (which I argue is directly related to loneliness), when you see statues of children playing and not actual children playing.

Further reading/viewing:

James Howard Kunstler: The ghastly tragedy of the suburbs

James Howard Kunstler: Geography of Nowhere

The Slaughter of Cities: Urban Renewal as Ethnic Cleansing

Streets for People: A Primer for Americans

Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community

The Great Good Place: Cafes, Coffee Shops, Bookstores, Bars, Hair Salons, and Other Hangouts at the Heart of a Community

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moldbugMay 2012

You're claiming that integration ruined Brooklyn? Can you explain the mechanism?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_flight http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethnic_cleansing

If you ever actually talk to anyone who was personally involved in the former, and they're being frank, they'll tell you that a primary concern was a rational fear for their physical safety and/or that of their families. Which adds up to the latter. Why do you think there are no Serbs left in Kosovo, or no Albanians in Mitrovica?

E. Michael Jones's Slaughter of Cities (http://www.amazon.com/The-Slaughter-Cities-Renewal-Cleansing...) is a good overview from a j'accuse perspective. For a mainstream author, read J. Anthony Lukas' Common Ground. Better yet, read them both.

Of course we've digressed into the question of harmful effects (of the civil-rights movement) on white people. My original post was mainly concerned with the effect on black people.

Perhaps you've noticed some cultural changes? Are they for the better? If we could sit down together and watch WSHH for an hour, how exactly would we disagree?

http://www.worldstarhiphop.com/videos/

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winestockAug 2011

The key word is ethnicity. The book that changed my way of thinking about the subject is _The Slaughter of Cities_, by E. Michael Jones.

http://www.amazon.com/Slaughter-Cities-Renewal-Ethnic-Cleans...

"In his meticulously documented book, he proves that urban renewal had more to do with ethnicity than it ever had to do with design or hygiene or blight. Urban renewal was the last gasp attempt of the WASP ruling class to take control of a country that was slipping out of its grasp for demographic reasons. The largely Catholic ethnics were to be driven out of their neighborhoods into the suburbs, where they were to be "Americanized" according to WASP principles. The neighborhoods they left behind were to be turned over to the sharecroppers from the South or turned into futuristic Bauhaus enclaves for the new government elites. Using political tactics like eminent domain and "integration," the planners made sure that the ethnic neighborhood got transformed into something more congenial to their dreams of social engineering than the actual communities of people they saw as a threat to their control."

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winestockAug 2011

"Decline" means different things when applied to Detroit and to its suburbs. The suburbs are much safer and have much better infrastructure, among many other things.

Higher up in this thread, I referenced the book The Slaughter of Cities, by E. Michael Jones. That is the book around which my views have gelled.

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winestockAug 2011

Read The Slaughter of Cities by E. Michael Jones. I've referenced it a couple of times in this thread. The migration of blacks into Detroit and other major American cities isn't something that simply happened without a cause. That's the point behind the questions that I was asking in the thread to which you are responding.

Jones' thesis is that the Brahmin WASPs of the Northeast feared a Catholic takeover of the United States through their high birthrates. They also didn't like the fact that ethnic-dominated unions could negotiate such high wages for their workers. They wanted to break up the cohesiveness of those ethnic neighborhoods and make the children go to secular public schools instead of Catholic schools.

So, they influenced former sharecropper blacks to move north with the enticement of better jobs. The sudden population increase to cities that already suffered from post-WWII housing shortages did not bode well for good neighborly relations. Et cetera.

Most of the serious commentary that I've read of this book denounces it as a conspiracy theory. Even asking the preliminary questions needed to flesh out the thesis results in name-calling. People see the conversation turn to race and lose it. Spell things out for them and they still lose it.

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