Cities of stars: urban renewal, public housing regeneration, and the community empowerment possibility of governance constellations

This paper examines the implementation of the largest public housing regeneration programme in the United States, HOPE VI (Housing Opportunities for People Everywhere), which provided $6 billion in grants to facilitate the redevelopment of 260 sites. It begins by noting the wide variation in approaches to income mixing, with some HOPE VI projects skewed toward public housing retention and others emphasizing more inclusion of market-rate housing. To help explain this, the paper proposes that approaches to HOPE VI are rooted in previous experience with displacement through slum clearance, urban renewal and central highway construction from the 1940s through the 1970s. In some cities, this sparked lasting backlash from citizen groups sufficient to alter the structure of urban governance in ways that tempered the prior roles of the state and powerful private developers. The paper explains this shift in governance using the metaphor of ‘governance constellations.’ These constellations spatially represent the systems of key players (or ‘stars’) whose presence is able to shine most brightly in each given regeneration process. Rather than networks of infinite variety, the paper argues that there are four basic types of governance constellations, each with its orienting polestar in a different sector of the sky – skewed either towards the private sector (The Big Developer), the public sector (Publica Major), the not-for-profit sector (Nonprofitus), or the community sector (Plebs). To explore this, the paper draws upon examples from four cities-New Orleans, Boston, Tucson, and San Francisco-which illustrate each of these basic constellation types. There are important roles for community leaders in each type of constellation, but the constellations explain how and why some cities favoured housing large numbers of very poor households when redeveloping mixed-income housing while others placed more emphasis on higher-income households. At base, these differences reveal quite different attitudes toward community empowerment.