{"id":19095,"date":"2017-10-13T12:27:50","date_gmt":"2017-10-13T16:27:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/?p=19095"},"modified":"2017-10-13T12:40:24","modified_gmt":"2017-10-13T16:40:24","slug":"changes-in-how-we-talk-about-cities","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/?p=19095","title":{"rendered":"changes in how we talk about cities"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>At a meeting at a community organization in Boston, we were using various terms to describe local issues and observing that those phrases would not be clear to the people we were talking about&#8211;especially new immigrants. That made me wonder about the history of our vocabulary, so I used Google&#8217;s Ngram tool to see the frequency of &#8220;urban poverty,&#8221; &#8220;inner city,&#8221; &#8220;gentrification,&#8221; &#8220;deindustrialization,&#8221; and &#8220;urban redevelopment&#8221; in published books. This graph shows trends since 1900.<\/p>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" src=\"https:\/\/books.google.com\/ngrams\/interactive_chart?content=gentrification%2Cdeindustrialization%2Curban+redevelopment%2Curban+poverty%2Cinner+city&amp;case_insensitive=on&amp;year_start=1930&amp;year_end=2008&amp;corpus=15&amp;smoothing=3&amp;share=\" name=\"ngram_chart\" width=\"900\" height=\"500\" frameborder=\"0\" marginwidth=\"0\" marginheight=\"0\" scrolling=\"no\"><\/iframe><br \/>\nIn rough order of when these phrases became popular&#8230;<\/p>\n<ol>\n<li>&#8220;Urban redevelopment&#8221; starts very soon after WWII but declines after 1970. It is a keyword of high-modernist urban planning from the era of big housing projects and highways blasted through downtowns.\u00a0 It has been notably less popular (at least in books) since ca. 1980.<\/li>\n<li>&#8220;Urban poverty&#8221; rises in the 1960s and the 1990s, but has&#8211;interestingly&#8211;fallen in the 2000s.<\/li>\n<li>&#8220;Inner city&#8221; seems to have become rapidly popular during the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, plateaued at a high level until about 2000, and then fallen off.<\/li>\n<li>&#8220;Gentrification&#8221; enters the lexicon in 1975. It plateaus in the 1990s and then rises rapidly in our century.<\/li>\n<li>&#8220;Deindustrialization&#8221; is a new term ca. 1980, describing a phenomenon that started in the 1970s. It peaks in the 1990s.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<p>These changes seem to reflect objective circumstances&#8211;cities lose their industrial base but then sometimes attract yuppies who push up housing values&#8211;as well as shifts in intellectual fashions, such as the rise, and then fall, of high-modernist design.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>At a meeting at a community organization in Boston, we were using various terms to describe local issues and observing that those phrases would not be clear to the people we were talking about&#8211;especially new immigrants. That made me wonder about the history of our vocabulary, so I used Google&#8217;s Ngram tool to see the [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[21,1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-19095","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cities","category-uncategorized"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19095","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=19095"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19095\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":19106,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19095\/revisions\/19106"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=19095"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=19095"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=19095"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}