Doctoral Dissertation Research: The American Alley: A History of Social Hierarchies in U.S. Urban Landscapes

University Of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison WI

Investigators

Abstract

This project will analyze the history of urban alleys, as both planned utilitarian spaces and spaces imbued with cultural meaning, to understand their role in shaping social hierarchies that persist in cities. Nearly all American cities have alleys running behind their residential streets and commercial blocks. These corridors provide access to garages and buildings, circulate traffic, facilitate waste management, and are traditional sites of affordable housing. Hidden from public eyes, they paradoxically serve as both playgrounds for children and as sites of crime. Unlike most features of the urban built environment, they are public land whose access and maintenance is unofficially controlled by private citizens. This research investigates the ways that alleys have long functioned fluidly between the categories of public and private space, and have therefore been able to accommodate marginalized groups, such as racial minorities and the urban poor, who would otherwise not have had access to urban space. In the past decade, as many cities turn to sustainable design and seek the economic benefits of residential and commercial gentrification, city governments and urban land organizations have turned their attention to alleys, arguing that these ubiquitous city spaces can be revitalized as public space. Through attention to the ways alleys' semi-private and semi-public status have historically provided for underserved urban residents, this project critically assesses the seemingly clear benefits of public space painted by today's urban designers and by scholars who critique the neoliberal privatization of urban land. Research findings will be disseminated directly to planning professionals and to a broader public through publications such as op-eds and blog posts and will also be instructional material for undergraduate geography, urban studies, and history classrooms. The project will also provide support to enable a graduate student to establish an independent research career. Despite their widespread presence and new popularity in American cities, alleys are conspicuously absent from literature in geography and urban and planning history. This research combines theoretical approaches from urban, historical, and cultural geography to tell a multi-decade history of alleys' changing functions and meanings. It contributes to scholarship that identifies ways that experiences based on race, gender, and class are embedded in urban landscapes. Finally, it uses the space of the alley to challenge static categories and prevailing assessments of public and private space. Through a combination of archival research, semi-structured interviews, and site visits, the researchers seek to understand the relationship between the changing built environment of alleys due to laws, policies, and technological innovations and the production and normalization of social hierarchies by race, class, and gender. Research will be based in Washington, D.C., a city with a recognized history of alley housing, one known for its ties between race and political-economic developments, and one that has recently turned to alley revitalization projects. In addition, as the only American city run by Congress through the early 1970s, D.C. is the best place to understand how national policies historically unfolded in a single city.