Dr. J. Mark Souther
Rhodes Tower 1904
Department of History
Cleveland State Univ.
Spring 2005

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Euclid Corridor Project

Syllabus (PDF)

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Readings

Required Texts

Stewart Brand, How Buildings Learn: What Happens After They’re Built (New York: Penguin Books, 1995).
We will use this book as a reference work to guide us in thinking about the urban built environment and how it evolves over time to suit people’s changing needs and tastes. You should use it to contextualize your study of the Euclid Corridor.

Nicholas Dagen Bloom, Merchant of Illusion: James Rouse, America’s Salesman of the Businessman’s Utopia (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2004).
This book examines the projects and ideas of famed urban planner James Rouse. It explores how Rouse, known primarily for his pioneering “festival marketplaces” in Boston and Baltimore, shaped the role of the private sector in American urban policy. Bloom evaluates Rouse’s projects—shopping centers, planned communities, downtown redevelopment projects, community development corporations, and festival marketplaces—in the context of cold war ideology. The kinds of projects that Rouse helped develop became the U.S.’s alternative to state-dominated urban planning in the Soviet Union and social democratic Europe. We will use this book as a window into the ways that planners sought to reverse the urban decline that characterized the second half of the twentieth century.

Kenneth W. Goings and Raymond A. Mohl, eds., The New African American Urban History (Thousand Oaks, Calif.: SAGE Publications, 1996).
A corrective to earlier studies that tended to depict African Americans as powerless victims of white racism and urban problems, this book is a collection of essays that focuses on the ways that blacks have taken active roles in carving out spaces for themselves, struggling against the problems they face, and managed to create a sense of dignity in urban America. We will use this book to provide a sense of black perspectives and as a counterpoint to standard texts about different periods in U.S. urban history.

M. Jeffrey Hardwick, Mall Maker: Victor Gruen, Architect of an American Dream (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003).
From the front and back flaps: “In Mall Maker, the first biography of this visionary spirit, M. Jeffrey Hardwick relates Gruen’s successes and failures—his work at the 1939 World’s Fair, his makeover of New York’s Fifth Avenue boutiques, his rejected plans for reworking entire communities, . . . and his crowning achievement, the enclosed shopping mall. Throughout, Hardwick illuminates the dramatic shifts in American culture during the mid-twentieth century, notably the rise of suburbia and automobiles, the death of downtown, and the effect these changes had on American life. Gruen championed the redesign of suburbs and cities through giant shopping malls, earnestly believing that he was promoting an American ideal, the ability to build a community. Yet, as malls began covering the landscape and downtowns became more depressed, Gruen became painfully aware that his dream of overcoming social problems through architecture and commerce was slipping away. By the tumultuous year of 1968, it had disappeared.”

Additional articles and book chapters are available on Electronic Course Reserve (ECR) or on JSTOR. All are PDF files. The computer lab on the fourth floor of Main Classroom Building offers free printing. You should always bring a copy of any required reading to class on the day for which it is assigned.

Recommended Supplementary Reading

Carol Poh Miller and Robert A. Wheeler, Cleveland: A Concise History, 1796-1996 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997).
The definitive biography of the city of Cleveland, Miller and Wheeler’s book offers a sweeping narrative and analysis of Cleveland’s development. I recommend this as your starting point for understanding how your project topics fit into broader context.