What History Can Teach Us About Today's Urban Challenges

For example, London points to the rapid urbanization of the industrial North Atlantic during the 19th century, and the associated ills of inequity and despair experienced in
the tenements of New York's Lower East Side and the rookeries of
London's East End as analogous to the challenges facing informal settlements in the contemporary developing world.

London looks to examples from the urban reform movement of the late 19th and early 20th
centuries and the "ethos of
experimentation, collaboration, and civic engagement with which
reformers and activists tackled these challenges...Their
vision of community empowerment stressed democratic
deliberation and bottom-up cooperation, a language paralleled today
by those who would upgrade slums in a non-destructive manner."

"Well before the term 'government 2.0' came into parlance
reformers on both sides of the Atlantic were trying to foster
active citizenship through public art and innovative local
government initiatives...Tactical urbanists of today can learn from the
playground movement of the early 1900s, which appropriated
under-utilised spaces and lots to serve neighbourhood needs.
Furthermore, all these ideas and practices were shared via national
and international networks of urban reformers. Sound familiar?"

For London, the responses by reformers of another era to the challenges of their times deserve to be assessed in the same way one might question the practices transmitted to us across space. "The means and ends of turn-of-the-century urban reformers
parallel our own in numerous ways, offering practices and ideas to
learn from and compare with our own efforts."