Kaleidoscope Metropolis: Autonomy and Integration in the Fractured City

By the 1950s, just as technocratic consensus settled on the opinion that Boston’s metropolitan problems demanded municipal consolidation, meaningful regional integration became a political dead letter. This paper examines how conflicting pressures towards both spatial integration and disintegration shaped the postwar city, with ecological concepts about environmental management jostling against demands for community autonomy coming from both right and left. Struggle over geographic units thereby became a key axis of conflict between different ideological strands of the politics of place.

The Environmental History Seminar invites you to join the conversation. Seminars bring together a diverse group of scholars and interested members of the public to workshop a pre-circulated paper. Learn more.

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