The Photographic Construction of Urban Renewal in Fargo, North Dakota

The federally subsidized urban renewal program had its roots in three major federal housing acts, those of 1937, 1949, and 1954. The Housing Act of 1937 defined a slum as “any area where dwellings predominate which, by reason of dilapidation, overcrowding, faulty arrangement or design, lack of ventilation, light or sanitation facilities, or any combination of these factors, are detrimental to safety, health, or morals.”¹ Responding to a call in President Harry S. Truman’s 1949 State of the Union address, Congress passed the Housing Act of 1949, Title I of which authorized the use of federal funds for what it termed slum clearance.² The 1949 act defined an approach to identifying and rebuilding “blighted or deteriorated” areas of cities that differed from previous efforts in two significant ways. Prior to 1949 slum clearance was a fundamentally local effort, accomplished largely or entirely without federal funding (with the exception of a small number of New Deal programs). In addition, early programs had generally failed to gain the participation of private developers. The Housing Act of 1949 explicitly enabled cities, with federal help, to purchase already-developed areas, clear the land of existing structures, and then resell it to private developers.³ The Housing Act of 1954 introduced the term “urban renewal” and gave new impetus to the federally subsidized effort by explicitly authorizing federal funds for the acquisition of property and the removal of buildings.⁴

My dual interests in urban renewal and archival research date back to the 1980s and my childhood in Winona, Minnesota. I recall an impressive collection of well-preserved nineteenth-century downtown buildings juxtaposed with two square blocks of 1970s-era apartment blocks, offices, and commercial buildings. These newer buildings represented Winona’s built legacy of the federally funded urban renewal program. Even as a child, I was keenly interested in the buildings I saw around me in my hometown, and with my mother’s encouragement and cooperation, I visited the local historical society archives on several occasions to learn about the buildings that were demolished to make way for the new. What I discovered was a collection of newspaper clippings, photographs, maps, and drawings that resonated with my own growing interests in architecture, drawing, and photography. Again with my mother’s support and encouragement, I began drawing and photographing the historic buildings of downtown Winona.

Although these formative experiences with buildings and archival research clearly laid the groundwork for my education as an architect and my later career as a university professor of architecture, my interest in urban renewal lay dormant for many years. It was rekindled in 2013 when my university, North Dakota State, offered a research grant designed specifically to encourage and support research into the materials in the university archives. Remembering my time as a young man researching in the Winona County Historical Society archives, hunting for materials concerning Winona’s demolished buildings, I wondered whether the North Dakota State University archives contained any material on Fargo’s urban renewal projects. To my delight, online finding aids confirmed that the archives housed extensive collections of urban renewal materials, many of which derived from the personal collections of Earl Stewart, a former professor in my own department who had passed away some years before I became aware of the collection.⁵ I wrote a successful proposal to the grant committee that centered on the construction of a digital model of downtown Fargo and digital mapping of archival materials. The Gunlogson Award also allowed me to hire a half-time graduate research assistant.⁶

The project related to my broad research interests concerning architectural and urban epistemology. In general, my research considers the ways in which knowledge about the built environment is produced, manipulated, structured, disseminated, consumed, and archived, in both historical and contemporary practices.⁷ For this project I proposed to study the archive’s collections of images, texts, maps, and models associated with Fargo’s urban renewal program from 1955 to 1974 and, specifically, to use digital technologies to organize, cross-reference, and analyze selected materials. As a topical subject within the field...