Ever responding to the impulses of capitalism and modernity, the American city of the post-World War II era was shaped in unprecedented ways by the emergent power of a new player: the Federal government. Where modernity dictated the constant destruction and regeneration of "physical environments, social institutions, metaphysical ideas, artistic visions, moral values" (Berman); and where capitalism constantly revolutionized not only the means of production but the techniques of consumption and accumulation; we see, with the sweeping presence of the Federal government, a radical transformation in the nature of the post-war city. In this paper, I will demonstrate how spatial disintegration, racial discrimination, and the influence of federal mandates on municipal affairs came to refashion the where and why--the geography--of the post-war American city.
	Whereas the city as coalesced in the late 19th century operated under its municipal government and had reached a certain degree of functional stability, the post-war era found the city claimed as progeny by a new mentor. The megalomaniacal bureaucratically structured Federal government, flush with the emergence of post-war American world hegemony, descended on the cites like a patron saint. It sought to at once resolve chronic housing shortages, to clean up the residue of racism and economic disadvantage, and to pump life back into a city that was being sapped of its vitality by the Federal government's own policies.
Historically, the intervention of the Federal government in municipal affairs has its roots in the Depression and the mobilization of World War II. Those eras saw the Federal government intimately involved with, in the 1930's, the erection of institutions that put millions to work on infrastructure projects that could only have been orchestrated by a body as powerful and rich as the Federal government was. The Civil Works Administration and the Works Progress Administration, as well as the unmistakable imprint on New York of megalomaniac par excellence Robert "He wasn't a do-gooder; he was a muthafucker" Moses (2), were matchless examples of the power the Federal government possessed to shape the urban and extra-urban landscape. World War II gave industry the boost it needed to finally rouse the U.S. from its Depression; by the end of that maleficent exercise, the Federal government and capital were poised to coordinate a refashioning of the city, and indeed, of the way Americans lived their lives.
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