In the late 1960s, cities faced urban policies that tolerated job losses and neighborhood decline. Despite this national retreat from public sector commitments, a few cities fought back by opening their city halls to wider participation and by redistributing resources to poor neighborhoods. These and other neighborhoods began doing their own planning, resulting in new city policy directions, new voices, and new services, taking up some of the slack left by public cutbacks.
The Project is an effort to preserve and collect the historical record of these initiatives, to engage scholars in researching them, and to stimulate and support related collections at the sites where the material is generated.
The Collection consists of 12 cubic feet of documents and other resources, and is held at Cornell University Library's Division of Rare and Manuscripts Collections (RMC). It includes many of the works referenced in the Project, and has been exhaustively indexed. Access is open to the public.
