In 1959, under the leadership of City Planner George Oberlander and with support from Louis Danzig, the Newark Planning Commission produced the report Newark Urban Renewal Plan: A Demonstration Grant Project. In that document, the Planning Commission gave a grade or ‘score’ to every street in the city to help decide which neighborhoods were so ‘blighted’ or ‘obsolete’ that they were ripe for demolition. One of the metrics they used was what the neighborhoods looked like, or what they called ‘aesthetic scoring.’ Neighborhoods that looked good got a good score (a “0” or a “1”). If a street or neighborhood got a bad score (up to “10”), it could be considered blighted, opening it up to potential whole-scale clearing.
The Planning Commission sent out an army of assessors to give every city block and every industrial building an aesthetic and obsolescence score, and then processed them with the newest technology: an IBM punch-card machine.
The impulse to tie culture and aesthetics to civilization is common to all colonizing projects. Colonizers claim superior culture and humanity to justify the suppression and removal of subjects deemed less civilized and thus less human. This was no different in 1960s Newark, where urban planners used the language of high culture to demote and delegitimize existing populations.
The Planning Commission sent out an army of assessors to give every city block and every industrial building an aesthetic and obsolescence score, and then processed them with the newest technology: an IBM punch-card machine.
The impulse to tie culture and aesthetics to civilization is common to all colonizing projects. Colonizers claim superior culture and humanity to justify the suppression and removal of subjects deemed less civilized and thus less human. This was no different in 1960s Newark, where urban planners used the language of high culture to demote and delegitimize existing populations.
The results:
X = bad
X = very bad
X = bad
X = very bad
The city’s urban planners, developers, and think tanks like the Urban Land Institute seized on the tropes of superior culture to justify the clearance of existing minority families based on their supposed lack of aesthetic sensibility, covering over urban renewal’s actual, far more venal goals: the desire for economic expansion and profit.
With aesthetic scoring as “a Method and a Philosophy,” the Demonstration Grant claimed: “It would appear then, that blight is closely attached to aesthetic appearance and by multiplication of component parts – to that of a neighborhood and community. If the visual impression evokes no comment, criticism, objection, or revulsion, then it can be reasoned that an aesthetic receptivity is absent. ... And this offense is an affront to the human appreciation of and need for aesthetic order, harmony and balance. “
In sum: if people living in deteriorating neighborhoods continued to live there, rather than leaving out of revulsion, they must lack the proper sense of artistic refinement, and therefore be less human.
George Oberlander, Newark Urban Renewal Plan: A Demonstration Grant Project, 1959
With aesthetic scoring as “a Method and a Philosophy,” the Demonstration Grant claimed: “It would appear then, that blight is closely attached to aesthetic appearance and by multiplication of component parts – to that of a neighborhood and community. If the visual impression evokes no comment, criticism, objection, or revulsion, then it can be reasoned that an aesthetic receptivity is absent. ... And this offense is an affront to the human appreciation of and need for aesthetic order, harmony and balance. “
In sum: if people living in deteriorating neighborhoods continued to live there, rather than leaving out of revulsion, they must lack the proper sense of artistic refinement, and therefore be less human.
George Oberlander, Newark Urban Renewal Plan: A Demonstration Grant Project, 1959
