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A Memorial Tribute to Roger Montgomery

By MARC A. WEISS
Friday October 31, 2003

My first memory of Roger Montgomery was when I was a graduate student in the Department of City and Regional Planning at the University of California, Berkeley in 1978. I took his class on Community Development. Roger was well-known at the time as being a critic of the infamous federal “Urban Renewal” program that had displaced so many low-income minorities from inner-city neighborhoods during the 1960s that it had been informally renamed the “Negro Removal Program.” Roger had provided expert faculty support to a movement to block urban renewal in the west Berkeley flatlands, and had helped to stop a substantial degree of displacement that would otherwise have occurred. Roger was a passionate political progressive, and he brought his passions into his classroom teaching in a way that I greatly admired. I particularly remember him drawing a picture on the blackboard of the widely heralded urban renewal in the Hyde Park neighborhood of Chicago, home to the University of Chicago, and I was struck by the way a policy activist like Roger could think in such distinctly visual images.  

A short time later I was hired by Roger as a graduate research assistant and did a major project, inspired by Roger, on the history of urban renewal. My research was published in 1980 as what is now a quite well-known article in the urban planning field, “The Origins and Legacy of Urban Renewal.” This article was very controversial at the time, as it critiqued the prevailing view among planners that urban renewal was a “failure” that produced negative consequences that were not intended by the program designers and managers. I argued, with Roger’s enthusiastic support, that in fact urban renewal did exactly what it was designed to do, and that its intentions were clearly understood all the way back to the origins of the program originally called “district replanning” back in the 1920s. Roger helped stiffen my backbone and find the courage to stand my ground. In the end, with his help, we won this debate, and my historical argument, once so controversial, has since become the standard interpretation in the field, and within decade after publication the article was even called a “classic” by two distinguished urban planning scholars in a literature review. 

Many years after I left UC Berkeley as a “Dr.” I still frequently called upon Roger for advice and support. Two years ago I started working to create the Prague Institute for Global Urban Development, of which one of my other former UC Berkeley professors, Sir Peter Hall, is currently serving as Vice Chairman of the Board of Directors. From the very beginning I turned to Roger to assist in our efforts, and even though he was already retired from professional activity and severely ill with cancer, he readily agreed to serve as one of the founding members of our international Advisory Board. In his loving memory, the Prague Institute is now dedicating an annual fellowship and memorial lecture to Roger Montgomery 

I dearly loved Roger, and I will miss him more than words can say. My hope is that his soul is not completely resting in heaven, but that he is also still shaking up the system and fighting for social justice, which was always his favorite thing to be doing. May his life inspire many more urbanists to follow in his example, just as Roger as a young man was deeply inspired by his political hero, Norman Thomas. I suppose they will never give Nobel Prizes for urban radicals, but if they did, Roger Montgomery would be my prime candidate. 

 

Dr. Marc A. Weiss is Chairman of the Prague Institute for Global Urban Development in Prague, Czech Republic and Washington, DC.