How the Tools Traveled

by bam

The capstone of the route series, and the course that turns a shelf of city courses into a curriculum with a thesis. Each city course in this series documented a decision: a blight designation in Indianapolis, a Supreme Court opinion out of Southwest Washington, a school district line in Detroit and Indianapolis, a racial zoning ordinance in Baltimore, a public-private partnership in Pittsburgh, a closed Army post in Lawrence, Indiana. Told separately they look like local misfortunes. They were not. They were a shared toolkit, largely federal, applied locally, and this course teaches the transmission rather than the tools. You will start with a taxonomy of connection, ranked from source and use at the strongest to thematic rhyme at the weakest, and with the rule that governs the rest of the course: a shared pattern is a rhyme, and only a documented line, a citation, a copied plan, a named person or a funding stream, is a connection. Then you will read the federal upstream in its own words: the Housing Acts of 1949 and 1954, the Federal Housing Administration's Underwriting Manual, and the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956, which was formally the National System of Interstate and Defense Highways and is the bridge between the war material and the city material. Then you will work the flagship connection all the way through, Berman v. Parker out of Southwest Washington, and watch it fail the chronology test in its strong form and survive in a weaker and truer one. Then you will test three more lines and one whole category the course could not close, without re-inflating a single claim a sibling course weakened. Fort Harrison shows the same federal upstream acting through a different mechanism, as landowner and employer rather than funder. The course ends where an honest one has to end, with what none of this proves, and with a drill and an assignment that make you test a connection of your own. Prerequisites: The Green Book: How to Read a Route, plus at least two city courses, of which Indiana Avenue: A District and What Replaced It and Washington, DC: Where the Instrument Was Blessed are the two ends of the connection worked here.