In Detroit, one legacy of urban renewal’s appetite for residential demolition was a proliferation of contaminated but archaeologically significant deposits at parcels throughout the city. Today, when federal agencies redevelop these parcels, federal law requires that they appropriately address both environmental contamination and archaeological significance.

Despite sharing objects of study - urban deposits - the environmental and archaeological professionals who manage these processes frequently work in isolation from each other. However, many environmental remediation activities involve substantial ground disturbance, including complete removal of contaminated but potentially archaeologically significant deposits. This sets up a direct conflict between environmental remediation and archaeological management, leading to project delays and potential regulatory compliance failures.

The authors, an archaeologist and an environmental scientist who review proposed housing redevelopments for the City of Detroit, discuss the interplay between our sometimes conflicting goals and how coordination between archaeological and environmental professionals can improve both of our processes.

This presentation explores artist and SAIC professor Jan Tichy’s interdisciplinary collaborations with urban archaeologists Dr. Krysta Ryzewski (Wayne State University) and Dr. Rebecca S. Graff (Lake Forest College), bringing contemporary art into active dialogue with archaeological practice. The collaboration begins with a 2022 project developed in partnership with MOCAD, where Detroit youth and Wayne State archaeology students excavated the site of a 19th-century greenhouse, women’s prison dormitory, and privy as part of Tichy’s All Monsters exhibition at the Mike Kelley Mobile Homestead. The presentation then traces subsequent projects in Hamtramck, Michigan, and at Armour Flats on IIT campus in Chicago. Tichy presents his use of photograms to reimagine excavated artifacts—not merely as historical evidence, but as vessels of memory, abstraction, and transformation. Reframing these remains through visual and conceptual strategies, the presentation proposes new roles for artists within public history, excavation, preservation, and community engagement.

In 1969, the Habitations des Îlots Saint-Martin, the earliest nonprofit housing built by the Government of Quebec, welcomed its first residents. Designed by Ouellet, Reeves and Alain, the project would go on to win the Massey Medal for Architecture in 1970. It also contributed to erasing the built environment hitherto occupied by Afro-descendant communities, obscuring their essential contribution to the economic and cultural flourishing of Montréal. In the name of urban renewal, several blocks of Little Burgundy neighbourhood were demolished, making way for the Îlots and the Ville-Marie Expressway, and in the process evicting nearly 7,000 residents from their homes. Over half a century later, Montreal’s Afro-descendant community maintains its historical ties to Little Burgundy, although few tangible traces of this rootedness remain. This paper combines archaeology and architecture to explore opportunities for site-specific interventions that address this issue, in the context of the legacy of franco-nationalist modernism in Montréal.

Behind the glossy edifice of progress, urban renewal obscures as it recasts Chicago’s depleted landscapes. Yet, counternarratives traced in the soil challenge these complex systems offering social insights on the continued impact of past land-use in the present. This paper presents preliminary research on an archaeological examination of soil toxicity and site formation processes in landscapes undergoing urban renewal. I seek to determine the long-term effects of industry on environmental health, especially as this relates to community gardening. Building on previous work mapping toxic soils, I identify the presence of heavy metal contaminants, trace their relationship to historical land use, and examine how communities today contend with this legacy through gardening. This study draws from scholarship on urban landscapes, slow violence, and the politics of cultivation, while it serves as testing grounds for an interdisciplinary methodology combining archaeological excavation, ICP-OES soil testing, and archival land-use research, visualized through ArcGIS mapping.

A symbolic battleground whose laws and budget are controlled by Congress, Washington, DC, has been a national center of urban renewal experiments since the 1860s. The capital’s cycles of displacement and redevelopment have formed archaeological sites, directed excavation, and determined the fate of collections. This paper compares a recent public archaeology project with collections excavated during 1980s federal redevelopment efforts. It examines how urban planners’ framing of the city’s past and future - in the 1890s, 1980s, and 2010s - positioned archaeologists and Washingtonians to interpret the histories urban renewal unearthed. As one archaeologist explained, excavating the past reminds people that DC is more than the federal government - “an actual living city.” Washingtonians once again find themselves embroiled in national debates over the city’s appearance and their right to self-governance. This paper explores what renewed analysis of and public engagement with DC’s archaeological legacy collections can offer the present.

In recent years archaeologists have been calling for more intentional and engaged research in and of urban renewal to challenge the dominant narratives and practices as understood and produced by federal legislation, municipal ordinances, and historic preservation and heritage professionals. The areas in U.S. cities that have been most shaped by processes of urban renewal are often the same places that bear a disproportionate burden of vacancy, toxicity, environmental degradation, disinvestment, and climate change. This paper presents the preliminary results from interdisciplinary research on Chicago’s West Side led by sociocultural anthropologists, archaeologists, soil scientists, community gardeners, and landscape architects, focusing on how ground is produced by decades of under or unregulated residential demolition and filling, and how future interventions such as sunken rainwater catchment gardens might be become the infrastructure of climate change.

Nashville, Tennessee, has seen rapid growth and gentrification in the last decade. While the city has evolved, the dynamics of the current clearance process mirror similar efforts in the past. Archaeology is situated to uncover and document the reshaping of urban landscapes and the marginalization of many communities. Through an examination of recent archaeological projects and development policy in Nashville, this paper explores archaeology’s role in this process, the influence of the academic model, and the disconnect with the realities of the present.

Emotions are an intrinsic part of human behavior, embedded also in political systems like capitalism. In capitalism, rationality and progress are put to the forefront, but they hide underlying emotional frames that ultimately impact politics. Urban development is often done in the name of ‘rational’ progress as was the case for a working-class community in Oulu, northern Finland that was established after WWII, and ultimately torn down by the city in the late 1980s. During the period in question, the welfare state was crafted in Finland, but society was also struggling with Cold War realities and the simultaneous introduction of neoliberal capitalism in Europe and the US. Recognizing the impact of emotions in politics and policies can help provide an alternative view to urban displacement and bring nuanced understanding of processes that are done in the name of ‘progress’.