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The most pressing question facing the small and mid-sized cities of
America's industrial heartland is how to reinvent themselves.
Once-thriving communities in the Northeastern and Midwestern U. S.
have decayed sharply as the high-wage manufacturing jobs that
provided the foundation for their prosperity disappeared. A few
larger cities had the resources to adjust, but most smaller places
that relied on factory work have struggled to do so. Unless and
until they find new economic roles for themselves, the small cities
will continue to decline. Reinventing these smaller cities is a
tall order. A few might still function as nodes of industrial
production. But landing a foreign-owned auto manufacturer or a
green energy plant hardly solves every problem. The new jobs will
not be unionized and thus will not pay nearly as much as the
positions lost. The competition among localities for high-tech and
knowledge economy firms is intense. Decaying towns with poor
schools and few amenities are hardly in a good position to attract
the "creative-class" workers they need. Getting to the point where
they can lure such companies will require extensive retooling, not
just economically but in terms of their built environment, cultural
character, political economy, and demographic mix. Such changes
often run counter to the historical currents that defined these
places as factory towns. After the Factory examines the fate of
industrial small cities from a variety of angles. It includes
essays from a variety of disciplines that consider the sources and
character of economic growth in small cities. They delve into the
history of industrial small cities, explore the strategies that
some have adopted, and propose new tacks for these communities as
they struggle to move forward in the twenty-first century.
Together, they constitute a unique look at an important and
understudied dimension of urban studies and globalization.
Beyond Rust chronicles the rise, fall, and rebirth of metropolitan
Pittsburgh, an industrial region that once formed the heart of the
world's steel production and is now touted as a model for reviving
other hard-hit cities of the Rust Belt. Writing in clear and
engaging prose, historian and area native Allen Dieterich-Ward
provides a new model for a truly metropolitan history that
integrates the urban core with its regional hinterland of satellite
cities, white-collar suburbs, mill towns, and rural mining areas.
Pittsburgh reached its industrial heyday between 1880 and 1920, as
vertically integrated industrial corporations forged a regional
community in the mountainous Upper Ohio River Valley. Over
subsequent decades, metropolitan population growth slowed as mining
and manufacturing employment declined. Faced with economic and
environmental disaster in the 1930s, Pittsburgh's business elite
and political leaders developed an ambitious program of pollution
control and infrastructure development. The public-private
partnership behind the "Pittsburgh Renaissance," as advocates
called it, pursued nothing less than the selective erasure of the
existing social and physical environment in favor of a modernist,
functionally divided landscape: a goal that was widely copied by
other aging cities and one that has important ramifications for the
broader national story. Ultimately, the Renaissance vision of
downtown skyscrapers, sleek suburban research campuses, and bucolic
regional parks resulted in an uneven transformation that tore the
urban fabric while leaving deindustrializing river valleys and
impoverished coal towns isolated from areas of postwar growth.
Beyond Rust is among the first books of its kind to continue past
the collapse of American manufacturing in the 1980s by exploring
the diverse ways residents of an iconic industrial region sought
places for themselves within a new economic order.
The most pressing question facing the small and mid-sized cities of
America's industrial heartland is how to reinvent themselves.
Once-thriving communities in the Northeastern and Midwestern U. S.
have decayed sharply as the high-wage manufacturing jobs that
provided the foundation for their prosperity disappeared. A few
larger cities had the resources to adjust, but most smaller places
that relied on factory work have struggled to do so. Unless and
until they find new economic roles for themselves, the small cities
will continue to decline. Reinventing these smaller cities is a
tall order. A few might still function as nodes of industrial
production. But landing a foreign-owned auto manufacturer or a
green energy plant hardly solves every problem. The new jobs will
not be unionized and thus will not pay nearly as much as the
positions lost. The competition among localities for high-tech and
knowledge economy firms is intense. Decaying towns with poor
schools and few amenities are hardly in a good position to attract
the "creative-class" workers they need. Getting to the point where
they can lure such companies will require extensive retooling, not
just economically but in terms of their built environment, cultural
character, political economy, and demographic mix. Such changes
often run counter to the historical currents that defined these
places as factory towns. After the Factory examines the fate of
industrial small cities from a variety of angles. It includes
essays from a variety of disciplines that consider the sources and
character of economic growth in small cities. They delve into the
history of industrial small cities, explore the strategies that
some have adopted, and propose new tacks for these communities as
they struggle to move forward in the twenty-first century.
Together, they constitute a unique look at an important and
understudied dimension of urban studies and globalization.
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