Decline and Renewal in North American Cities

Abstract

Time magazine featured an autopsy of Detroit, Michigan, a city of nearly 750,000 people. In it, Motor City native Daniel Okrent injects the now-familiar urban declension narrative with a shot of hyperbole, treating readers to a titillating tour of the Rust Belt's most notorious metropolis. According to the author, Detroit is a city that "has been brought to its knees," "the urban equivalent of a boxer's mouth, more gaps than teeth," and a metropolis in the midst of a "death spiral." 1 Angered by the deindustrialization and depopulation of this once "muscular" city, Okrent deploys these and other metaphors in an attempt to convey both the human costs of the urban crisis and his own authenticity as an observer. The results, unfortunately, are quite mixed. On the positive side, Okrent accurately describes many of Detroit's most pressing social problems-everything from crime to corporate greed. More negatively, though, Okrent's anthropomorphic caricatures of Detroit's demise reinforce the popular fiction that cities somehow die after white people, investors, and professionals move away from them. Only slightly less vexing is the author's insistence on identifying the individuals who "killed Detroit," a polarizing exercise that offends many city dwellers while simultaneously obscuring the deep structural roots of the urban crisis. The clear lesson in all of this is that narratives and metaphors of urban death are unfair-both to thriving neighborhoods such as Detroit's Mexicantown and, more generally, to the millions of people who remain in shrinking cities.Like journalists, historians have been writing about the decline of the modern city for decades. 2 In 1996, Thomas Sugrue's The Origins of the Urban Crisis traced how white racism and corporate disinvestment shaped "Detroit's journey from urban heyday to urban crisis." Significantly, Sugrue argued that the "rusting of the Rust Belt" began quietly after World War II, long before the destructive urban riots of the 1960s. 3 While Sugrue marshaled an impressive

Racist housing practices as a precursor to uneven neighborhood change in a post-industrial city

“…The work of Henthorn (2005) and Highsmith (2009aHighsmith ( , 2009bHighsmith ( , 2011Highsmith ( , 2012Highsmith ( , 2013 has been valuable in providing a social-historical view into the reasons behind racially motivated housing abandonment in Flint. The current study has built on this understanding -and research on racism and housing more generally -by lending a spatial lens to the effects of demographic change.…”

“…Aalbers (2014) recently discussed the parade of scholars who conceptualize neighborhood change and decline as a natural consequence of aging housing, including Hoover & Vernon (1959), Downs (1973), and Grigsby et al (1987). While racially motivated exclusionary housing policies have influenced this decline (Highsmith, 2011), many studies frame decline from a strictly economic perspective (as in , and thus may miss the influence of demographic changes or white flight on neighborhood change. Yet it is well known that white flight and Downloaded by [University of Lethbridge] at 04:51 11 June 2016 deliberate disinvestment are precursors to abandonment (Duncan et al, 1975).…”

Urban Decline: The Staying Power of a Postwar Story

“…Speaking of the literature on postwar urban renewal, Highsmith charged that too many scholars "treat community members as silent victims of the federal bulldozer." 8 In a similar vein, Highsmith argues in Demolition that "the driving forces" in Flint and other cities "have always been renewal and reinvention more than decline and abandonment" (p. 6). However, there is a slight mismatch between Highsmith's tone in these remarks and the evidence in Demolition.…”

Shifting shorelines: Land reclamation and economic blackmail in industrial South Chicago

“…I extend this work by showing that corporate strategies of economic blackmail not only drove processes of post-1970s deindustrialization; they were also integral to fueling industrial expansion during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, another period of weak union protections, outsized corporate influence, and widespread social and economic inequality. My research helps challenge the declension narrative that assumes a non-cyclical trend toward decline resulting from the inevitable effects of neutral market forces by showing specific corporate and state actions that drove both economic development and disinvestment (Highsmith, 2011; Neumann, 2016).…”