Decline machines and economic development: rust belt cities and Flint, Michigan

Wilson, David; Heil, Melissa

doi:10.1080/02723638.2020.1840736

Cited by 11 publications

(9 citation statements)

References 54 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…In these cases, ‘decline’ can be employed as a discursive construct meant to catalyse an exclusionary and racialised process of urban renewal (Wilson and Heil, 2022). Here decline not only highlights the existence of potential rent gaps, but it also exoticises cities and their residents, and serves as justification for growth-oriented interventions (Wilson and Heil, 2022). This explains the apparent contradiction between the discourse that justifies ‘shrinking cities’ in order to improve service delivery, and exclusionary outcomes of initiatives that manage decline (Béal et al, 2019; Rhodes and Russo, 2013).…”

Section: The Case For Subordinate Degrowthmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…However, many of these initiatives comprise members of erstwhile 'growth machines' who would welcome a return to business-as-usual if it were feasible. In these cases, 'decline' can be employed as a discursive construct meant to catalyse an exclusionary and racialised process of urban renewal (Wilson and Heil, 2022). Here decline not only highlights the existence of potential rent gaps, but it also exoticises cities and their residents, and serves as justification for growth-oriented interventions (Wilson and Heil, 2022).…”

Section: The Case For Subordinate Degrowthmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In response to urban decline, coalitions of place-based actors whose livelihoods and wellbeing are tied to a city/region engage in a politics of adaptation. Scholarship focused on these ‘degrowth machines’, ‘decline machines’ or attempts to deal with ‘shrinking cities’ (Martinez-Fernandez et al, 2012; Schindler, 2016; Wilson and Heil, 2022) reveals that these coping strategies have an ambiguous relationship with degrowth. Neoliberal approaches and market interests dominate initiatives to manage urban decline in ways that are presented as ecologically sustainable and socially inclusive (Béal et al, 2019; Clement and Kanai, 2015; Rhodes and Russo, 2013).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 2 more Smart Citations

Deindustrialisation and the politics ofsubordinate degrowth: The case of Greater Buenos Aires, Argentina

2023

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Cities in low- and middle-income countries have experienced deindustrialisation as localised agglomerations that historically served domestic and regional markets have become exposed to highly productive global value chains as capital has been (re)allocated to primary sectors. State, corporate and social actors have responded to economic decline by embracing a range of coping and adaptation strategies, some of which are consistent with degrowth, but they are often combined with business-as-usual initiatives in pursuit of economic growth. We refer to this as subordinate degrowth because localised responses are conditioned by the subordinate position of countries and cities in the global economy. While we acknowledge its divergence from ‘pure’ ideal-type degrowth, we do not dismiss the transformative potential of incremental change. Indeed, we argue that any realistic strategy to spatialise degrowth within cities must recognise the indeterminacy and messiness of urban politics. We employ subordinate degrowth as an analytic to interpret responses to deindustrialisation and economic decline in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Our analysis attends to three meso-level blind spots that characterise much degrowth scholarship, between (1) particular and universal, (2) advanced-industrial and agrarian ideal-types and (3) past/current socio-technical regimes and ‘pure’ degrowth.

show abstract

Section: The Case For Subordinate Degrowthmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: The Case For Subordinate Degrowthmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

Deindustrialisation and the politics ofsubordinate degrowth: The case of Greater Buenos Aires, Argentina

2023

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Machine actors racialize this managing of political opposition and dissent voices. Here, race becomes an "ontological powerhouse" (Wilson and Heil, 2020) and space-producing resource, with oppositional voices from historic preservation groups accused of embodying racist motivations to deny African-American communities their longed for economic development. Yet machine actors deliberately bypass and ignore African-American residents and their concerns about gentrification and displacement, too, despite claiming that the OPC is an inclusive project where every concerned resident can make their voices heard.…”

Section: Silencing Through Racializationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Silencing, Urban Growth Machines, and the Obama Presidential Center on Chicago's South Side

Schwarze¹,

Wilson²

2022

Front. Sustain. Cities

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Recent research on growth machines, in a prominent theme, has focused on how mobilized discourses promote urban redevelopment projects. Pushed to the margins, in this work, has been the issue of how alternative growth visions and voices are silenced or muffled. This article examines the notion of “silencing” in urban growth discourses. Silencing, it is argued, should not be understood as censorship but rather as attempts by growth machines to relativize the importance of critical and dissent voices in redevelopment projects. We believe that to understand how redevelopment projects operate and transform (urban) spaces, such rhetorical peripherialization is as important as pro-growth discourses. In developing this argument, the article focuses on the case study of the Obama Presidential Center (OPC) on Chicago's Southeast Side. An OPC growth machine consisting of the Obama Foundation, the city mayor, the University of Chicago, and a coalition of local business and community organizations practices this simultaneity of offering their voice and undercutting alternative voices in adroit ways. Race, it is argued, is at the center of this systematic suppression. The OPC development provides an important example of how current redevelopment in cities across the global west currently proceeds.

show abstract

“…Dracula-itis furtively moves among us, not as dreams or legends, but as realities of planetarysprawling growth organizations that seductively extract the essence of others as they propel growth and negotiate the shadows of the ordinary -David Wilson (2021) The blood is the life! -Bram Stoker (1897) The dramatic rise of Stein's (2019) real-estate state across the globe (powerfully meshing realestate interests with government programs) now feverishly implements a mania: smart city building (c.f.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Toward a Dracula urbanism: Smart city building in Flint and Jakarta

Wilson

Wyly

2022

Dialogues in Urban Research

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

We study two places experiencing the rise of both the real-estate state and smart city building, Jakarta, Indonesia and Flint, USA. Our core thesis: these real-estate states work through and make a kind of urbanism that we term Dracula urbanism. We identify Dracula urbanism as a deep-reaching, human-punishing unfolding that is simultaneously a state of mind, a mode of institutional operation, a vision of people, one gaze onto growth's true needs and a kind of growth produced. Our Dracula urbanist notion that is seen to engulf real-estate states has four central features. First, the political and economic resources to drive smart city building are secured through ever-thickening parasitic relations, particularly with upper-level sources of power and authority. Second, city building involves unrelenting drives to kill and destroy (not rehabilitate or therapeutize) supposedly deep civic ‘cancers’, such as the poor's presumed anti-civic, morally and culturally deficient dispositions and ways. Third, city building is promoted through strategically deploying the materiality and discursive terrors of decline. Fourth, local real-estate states are decisively integrated into ‘planetary urbanizations’ through circuits of smart-growth capital investment and techno-scientific claims to expertise. All of these, we chronicle, are vintage characteristics of Stoker's rendition of Dracula. The results suggest that the cultural politics of in-your-face revanchism that Neil Smith helped us to see, and is still present in cities such as Flint and Jakarta, is today accompanied by an equally punishing, complicated and adroitly adapting state politics in these places.

show abstract

Decline machines and economic development: rust belt cities and Flint, Michigan

Cited by 11 publications

References 54 publications

Deindustrialisation and the politics ofsubordinate degrowth: The case of Greater Buenos Aires, Argentina

Deindustrialisation and the politics ofsubordinate degrowth: The case of Greater Buenos Aires, Argentina

Silencing, Urban Growth Machines, and the Obama Presidential Center on Chicago's South Side

Toward a Dracula urbanism: Smart city building in Flint and Jakarta

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About