Remaking Post-Industrial Cities

Lessons from North America and Europe

Donald K. Carter

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317481515
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Urban Planning & Landscaping

Remaking Post-Industrial Cities: Lessons from North America and Europe examines the transformation of post-industrial cities after the precipitous collapse of big industry in the 1980s on both sides of the Atlantic, presenting a holistic approach to restoring post-industrial cities.

Developed from the influential 2013 Remaking Cities Congress, conference chair Donald K. Carter brings together ten in-depth case studies of cities across North America and Europe, documenting their recovery from 1985 to 2015. Each chapter discusses the history of the city, its transformation, and prospects for the future. The cases cross-cut these themes with issues crucial to the resilience of post-industrial cities including sustainability; doing more with less; public engagement; and equity (social, economic and environmental), the most important issue cities face today and for the foreseeable future.

This book provides essential "lessons learned" from the mistakes and successes of these cities, and is an invaluable resource for practitioners and students of planning, urban design, urban redevelopment, economic development and public and social policy.

Part I
North American City Case Studies

1
The View from the United States

Alan Mallach

Driven by the simultaneous disruptive processes of migration, economic readjustment, and demographic change, cities in the United States have undergone a profound transformation since the end of World War II. Through the 1980s, that transformation was a negative one for most cities as they lost jobs, wealth, and population. Since the 1990s, a growing number of cities, although far from all, have begun to rebuild themselves by finding new economic roles and reconfiguring their physical form. Even in more successful cities, regeneration has been spatially and economically uneven in its effects on different places and sectors of the population, leaving many neighborhoods and their residents behind. As cities today grapple with post-industrial realities, they face the challenges of finding new roles in the global economy, rebuilding their physical fabric, systems, and infrastructure, and re-emerging as the hubs of innovation that they once were.

From Industrial to Post-Industrial: A Short History to 1985

America’s older cities embody the remarkable rise of the United States from the mid-1800s to the early twentieth century from a largely agrarian nation into the world’s economic and industrial powerhouse. Dozens of cities, large and small, were part of that transformation. Many of them have become iconic, with Detroit becoming a synonym for the car industry and Pittsburgh for steelmaking. By 1920, Detroit was the fourth largest city in the United States, Cleveland the fifth largest, and Pittsburgh the ninth.

These cities were not only industrial powerhouses, but were also centers of government, arts, learning and culture. Even today, universities like Johns Hopkins, Carnegie Mellon University, the University of Pittsburgh, and Case Western Reserve are among America’s greatest. The recent controversy over selling the collection of the Detroit Institute of Arts serves to remind us of its importance, not only to the world of art, but to its community. They were also centers of upward mobility, as generations of immigrants—from inside and outside the United States—came there, found decent-paying, albeit dirty and sometimes dangerous work, and propelled their children into the American middle class. The cities were polluted and far from pretty, yet they were vital centers of unprecedented opportunity (Figure 1.1).

As early as the 1920s, automobile ownership and suburban growth were already beginning to erode urban supremacy. The Great Depression, which froze pre-existing patterns for over a decade, was followed by World War II, when the conversion of American industry into a powerful war machine gave cities a new, but brief lease on vitality and prosperity. As the nation demobilized at the end of the war, industrial cities were in many respects tired, run-down places, which had seen little growth or investment for nearly two decades. As the nation embraced the automobile with a passion, the stage was set for their collapse.

Figure 1.1 Southside Pittsburgh, circa 1940

Source: Photo by Jack Delano, Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, FSA/OWI Collection.

Between the late 1940s and the 1980s, a series of radical changes transformed cities from the nation’s powerhouse to its urban problem. Many different factors contributed to that transformation. Suburbanization took off soon after the end of World War II, with thousands of new homes built on former cornfields and apple orchards across the country. Nassau County, east of New York City, saw its population grow from 400,000 to nearly 700,000 during the late 1940s and to 1.3 million by 1960. Simultaneously, America’s population center moved from the north and east to the south and west. Since 1950, as the population of the United States has roughly doubled, that of Florida, California, Arizona, and Texas has quadrupled. Phoenix has gone from a city of 100,000 to one of nearly 1.5 million.

Although urban manufacturing in the Northeast and Midwest was still strong at the end of World War II, its days were numbered. Obsolete plants and equipment, coupled with competition from the suburbs, the South, and eventually overseas, led to the collapse of historic industries from the 1960s through the 1980s, as not only large-scale heavy industries such as steel or automobiles, but also much smaller-scale manufacturing, largely disappeared from the cities. These industries not only had provided the jobs for the city’s population, but also had occupied large parts of each city’s land mass. The collapse of manufacturing left the cities not only with widespread unemployment, but with the vast physical residue of their historic industrialization.

Overlaid on these changes is the pervasive effect of race, the seemingly permanent elephant in the national living room. Black in-migration and white flight paralleled the collapse of the urban industrial base. Although racial conflict was an undercurrent in America’s urban history long before the riots of the 1960s, the riots moved it into the open, as the Kerner Commission warned: “Our nation is moving toward two societies, one black, one white—separate and unequal.”¹ Fifty years later things have changed in many respects, but have remained much the same in others.

Government was not indifferent to these changes. The Urban Renewal program pumped some $60 billion (in 2014 dollars) into the redevelopment of older cities in the 1950s and 1960s, while a host of other short-lived initiatives, including the War on Poverty, Model Cities, and Urban Development Action Grants (UDAG) were rolled out during the 1960s and 1970s. Some were useful, but modest in their scale and impact. The Urban Renewal program was far more ambitious, but grounded in flawed premises about the reasons for urban decline and misguided prescriptions for its reversal, thus, it was largely ineffective. As John Teaford has written:

By the early 1960s, however, skeptics were questioning the merits of federally subsidized urban renewal, and ten years later the program generally evoked images of destruction and delay rather than renaissance and reconstruction. By the time it died in 1974, the federal urban renewal program was much maligned and could claim at best mixed results.²

When the first Remaking Cities Conference took place in Pittsburgh in 1988, the view from the United States was not a promising one. Almost every older city had lost population since the 1950s, and abandonment of old buildings had become endemic. Their manufacturing bases had sharply declined, much of their middle class had decamped for suburbia, and the remaining population was far poorer than that of their suburban neighbors. While many participants in the conference presented scattered revitalization success stories, usually sustained with public funds, the overall picture was one of sustained decline.

From 1985 to 2015: Era of Change

There is no way to pinpoint an exact moment when the trajectories of America’s older cities began to change, but it is clear that the decades of the 1990s and 2000s saw a dramatic change. While a few older cities, most notably New York City and Boston,³ had already shown strong revival, since the 1990s, revival has spread to city after city, including many that had been all but left for dead in earlier years. In the late 1980s, Washington, D.C., was widely known as “the murder capital of the world” with a downtown that was “dull, dirty, and dangerous.”⁴ Today not only downtown, but large parts of the district are vibrant and exciting. In a dramatic reversal, the city’s population is growing by 10,000–15,000 people per year.

Washington, D.C., as the center of government for the wealthiest and most powerful nation in the world and a mecca for lobbyists, non-profit organizations, government contractors, and think tanks, may be an extreme case, but is far from unique. Pittsburgh has become the poster child for Rust Belt revival, but Baltimore, Philadelphia, and St. Louis are also experiencing highly visible change. Buildings have been restored and new ones constructed, new stores and restaurants open, and thousands of people are moving into these cities to live and work.

Like their earlier decline, the reasons for the cities’ turnaround are complicated, and reflect economic, generational, and other forces. One factor has been the growth in what is often called the knowledge economy. As universities and medical centers have grown into behemoths, they have drawn billions of dollars and thousands of highly-skilled people to them; Johns Hopkins in Baltimore and the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center (UPMC) in Pittsburgh have become the dominant economic engines of those two cities. Over the past decade, Baltimore has added 25,000 jobs in health care and education, to the point where they now make up almost two out of every five jobs in the city. Counting the multipliers generated by spending, spin-offs, and secondary employment, it is likely that these two sectors account for two-thirds or more of the urban economy, with tourism and entertainment likely to account for much of the rest. The picture is similar in Pittsburgh, where education and health care have grown by 30,000 jobs over the past decade. UPMC has become not only the largest employer in Pittsburgh, but in all of Western Pennsylvania. In Buffalo, the health care sector provides nearly one-quarter of all the jobs in the city.⁵ These once-industrial cities have truly become post-industrial cities.

The economic shift is paralleled by an even more significant change in how generations of Americans see their cities. The mindset that led middle- and upper-income families to flee the cities in the 1960s and 1970s has changed; younger people today, largely raised in the suburbs, see cities as desirable and a destination of choice. Well-educated, highly-skilled people who have reached adulthood during the past ten to fifteen years, members of what has come to be known as the millennial generation, are flocking to the cities in unprecedented numbers. While Washington, D.C., grew by 13 percent between 2000 and 2013, its population aged 25–34 with BA/BS or higher degrees more than doubled, going from 51,000 to nearly 113,000. Although that demographic makes up only 4 percent of the nation’s population, they were 17 percent of Washington’s entire population in 2013 and at the current rate of increase will exceed 20 percent of the city’s population by 2020. The same trend is visible in other formerly-industrial cities. Pittsburgh has seen that demographic increase by 60 percent or 12,000 since 2000; millennials with college degrees now make up 11 percent of the city’s population.

Millenials seek out distinctive urban assets: high density, walkability, historic and architectural character, and a rich mixture of land and building uses. Areas that share those features have been transformed. For example, Washington Avenue, once St. Louis’ garment district and all but abandoned twenty years ago, is now a vibrant shopping and entertainment district with thousands of residents living in restored factories and warehouses (Figure 1.2). Transformation is not without its problems; as the New Orleans case study de...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Figures
• Tables
• Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part I North American City Case Studies
• Part II European City Case Studies
• List of Contributors
• Index