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A dominant interpretation of the twentieth-century U.S. city is one of declension, wherein cities contracted following a number of profound ruptures. At these moments, neoliberalism began its ascent, disconnecting the historical processes that created the city from the current policies and realities of American urban centers. By documenting the histories of urban agriculture in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, this essay seeks to complicate this declensionist narrative while highlighting the overlooked role that food production played in the growth of a major urban center—all the while providing a usable history for efforts to renew the twenty-first century city. Even during the height of industrial expansion in Milwaukee, urban agriculture played a significant role in the economic, social, and spatial development of the city. Then, as both deindustrialization and responses to such phenomena began to dramatically affect Milwaukee by the 1960s, urban agriculture remained a viable tool for urban redevelopment, one employed by both public- and private-sector actors well into the twenty-first century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Keywords: deindustrialization; post-Soviet urban; socialist legacy; socialist modern; Soviet planning; Tolyatti EN deindustrialization post-Soviet urban socialist legacy socialist modern Soviet planning Tolyatti 936 941 6 06/07/23 20230701 NES 230701 Novikov, Sergey Sher, Max (2019). Treating the Soviet Union as exclusively totalitarian and identifying Stalin's rule with the USSR also conflicts with the research of Alexei Yurchak, Jochen Hellbeck, Stephen Kotkin, Sheila Fitzpatrick, and many others who present Soviet experience as multidimensional and chronologically varied. As Sechi and Cera underline, although company towns were a key element of Soviet ideology, this type of urban settlement is not unique to the USSR or state socialist countries. 6 Jeremy Morris, "Notes on the "Worthless Dowry" of Soviet Industrial Modernity: Making Working-Class Russia Habitable", I Laboratorium: Russian Review of Social Research i 3 (2015): 25-48; Alexandrina Vanke, "Masculinities, Bodies and Subjectivities: Working-Class Men Negotiating Russia's Post-Soviet Gender Order", in I Masculinity, Labor and Neoliberalism: Working-Class Men in International Perspective i , ed. [Extracted from the article]

The redevelopment of the Bankside area in central London was proposed in 1943, yet substantive regeneration was only achieved toward the end of the century. This article analyzes the processes whereby a postwar industrial, then deindustrial, locality evolved into a popular leisure and residential quarter. It argues that strategic plans for the area engendered only incremental and piecemeal redevelopment. Change was principally driven by industrial decline, government building policies, and the availability of finance, and, since the 1990s, by private-sector investment and culture-driven regeneration. Tensions and conflicts arose over the direction of, sometimes controversial, redevelopment. The locality's principal building, Bankside power station, inhibited the realization of early redevelopment plans, but, as Tate Modern, was instrumental in the cultural and social transformation of the area. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the 1960s, a new and popular theory of “new careers” proposed to address urban poverty and deindustrialization by growing the human services sector and hiring so-called nonprofessional workers to aid the delivery of those services. This strategy gained traction in social scientific, philanthropic, and bureaucratic circles and shaped Great Society legislation, which allocated federal grants to create entry-level jobs and professionalizing career ladders in the fields of health, education, and welfare. The implementation of this strategy had consequences for the human service organizations that received federal funds, as well as for the people hired into the new positions. Instead of building ladders to professional employment, efforts produced dead-end positions that left the predominantly African American women hired as aides in poverty. Even as the new careers experiment helped usher in a post-industrial economy, it reinforced the stratification of the labor market along lines of race, gender, and credentials. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Detroit’s perceived social and industrial degeneration has been matched by an unfortunate aesthetic appreciation for the image of urban ruination. Detroit, and other cities experiencing economic disinvestment, have become the inanimate models for a documentary and artistic mode of photography that fetishizes scenes of urban decline and abandonment. Such cities and urban spaces have become real-life stand-ins for the apocalyptic imagination already nurtured in broader arts and media. The fascination with the ruins of contemporary culture and the proliferation of what is sometimes referred to as “ruin porn” photography, point toward Susan Sontag’s cautious warning about the photographer’s complicity in retaining the photographed object’s state of being. Drawing on Sontag’s suspicions of photography, I offer a critique of the function and meaning of ruin photography. I draw on both Sontag’s and Roland Barthes’s cautions about the interpretive function of the photograph in terms of the act of photographing the object as well as the meaning that the photograph proposes. Using this framework, I consider the recent conceptualizations of ruin, particularly the industrial ruin, as ambivalent and multifaceted. I question whether this multidimensionality is evident in the ruin photography of Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre and others, the urban exploration photography of Detroiturbex, and the documentary film Deptropia. I suggest that the photographer’s fascination with places of ruin carries out the double act of fixing such places firmly in a particular melancholic moment and equally fixes any potential meaning potentially represented in such imagery. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In dialogues among eight pairs of photographs, this piece aims to tell a distinct story about modernity’s industrial remains. These dialogues embody the workers’ dream of mass utopia that has come and gone. Images depicting Massachusetts’ Gateway Cities enter into conversation with photographs of Soviet industrial architecture.1 This juxtaposition of images and text serves the purpose of telling a story about the same thing: the rise and fall of empires, ones ideologically seemingly so different, yet similar in fate. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article discusses the role of former Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania mayor Pete Flaherty in relation the city's urban renewal known as the Pittsburgh Renaissance. Topics include the relation of Flaherty to the organization Allegheny Conference on Community Development (ACCD), the relation of Flaherty to the city's Democratic Party, and his involvement in neighborhood planning.

The article discusses the relationships between Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania's urban renewal known as the Pittsburgh Renaissance and deindustrialization in the region. Topics include the role of uneven economic development in deindustrialization, regional business cooperation by business elites, and the relation of the organization Allegheny Conference on Community Development (ACCD) to the city's industries.

The article discusses the Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania urban redevelopment known as the Pittsburgh Renaissance of light of 1930s visions of urban utopias. Topics include the 1939 World's Fair in New York City, the implementation of flood control measures in Pittsburgh, and Pittsburgh's response to the decline of its steel industry.

Effective place-based learning challenges the traditional understanding of academic service. The present article demonstrates that students and scholars can engage and collaborate with communities to identify, analyze, and respond to pressing social problems. Service, in this context, is integrated with teaching and research. This article traces the development of an applied research course at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. Students and professors conducted research on the neighborhoods that compose Baybrook, an industrial community in the southern corner of Baltimore City. The course demonstrates that public history methods can create dynamic social spaces in which scholars and residents work together to frame questions, conduct research, and preserve urban places. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Following World War II, executives from the General Motors Corporation (GM) implemented a sweeping corporate growth plan that centered on the suburbanization of manufacturing. As part of this agenda of metropolitan capitalism, company officials shifted resources and jobs away from the city of Flint, Michigan—GM’s international manufacturing headquarters. However, these capital migrations were not examples of corporate abandonment. Rather, the company’s investment decisions were part of a larger effort to expand Flint’s boundaries and create a regional government. Although suburban opponents ultimately defeated the proposal for a “New Flint,” GM’s support for metropolitan government belies the notion of capital flight at the heart of most literature on the “urban crisis.” Emphasizing the local struggles that unfolded over GM’s postwar investment strategy, this case study posits metropolitan capitalism as a new framework for explaining urban deindustrialization and, more broadly, the processes of suburban development. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In the eyes of many, the steel city of Gary, Indiana, entered a period of decline in the middle of the twentieth century. The once great city was seemingly racked by job loss, crime, racial division, or moral decay. Which of these caused the decline of the city depended upon the perspective of the story’s teller. Each narrative of decline contained a different moment where the city went wrong and it began to decay. For some it was the moral decay of the 1950s, for others it was the rise of black power and politics in the 1960s, for still others it was the white backlash against civil rights in the 1970s. Some saw a microcosm of America, some saw a dangerous cauldron of race and ethnicity. The source of decline and the origins of the urban crisis were largely in the eye of the beholder. The stories people chose to tell about Gary mattered because for much of the twentieth century, Gary was at the center of American narratives about industrialism. These were outsider narratives of decline read onto the Indiana steel city because Gary represented larger debates. People read onto Gary their changing expectations and anxieties about industry and industrial spaces. This article traces the changing attitudes outsiders held toward Gary from the middle of the twentieth century through the period of deindustrialization at the end of the century and examines American narratives about deindustrialization and urban decline. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

During the early 1970s, residents of St. Louis's poorest African American neighborhoods mounted a spirited campaign to get city politicians and public health officials to address the epidemic of childhood lead paint poisoning in their communities. This activism was directly connected to aspects of the civil rights and black power movements, but it was also a response to the decline of the city's physical space. Housing discrimination, disinvestment, deindustrialization, and population loss forced many poor black residents to live in the city's rapidly decaying housing stock. Activists and residents seized on childhood lead poisoning, caused by the overwhelming use of lead paint, as a tangible manifestation of discrimination and injustice. Although the success of this activism was limited--it raised awareness but did not solve the core problem of inadequate housing--the St. Louis story is an important example of postwar urban environmentalism. During the 1960s and 1970s, poor and working-class urbanites across the country engaged in similar activism to address the physical problems of urban decline. This activism was an important part of the early environmental movement and is the precursor to what would become known as environmental justice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In January 1974, Philadelphia's Somerset Knitting Mills Company announced plans for a new factory in the Franklin-Callowhill East Urban Renewal Area. The project received assistance from the Philadelphia Model Cities Administration and the Philadelphia Industrial Development Corporation—on the condition that Somerset employ neighborhood residents, mostly African Americans and Puerto Ricans, in its new plant. Confounding processes of deindustrialization and urban disinvestment, Somerset remained in its new building until 1992. This article contextualizes the project (and a related "Garment Center" for the local apparel industry) within the ideological and policy history of urban renewal. It argues that with their focus on countering deindustrialization and establishing community partnerships, the Somerset and Garment Center projects offered models of how urban renewal should have proceeded from its inception. The two projects also demonstrated that the local state can reconfigure supposedly "natural" market forces and counter the purportedly inevitable process of urban economic decline. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When historians refer to "urban renewal," they are not describing one singular policy. After 1945, as Andrew Highsmith, Irene Holliman, and Guian McKee show, leaders of renewal efforts in Flint, Atlanta, and Philadelphia assumed that a combination of slum clearance, office towers, and expressways would bring white, middle-class people back to downtown. Surprisingly, African American leaders in Flint and Atlanta often cooperated in these plans. In Philadelphia, however, Mayor Frank Rizzo, known as a racist, used renewal funds to create jobs for African American and Puerto Rican women. Federal officials also financed suburbanization, thus channeling resources away from the nation's inner cities and leaving behind a wake of dilapidated infrastructure and racialized poverty. White Americans attributed renewal and suburbanization to the work of markets, overlooking the decisive hand of politicians and public policy. The skewed effects of these renewal and suburbanization programs denote a time "when affirmative action was white." [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The deindustrialization of North American cities is generally told as a post-World War II narrative, featuring factory closings, highways to the suburbs, and urban renewal programs responding to the loss of jobs and population. Yet, as recent scholarship on industrial suburbanization has shown, the decentralization of manufacturing manifested itself throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Some scholars of twentieth-century planning have observed that urban renewal programs hurt cities as much as they helped. This essay argues that some late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century redevelopment programs played a greater causal role in deindustrialization and the shift in Americans' conceptions of cities from places of production to places of consumption. Surveying the complex relationships between urban and industrial restructuring in Philadelphia during the pre-Depression decades, it examines the prehistory of federal urban renewal at the state and local level. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A pioneering effort to understand working-class African Americans as historical agents. "Black Milwaukee" situated the Great Migration within an ongoing debate over workers' ability to shape the transition from agricultural to industrial society. By joining that debate, Trotter inherited an attention to class consciousness and the significance of work that distinguished the "new labor history" of the 1900s and 1970s, but he also adopted a teleological understanding of modernization that elided historical and geographical complexities of working-class experience. By developing a more flexible understanding of "proletarianization," the author argues, contemporary scholars can benefit from Trotters' theoretical framework without replicating its conceptual blind spots. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the history of deindustrialization in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania in relation to the urban renewal known as the Pittsburgh Renaissance. Topics include population decline in Pittsburgh neighborhoods, public relations efforts to boost the city's reputation, and comparisons of Pittsburgh other Midwestern U.S. cities, including Detroit, Michigan and Cleveland, Ohio.