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With an eye to urban branding campaigns in global cities such as New York, in the 1970s and 1980s, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania’s public officials worked with local corporations and media outlets to market “dynamic” Pittsburgh to a national audience. This article examines the relationship between the “imagined space” of boosters’ urban branding campaigns and their decades-long efforts to physically and economically reorganize the region’s “material space” around service and finance industries, and medical and educational institutions. Through urban branding, local elites’ efforts created new mental maps of the region that excluded its mill towns and manufacturing workers and emphasized, instead, the relationship between the city and its well-heeled suburbs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article summarizes the goal of this special issue of the Journal of Urban History (JUH). Offering a variety of perspectives—ranging from the role of impromptu artists to that of immigrants and small, independent communities of activists—it details unconventional solutions offered for reviving the economically declining postindustrial American city. Akin to the articles included in this volume, this essay emphasizes ways in which revitalization can take place without necessarily engaging the top–down missions of governmental agencies, large corporations, or costly urban planning. As this introduction demonstrates, most articles in this volume reflect on current and recent developments in major postindustrial American cities. As such, this issue of JUH hopes to offer fresh perspectives on the role of ad hoc agents, a topic rightly deserving of further attention in the field. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Asbury Park, New Jersey, flourished as a seaside destination from the late nineteenth through the mid-twentieth century. Middle- and working-class visitors from New York to Philadelphia frequented the city’s hotels, commercial amusements, and beach. During the 1960s and 1970s, as with many cities across the country, Asbury Park experienced physical and socioeconomic decline. Over the past three decades, a range of public and private actors have made several attempts at postindustrial renaissance, including privately funded waterfront redevelopment, music tourism–based historic preservation, and renovation and gentrification led by a largely gay and lesbian population. While Asbury Park’s revitalization continues today, the varied outcomes of these disparate processes suggests the significance of multiple small-scale, locally rooted investments to the postindustrial city’s sustained growth and resilience. In complement to the substantial attention scholars have paid to the mid- to large-sized cities of industrial production, Asbury Park’s story also illustrates the significance of cities of consumption—both big and small—to the history of postindustrial revitalization. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In the projects of the artist Theaster Gates, social change and transformation is strongly tied to an actual rebuilding and reactivation of vacant architectures across the South Side of Chicago. Opposed to Richard Florida’s analysis of the artist’s role in the processes of gentrification, in Gates’s model, the artist does not upvalue property in a decaying place only to then become victim to the outcome of this valorization, but the artist is a conscious and acting part in the very process himself with a designated long-term goal. Gates started acquiring abandoned houses at South Dorchester Avenue in Chicago’s Grand Crossing area in 2006, and since then included them into an artist-activated ecology. He inserts architectural remainders into works of art that travel around the world, and when sold to collectors, he reinvests the profits into the reconstruction of the buildings and acquisition of further ones. Especially through an involvement and practical reworking and repurposing of architectural structures, Gates is performing a break from a passive emotional attachment to a nostalgic image of the spaces of non-lived memory that is a prevailing trend in photography at the moment as in the works of Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre for example. Gates’s active placemaking includes the investment into the materiality and poetics of space, communal dinners, performances, film screenings and an artist residency program with a focus on sustainable site-specific projects. In Dorchester Projects, Gates’s interests in a history of making, as well as the history of the city cumulate, but despite historical preferentiality, the places have a distinct atmosphere of nowness. He links his artistic practice and social agendas with architectural and aesthetic issues. Gates’s recycling, or also upcycling, an “investment into the care of things” and the permanence of built places is testifying to his interest “to move back and forth between the real, the gestural, and the economic,” all contributing to his “art of staying.” [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Karimi, P. 2015. “Introduction: Reinventing the American Postindustrial City.” Journal of Urban History 41:147–57. (Original doi: 10.1177/0096144214563511)On page 152 of the original paper, the name of one of the authors is spelled incorrectly. The correct name is Saima Akhtar. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]