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INTRODUCTION

Cities and the Postindustrial Imagination

In 1968, shortly after Jack Moore became Hamilton, Ontario’s, first economic development commissioner, he took a trip to Pennsylvania. Concerned about industrial decentralization, suburban migration, and central city decline, Hamilton’s municipal officials had replaced the city’s Industrial Development Commission with an Economic Development Commission and initiated a series of urban renewal projects intended to reinvent their drab steel town as a bustling regional service center. Pittsburgh, Hamilton’s steel-producing neighbor to the south, offered them a successful model, and Moore went down to investigate. Hiram Milton, president of Pittsburgh’s Regional Industrial Development Corporation, and John J. Grove, executive director of the Allegheny Conference on Community Development, took Moore on a tour of the city’s redevelopment sites. But Moore was more interested in learning the details of how the corporate-led Allegheny Conference had worked with public officials to turn the city’s smoke-filled downtown into a modern commercial center. “My principal reason for visiting Pittsburgh,” he had written to Grove when arranging his trip, “is not just to look at industrial development but to learn a good deal more about how your organization was successful in spearheading the redevelopment of downtown Pittsburgh. I am particularly interested in knowing how you can demand and get active participation from your top business executives.”¹

For Moore and the city officials he represented, reproducing Pittsburgh’s public-private partnership looked like the best route to making Hamilton something more than a steel town. Public officials in other manufacturing centers had the same idea. In the 1950s and 1960s, more than seventy national and international delegations of urban policy tourists who hoped to replicate the “Renaissance,” as the city’s urban renewal program was known, arrived in Pittsburgh to see first-hand how Democratic mayors and Republican businessmen had worked together to scrub clean the streets and skies of the dirty, polluted, and flood-prone city. Visitors from Dayton and Detroit wanted to know more about Pittsburgh’s urban renewal program and the public-private partnership behind it; so did officials from Australia, Brazil, Belgium, Germany, and Scotland. Canadian policymakers were especially interested in the Renaissance, sending a stream of urban specialists to Pittsburgh from Quebec, Ontario, and Manitoba.² International consulting firms, too, recommended that their clients visit Pittsburgh. In fact, the year before Moore’s trip, Hamilton’s Economic Development Commission had hired Boston-based Arthur D. Little and Company to study Hamilton’s lackluster commercial development. Citing successful downtown renewal efforts in U.S. cities, and especially Pittsburgh, the consultants urged Hamilton’s city officials to diversify the regional economy by working with local businessmen through a civic organization that was separate from but worked closely with local government.³ In response, the Economic Development Commission sent Moore to Pittsburgh.

When Moore arrived in Pittsburgh, pundits, politicians, and policymakers did not yet describe the city’s physical redevelopment as “post-industrial”—that term would not gain widespread usage until the 1970s, when a wave of plant closings devastated communities in the U.S. manufacturing belt. But what Moore observed on his visit was, indeed, the beginning of postindustrialism: the social and physical redevelopment of manufacturing centers that accompanied economic transitions from heavy industry to finance, services, and research in heavily industrialized North Atlantic cities in the second half of the twentieth century.⁴ Postindustrialism included a pervasive ideology that privileged white-collar jobs and middle-class residents, as well as a set of pragmatic tactics designed to remake urban space, including financial incentives, branding campaigns, and physical redevelopment, typically carried out by public-private partnerships.

Beginning in the early twentieth century and accelerating after World War II, the distribution of functions between cities and the suburbs and hinterlands that composed their metropolitan regions changed as production moved out of central cities to less expensive land, first in outlying areas and eventually to countries in the global South.⁵ Manufacturing, of course, did not entirely disappear from cities. Instead, between the 1950s and the 1990s, “smokestack” industries like steel and automotive gave way to smaller-scale, more technologically advanced production. As industry decentralized, management functions and professional services became centralized in downtown skyscrapers. Corporations increasingly enlisted the professional services of well-paid ad men, bankers, accountants, lawyers, and real estate agents, whose activities were likewise centralized. Managers, over the course of their workday, also relied on the labor of other kinds of service workers—the janitors who cleaned their offices, the waitresses who brought their business lunches, the maids who cleaned the hotel rooms when colleagues came to town—who typically earned at or just above minimum wage. In the United States, the lower wages that accompanied the shift from manufacturing to services meant that average hourly pay fell by 7.5 percent between 1973 and 1993.⁶

Contemporary narratives of the inexorable decline of basic industry in North America and Western Europe make the postindustrial transformation of national economies and old manufacturing centers seem like a historical inevitability, the product of natural business cycles and neutral market forces. This book tells a different story, one in which growth coalitions composed of local political and business elites set out to actively create postindustrial places. They hired the same international consultants and shared ideas about urban revitalization on study tours, at conferences, and in the pages of professional journals. Growth coalitions narrowly focused on creating the jobs, services, leisure activities, and cultural institutions that they believed would attract middle-class professionals. In doing so, local officials abandoned social democratic goals in favor of corporate welfare programs, fostering an increasing economic inequality among their residents in the process.

Pittsburgh and Hamilton are exemplary of postindustrialism, but they are not exceptional. The stories of the two steel towns are local variants of larger social, political, and economic processes that affected many North American and Western European cities. The changing geography of production made the industrial crises of the 1970s and 1980s a decidedly North Atlantic, rather than strictly national or truly international, phenomenon. Cities in the North Atlantic coal and steel belts had been seats of industrial power in the early twentieth century. By the 1970s, the economic and political might of the North American heartland, Germany’s Ruhr Valley, and the English Black Country had been significantly diminished by newly industrializing regions in the global South, from the U.S. Sunbelt and Mexico to Latin America, Asia, and the Middle East.⁷

The late twentieth-century decline of manufacturing and the transition to service- and finance-sector economies that seemed to come as a shock to manufacturing workers, corporate executives, and elected officials throughout the North Atlantic were decades in the making. Industrial restructuring was a spatially and temporally uneven process, taking place in different ways, at different times, in different regions. It was in the North American heartland, however, where the combination of declining infrastructure and industrial restructuring first took its toll. The precipitous decline of Pittsburgh, Hamilton, and other mature steel centers served as a bellwether for aging manufacturing cities around the world.

Figure 1. The North Atlantic Rust Belt.

From the vantage point of the 1950s, the Great Lakes manufacturing belt had seemed impervious to rust. The region had long been a site of material and symbolic significance to the North Atlantic economy. Its factories produced the tanks and planes that helped the Allies win World War II and later turned out the consumer goods that expanded American markets into physically and economically devastated postwar Europe. The Detroit-centered automotive and rubber industries spawned boomtowns in Ohio and Ontario, and the steel and coal belts ranged north from the Ohio border through Western Pennsylvania and into Southern Ontario. Great Lakes manufacturing centers in the early postwar decades projected an image of invulnerability to the boom-and-bust cycles that affected other economic sectors. At midcentury, the hulking factories that punctuated the regional landscape lent an air of permanence to industries like steel and automotive and to the hundreds of thousands of jobs they created.⁸ Within a few decades, however, trade liberalization, U.S. subsidies for foreign manufacturers, and successful industrial attraction schemes in the South and the Sunbelt had reduced Great Lakes manufacturers’ shares of international markets, and increasingly globalized manufacturing and labor flows diminished executives’ commitments to the communities in which their companies were headquartered. By 1984, Democratic presidential candidate Walter Mondale lamented “the vast Rust Bowl with tragic unemployment and broken dreams all through the great industrial Midwest.”⁹

Mondale failed to coin a term with “Rust Bowl,” but with the popularization of the Rust Belt appellation, as historian Steven High has noted, “the problem became imaginatively contained, tied to one place.”¹⁰ Accepted historical wisdom tells us that the Rust Belt is an American phenomenon, an economically devastated region stretching from New York to Chicago. This book expands the geography of the Rust Belt across the northern border of the United States to the manufacturing centers of the Canadian heartland. The Rust Belt may have been discursively situated in North America, but by the 1980s Western Europe’s steel and coal country, from Lille to the Ruhr to Sheffield and Glasgow, was corroding as well.¹¹ And if the crisis of North Atlantic manufacturing was symbolically tied to the North American Rust Belt, solutions to the problems facing those manufacturing centers were tied to one city: Pittsburgh. For public officials and civic-minded businessmen from the middle of the twentieth century into the twenty-first, postindustrial Pittsburgh represented a phoenix that rose from the ashes of the steel industry with a revived downtown; a lively cultural district; expansive university, medical, and technological complexes; and vibrant residential neighborhoods. From St. Louis to Birmingham to Dortmund, city officials’ and civic leaders’ imaginations swelled with similar visions for postindustrial futures. They imagined gleaming headquarters buildings and luxury housing designed to meet the needs of the financial and commercial service sectors, residential neighborhoods scrubbed free of industrial detritus, state-of-the-art sports stadiums and conference centers, and culture and leisure activities that would appeal to tourists and suburbanites.¹²

Hamilton’s elected officials and civic leaders were no exception, even as Pittsburgh and Hamilton’s manufacturing bases contracted in very different ways. In Pittsburgh, the steel industry collapsed, leading to the eventual shutdown of all but one of the region’s steel mills and countless steel-related manufacturers. In Hamilton, the steel industry restructured, which allowed the mills to remain profitable but eliminated a quarter of the city’s well-paid manufacturing jobs. In the 1980s, the Pittsburgh region’s shuttered plants, legions of unemployed steelworkers, and bankrupt mill towns became emblems of an emerging Rust Belt. Hamilton also faced high unemployment rates, aging infrastructure, and a declining tax base, but its mills continued to churn out steel, and the Golden Horseshoe—the cluster of industry around Lake Ontario stretching from Niagara Falls to Oshawa—remained a manufacturing center. Popular imagery of postindustrial cities may evoke shuttered factories, but, in places like Hamilton, postindustrialism was a utopian planning model that did not require the collapse of manufacturing. Even as plumes continued to rise from Hamilton’s smokestacks, its growth coalition doggedly pursued schemes intended to produce postindustrial space.

While Pittsburgh features prominently in the literature on postwar U.S. cities, it was in many ways an atypical place. Its physical geography and robust philanthropic foundations made it unique among North Atlantic manufacturing centers, and its relatively small African American population made it unlike other major northern U.S. cities.¹³ Hamilton, on the other hand, has not achieved Pittsburgh’s rarefied status among urban scholars, in part because it is overshadowed by nearby Toronto and in part because its postindustrial redevelopment was halting and incomplete.¹⁴ Nevertheless, the growth coalitions in both cities acted in similar ways. Hamilton’s elected officials and civic leaders, like Pittsburgh’s, sought to stem the flow of businesses to the suburbs, to attract corporate headquarters and service sector jobs, and to draw suburban residents and their spending power into the city. But the ad hoc coalition between Hamilton’s mayors and local businessmen could not control the activities of urban planners to the same extent as its counterpart in Pittsburgh, where collaboration between political and business elites limited political contestation.

The structure of this book reflects the uneven development across space and time evident in Pittsburgh and Hamilton.¹⁵ On one level, it provides case studies of two cities in transition within the larger context of North Atlantic economic restructuring. On a second level, it explains the relationship between local redevelopment strategies in Pittsburgh and Hamilton and broader shifts in regional and national public policies. On a third level, it considers how exchanges between the two cities reflected policy circulation in the North Atlantic. Events in Pittsburgh and Hamilton highlight the primacy of local place in understanding how the global and national social, political, and economic processes that constituted postindustrialism were worked out on the ground. Yet national policy orientations and regional politics constrained local political and civic leaders’ abilities to adopt redevelopment models that they believed would allow them to realize their goals. In Pittsburgh, entrepreneurial mayors and university presidents, corporate elites, state government officials, local foundations, and community development corporations worked together to pursue a shared vision for an expansive postindustrial transformation facilitated by state and federal policy. In Hamilton, municipal officials partnered with small business owners and the local Chamber of Commerce on an ad hoc basis to carry out development projects, but their postindustrial imaginations were constrained more often than they were supported by federal and provincial regulations. Hamilton’s municipal officials sought to reproduce Pittsburgh’s partnership structure and its public subsidies for private developers, but they were largely unsuccessful in achieving either goal because provincial political institutions barred municipal financial incentives for private development. And as Hamilton’s public officials pursued redevelopment projects and a new urban image, their visions for a postindustrial future were limited by a provincial growth policy that required the city to remain a manufacturing center and by the continued presence of heavy industry near the downtown core.

But these were not foregone conclusions when Jack Moore arrived in Pittsburgh in 1968. By that point, local and national policymakers in heavily industrialized North Atlantic nations had been concerned with diversifying their economies and hastening the transition to services for nearly twenty years.¹⁶ It was only after the 1973 publication of Harvard sociologist Daniel Bell’s The Coming of Post-Industrial Society, however, that they had a common grammar with which to describe their activities. In the book, Bell described post-industrial society as one in which the basis of the economy had shifted from the production of goods to the provision of services. He argued that knowledge industries had replaced manual labor as the most important social force in advanced capitalist nations, and that a technical-professional class had supplanted the working class as the largest and most significant occupational group. For Bell, this marked progress toward a more just future characterized by shorter workdays, more leisure time, and a more equitable distribution of resources.¹⁷

Bell had rehearsed his ideas in a few scholarly articles in the late 1960s, but they gained little attention outside the academy.¹⁸ The Coming of Post-Industrial Society, however, hit bookshelves just as the golden age of postwar capitalism wound to an end, and Bell’s utopian prognostications resonated with popular audiences. Shortly after the book’s publication, Amherst sociologist Norman Birnbaum lamented Bell’s outsized influence in the academy and among the more “sophisticated in public affairs and business,” complaining, “when Daniel Bell declares society has changed, it does not follow that it has done so. But it does follow that many people will think it has.”¹⁹

Birnbaum was right. Journalists, pundits, and politicians eagerly embraced Bell’s book, and “post-industrial society” rapidly became part of the popular and professional lexicon. Bell’s influence in urban planning circles was cemented when Robert Cassidy, the editor of the American Planning Association’s professional journal, penned a glowing review for the Chicago Tribune. Unlike Birnbaum, who worried that Bell’s intellectual stature would garner more attention than his work deserved, Cassidy fretted that the book would be ignored because of its turgid prose. Bell was unlikely to make the best-seller list or The Dick Cavett Show, Cassidy joked, but The Coming of Post-Industrial Society advanced a theoretical framework that let “us know not only where we are, but where we may be headed.”²⁰ Cassidy’s concerns that Bell’s work would slide into oblivion were unfounded: by the end of the decade, widely circulating popular discourses of postindustrialism reflected Bell’s optimism that the relative decline of manufacturing and the increase in services in the United States and other industrialized nations heralded an economic transition that would eventually lead to unprecedented social and economic stability.

When Bell predicted that manufacturing would decline and that professional services and technology industries would become increasingly important to industrialized economies, he was not telling planners and politicians in Detroit, Manchester, and the Ruhr Valley anything they did not already know. In those places, economic trends away from manufacturing and toward increased service sector employment had been clear for a decade or more—Bell, in fact, identified 1956 as a “symbolic turning point,” because that was the first year that white-collar workers outnumbered blue-collar workers in U.S. occupational rankings.²¹ His forecast for employment trends turned out to be correct. In advanced industrial economies such as the United States, Canada, the UK, Germany, Austria, Italy, France, Belgium, and Spain, manufacturing employment declined between 1970 and 2000, while service-sector employment increased. The United States, the UK, and Belgium shed around half their manufacturing jobs; Germany lost 40 percent; Canada and France more than a third; and Italy 20 percent. In those countries, employment in services and the public sector increased by 10 to 20 percent over the same period.²²

For Bell, the shift from goods-producing to service-producing industries was a logical outcome of social democratic impulses embedded in postwar state-building projects. After World War II, in an effort to stave off the conditions for another depression, North American and Western European governments had embraced a form of political-economic organization variously described as growth liberalism, embedded liberalism, or Keynesian liberalism, the essential characteristics of which were the use of Keynesian fiscal and monetary policy to dampen business cycles and ensure full employment, a business-labor accord, and the creation or expansion of social welfare programs. Under growth liberalism, business elites accepted varying degrees of regulation and redistribution because Keynesian policies increased consumer demand and facilitated high levels of industrial growth. By the end of the 1960s, however, growth rates fell while inflation and unemployment rates climbed, causing stagflation and a series of fiscal crises in national and local economies. In response, national governments and a shifting constellation of business leaders worked together to dismantle growth liberalism and replace it with a new international political economic order.²³

Bell’s post-industrial society thesis both reflected and shaped political and business leaders’ responses to structural change throughout the North Atlantic. As his critics pointed out, however, it did not actually explain the historical processes at work. Bell’s detractors and political opponents of growth coalitions’ urban redevelopment plans included labor leaders, rank-and-file workers, and some academics on the Left. As they confronted political and economic restructuring, they struggled to develop a language adequate to explain the uneven social, spatial, and economic changes underway. On the ground in economically troubled cities, “deindustrialization” and “postindustrial society” functioned as rhetorical devices through which urban constituencies articulated competing visions for cities after the decline of manufacturing. Planners and politicians embraced the positive connotations of the forward-looking “post-industrial society.” Labor activists preferred the term “deindustrialization,” which evoked powerful place-based imagery of abandoned factories and boarded-up buildings in a way that “post-industrial” did not.²⁴ Scholars, however, have been exceedingly skeptical of both terms, contending that neither convincingly explains the social relations of the economic transition from basic manufacturing to the dominance of other types of economic activity.²⁵

Within the academy, critics on the Left instead described the related processes of remaking the geography of state power and the social, cultural, and economic geography of cities in the late twentieth century first as “postmodern,” then as “post-Fordist,” and most recently as “neoliberal.”²⁶ No matter which they term they employed, critics of contemporary capitalism argued that a crisis in the 1970s led to disinvestment in the industrial mode of production and the emergence of flexible production models and service- and finance-based economies.²⁷ After neoliberalism supplanted postmodernism and post-Fordism as the lingua franca of social criticism, scholars commonly associated policy tactics such as deregulation, privatization, devolution, and the evisceration of the welfare state with the implementation of neoliberal political projects.²⁸ Under neoliberalism, state retrenchment occurred in some policy areas, such as social welfare provision, while at the same time state involvement expanded in other areas, such as military spending, corporate tax incentives, and the repression of labor unions.

Contemporary scholars of neoliberalism tend to fall into one of two groups: those who are interested in the intellectual history of the term and its progenitors, the economists of the Mont Pèlerin Society; and those who engage neoliberalism as an analytical framework to explain the features of contemporary capitalism. Members of the first group, composed primarily but not solely of historians, have charted the political and economic influence between the 1930s and the 1980s of ideas first advanced by “market advocates” such as Friedrich Hayek, Ludwig von Mises, and Milton Friedman. Academics on the Left and social critics in the second group began to use neoliberalism broadly to refer to market fundamentalism and the unmaking of North Atlantic welfare states. They adopted neoliberalism as rhetorical shorthand for their outrage over the hollowing out of the middle class and the widespread acceptance of inequality that accompanied economic shifts.²⁹

Critics have pointed out that scholars tend to invoke neoliberalism without defining the term and often fail to differentiate between its historical and contemporary meanings. One scholar characterized neoliberalism as “one of the boom concepts of our time,” an “all-purpose descriptor” for wide-ranging phenomena.³⁰ Another quipped that “neoliberalism” is used so imprecisely in many texts “that one is tempted to pencil one’s objections in the margins as one might in a student essay.”³¹ Historians, on the whole, have objected to anachronistic uses of the term, pointing out that, unlike liberals, conservatives, or neoconservatives, the historical actors typically labeled neoliberal—Augusto Pinochet, Margaret Thatcher, and Ronald Reagan among them—would not have used the term to describe themselves.³² Even as historians caution against too-broad invocations of neoliberalism, however, they agree that, in the 1970s, the liberal order broke down without a clear successor.³³

The rapidly proliferating scholarship on the subject amply demonstrates that actually existing neoliberalism did not have a single germinal moment. It did not spring forth, fully formed, like a Venus of Mont Pèlerin. There were instead many overlapping paths to neoliberalism—through routes as diverse as international development organizations and financial institutions, U.S. foreign policy initiatives, and welfare state reforms—which began at different times and in different places. In the global South, neoliberalism often followed aid packages from the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF), which required developing countries to implement wrenching social and economic reforms. If the strings attached to IMF loans pulled Calcutta, Mexico City, and Lagos to neoliberalism, postindustrialism forged the path for Pittsburgh, Essen, and Rennes.³⁴

Postindustrialism thus represented one trajectory to neoliberalism among many, and urban sociologists and geographers have argued that cities quickly became testing grounds for neoliberal policy experiments. Scholars cite capital subsidies, place promotion, supply-side intervention, central-city makeovers, and place branding as the urban manifestations of the widespread privatization and devolution that accompanied market orthodoxy.³⁵ They describe public-private partnerships as an essential marker of neoliberal urbanism and the primary mechanism through which privatization and devolution took place. Public-private partnerships took varied forms, all of which involved marshaling the powers of the local state in service of business interests, usually through a public subsidy for private development designed to serve individual or corporate, rather than collective or public, interests.³⁶

The social and political processes at work in postwar Pittsburgh and Hamilton illustrate the range of ideas about political realignment, spatial change, and urban citizenship that social scientists now call neoliberal. They also demonstrate that the institutional arrangements for privatization (particularly through public-private partnerships) and devolutionary urban policy were not developed in response to a break or rupture in the 1970s. Instead, they were in place well before social scientists argue that neoliberalism became ascendant in North Atlantic nations.

The decline of manufacturing and rise of services that Bell predicted would yield a socially just post-industrial society instead turned out to be harbingers of the rising inequality critics associated with neoliberalism. Yet, in troubled manufacturing centers, the late twentieth-century changes to local economies, to the built environment, and to social relations are best understood as an acceleration and intensification of processes that began in the early postwar period. The people involved did not, of course, use the term “neoliberal.” Instead, they described their activities in the narrower context of “economic diversification” in the 1950s and 1960s and, after Bell’s book was published, adopted his rhetoric of post-industrial society. They began to talk, too, of an emerging “knowledge economy” or “information society,” in which the production of knowledge and the manipulation of information would replace basic manufacturing’s central role in advanced capitalist economies.³⁷

Neoliberalism has supplied scholars with a framework through which to make sense of disparate tactics with broad and diverse constituencies that were implemented for a host of pragmatic reasons over several decades that by the 1980s had become commonsense. Policies originally intended to revive declining cities were used to justify government retrenchment from the urban sphere in the United States, Canada, and other advanced industrial economies, especially the UK. A consensus emerged among policymakers across partisan and political boundaries that public incentives for private-sector economic and urban redevelopment projects were not just one way but, instead, the only way to confront urban problems. Planners, elected officials, and corporate elites in declining manufacturing centers around the world shared common understandings of the problems facing their cities and sought to create similar institutional arrangements to address those problems, most often through public-private partnerships modeled on those developed in the United States.³⁸ There was nothing essentially neoliberal, or even particularly new, about such policies—most had long histories as urban development tactics. They were merely deployed in new ways, with different intentions, and in changing institutional settings, at a time when liberals and conservatives increasingly came to share the same sense of political possibilities.

Postindustrialism and neoliberalism may seem like arcane subjects, but the public policies and political actions taken in support of or opposition to them have shaped the material possibilities and daily lives of urban dwellers for more than half a century. Local politicians and policymakers confronted with industrial decline and urban crises incrementally rejected options that were not predicated on devolution and privatization—tactics that later became central to scholars’ conceptions of neoliberal urbanism—out of pragmatism rather than hubris. As public resources dwindled, city officials made harsh calculations about whose needs they would no longer meet, rather than seeking to better meet the needs of all residents. In the 1970s and 1980s, mayors and planners sought to attract middle-class taxpayers back to hollowedout central cities, not to hollow out the middle class by diminishing their political and economic power. They faced difficult choices and, seeing no other way forward, made decisions about how to allocate resources in a way that exacerbated inequality and sacrificed the well-being of large portions of urban populations in order to “save” cities. As the stories of Pittsburgh and Hamilton demonstrate, local officials in rusting manufacturing centers may have helped lay the foundation for what scholars call “neoliberal urbanism,” but their complicity was the unintentional outcome of limited resources and an inability to see beyond postindustrialism as a planning model.