Remaking the Rust Belt - Tracy Neumann American Business, Politics, and Society

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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.

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      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

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