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

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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

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