Diversify or die. This stark choice was articulated by city planners in many of North America's foundering steel cities during the industrial crisis of the 1970s and 1980s. Two of these cities—Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and Hamilton, Ontario—are ground zero for Tracy Neumann's Remaking the Rust Belt: The Postindustrial Transformation of North America, an insightful exploration of deindustrialization, public policy, and the postindustrial turn.
In each city, Neumann traces the particularities of place-based diversification strategies as they were envisioned by middle- and upper-middle-class urban growth coalitions. The public-private partnerships that underpinned North American urban renewal projects during the 1950s and 1960s would ultimately give way to neoliberal urbanism, the abdication of public-sector responsibility to the private sphere, and the marginalization of blue-collar workers who had built cities throughout the Rust Belt on both sides of the border. Neumann is clear in her assessment: these processes were not inevitable. Rather, with sympathy for those directly implicated, the author reveals how postindustrial transformation was embarked upon as part of a planning model that sought to appropriately allocate diminishing resources and chart new economic ground in an effort—however misplaced—to “save” these cities.
The operational impetus for such efforts, “the postindustrial imagination,” provides fertile ground for Neumann to probe the depths of actually-existing neoliberalism. Indeed, the author's treatment of the postindustrial imagination as a mechanism for neoliberalism is an important thread that runs through each chapter. “If the strings attached to IMF loans pulled Calcutta, Mexico City, and Lagos to neoliberalism,” she argues, “postindustrialism forged the path for Pittsburgh, Essen, and Rennes” (p. 11). This occurs not simply as the result of policy prescriptions, but also in decisions relating to marketing, urban rebranding, and promotional efforts to highlight postindustrial civic qualities like entrepreneurialism, dynamism, and boosterism. Whatever the intention behind their efforts, Neumann's “growth coalitions”—comprising local businesspeople, connected policy leaders, and a variety of city planning officials—ultimately came to remake urban space and turn away from the lunch-bucket sensibilities that had long characterized the two steel cities under consideration.
The primary strength of Remaking the Rust Belt is Neumann's constant attention to the different institutional frameworks that contextualize the pace of postindustrial development in Pittsburgh and Hamilton. The result is a profoundly transnational piece of scholarship that succeeds in exposing the on-the-ground impact of differences in federal, regional, and local politics. Despite local resistance, Pittsburgh's growth coalition found success thanks to an increasing federal commitment to privatism, state-driven corporate welfare, and a municipal government that was near single-minded in its effort to move beyond the trappings of its “historic” steel industry. As Mayor Richard Caliguiri told reporters in the 1980s, Pittsburgh would “rather have less people with high incomes than more people with relatively low earning and spending power” (p. 72). While the Hamilton growth coalition pushed for similar policies, “downtown revitalization, mill neighbourhood redevelopment, and urban branding” chief among them, federal and provincial commitments to “ensuring socially just outcomes for urban residents” presented an obstacle to a wholesale shift (p. 106).
Grounded in source material drawn from middle-class civic boosters, entrepreneurs, and development officials, Neumann's comparative study might be critiqued for eliding the experiences of those most directly affected by the economic and political processes under consideration: displaced steelworkers, working-class families, and blue-collar residents of neighborhoods and cities in transition. This is not to say that Neumann is entirely uncritical in her replication of the arguments of growth coalitions, but that her depictions of these groups’ political successes could—perhaps uncharitably—be read as a justification for their efforts. Certainly, this does not appear to be the author's intent. In fact, she dedicates the final pages of the book to rearticulating the racial and class-based inequalities that have persisted in both Hamilton and Pittsburgh through the imposition of postindustrialism. Maintaining such a focus throughout the book would have foregrounded the lived impact of what she terms “policy circulations in the North Atlantic.”
Neumann's final question, reflected in the choice of title for her epilogue—”Cities for Whom?”—is a clarion call for renewed attention to the type of cities created in the rush to postindustrialism. Survival is no longer the primary issue. Hamilton and Pittsburgh have both survived the collapse of heavy industry. Each has, in its way, found measured success in appeals to the creative class, “meds and eds,” and the provisions of the so-called knowledge and service economy. But how successful are such efforts, truly, if they simply rely on the displacement and marginalization of existing working-class communities? If our postindustrial urban centers are transformed into exclusionary spaces, devoid of any historical or economic obligation to those who came before, what is it that is being saved?
