A01=Andrew R. Highsmith
Author_Andrew R. Highsmith
auto industry
Category1=Non-Fiction
Category=NL-RP
Category=RPC
city
community
COP=United States
corporations
deindustrialization
demolition
desegregation
Discount=15
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
factories
flint
Format=BC
Format_Paperback
gm
history
HMM=229
housing crisis
IMPN=University of Chicago Press
industrialization
inequality
inequity
ISBN13=9780226419558
jim crow
land use
Language_English
michigan
neighborhood
nonfiction
PA=Available
PD=20170217
planning
politics
poverty
Price_€20 to €50
progress
PS=Active
PUB=The University of Chicago Press
race
redevelopment
renewal
revitalization
segregation
SN=Historical Studies of Urban America
social change
sociology
Subject=Regional & Area Planning
suburbanization
suburbs
systemic racism
urban
wealth gap
white flight
whiteness
WMM=152
Product details
- ISBN 9780226419558
- Format: Paperback
- Weight: 737g
- Dimensions: 16 x 23mm
- Publication Date: 30 Dec 2016
- Publisher: The University of Chicago Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
- Language: English
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In 1997, after General Motors shuttered a massive complex of factories in the gritty industrial city of Flint, Michigan, signs were placed around the empty facility reading, "Demolition Means Progress," suggesting that the struggling metropolis could not move forward to greatness until the old plants met the wrecking ball. Much more than a trite corporate slogan, the phrase encapsulates the operating ethos of the nation's metropolitan leadership from at least the 1930s to the present. Throughout, the leaders of Flint and other municipalities repeatedly tried to revitalize their communities by demolishing outdated and inefficient structures and institutions and overseeing numerous urban renewal campaigns many of which yielded only more impoverished and more divided metropolises. After decades of these efforts, the dawn of the twenty-first century found Flint one of the most racially segregated and economically polarized metropolitan areas in the nation. In one of the most comprehensive works yet written on the history of inequality and metropolitan development in modern America, Andrew R.
Highsmith uses the case of Flint to explain how the perennial quest for urban renewal even more than white flight, corporate abandonment, and other forces contributed to mass suburbanization, racial and economic division, deindustrialization, and political fragmentation. Challenging much of the conventional wisdom about structural inequality and the roots of the nation's "urban crisis," Demolition Means Progress shows in vivid detail how public policies and programs designed to revitalize the Flint area ultimately led to the hardening of social divisions.
Andrew R. Highsmith is assistant professor of history at the University of California, Irvine.
