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.
CHAPTER ONE
The Roots of Postindustrialism
In declining manufacturing centers throughout the North Atlantic, public-private partnerships that allowed political and civic leaders to provide public subsidies for private development were vital to postindustrialism. Such partnerships flourished in U.S. cities like Pittsburgh in the 1950s and 1960s but emerged more slowly in other parts of the world. In Canada, for instance, public development corporations were “difficult to form,” according to the U.S. consultants who had advised Hamilton Mayor Vic Copps to look to Pittsburgh for a redevelopment model.1 Yet when Copps sent Jack Moore to Pittsburgh to study the Allegheny Conference in 1968, neither the mayor nor the economic development commissioner appeared to give much thought to why that was the case. This was perhaps because the consultants had cavalierly assured city officials that there was “nothing to prevent the Hamilton Economic Development Commission or some other body from encouraging interested private citizens to form a development corporation.”2
While it may have been true that Canadian laws did not prohibit formation of a private development corporation, Arthur D. Little’s “Lunchpail Report,” as local officials referred to it, ignored the influence of national political frameworks on when and where public-private partnerships formed and how they functioned. The consultants instead stressed the importance of strong mayoral leadership and the participation of “highly influential private citizens” in U.S. cities after World War II. In Pittsburgh, they wrote, the city’s famed Renaissance could not have occurred “unless well intentioned men decided to act.”3 They overlooked the fact that securing the long-term cooperation of those “well intentioned men,” in Pittsburgh and elsewhere, rested on changing state and federal laws to create an institutional framework for public-private cooperation that allowed business leaders to profit handsomely from their participation in publicly sponsored urban redevelopment plans.4
Public-private partnerships had a long history in North America by the time Arthur D. Little submitted the Lunchpail Report. In U.S. cities, ad hoc booster relationships established in the early nineteenth century transformed into informal partnerships around 1850, when businessmen formed civic associations and clubs through which to rationalize the urban landscape and create new opportunities for real estate development.5 Nineteenth-century U.S. and Canadian public works projects were often public-private ventures. Boosters on both sides of the border assembled subsidies and loans to attract private railroad companies in a way that foreshadowed the interurban competition for jobs common among North Atlantic cities by the 1970s.6 In Europe, Louis Napoléon’s reconstruction of Paris in cooperation with Crédit Mobilier was a nineteenth-century forerunner of the partnerships that implemented urban renewal projects in the 1950s and 1960s. And in the United States the federal government began to underwrite locally led partnerships through New Deal housing and public works programs.7
From the ground, public-private cooperation often looked like a purely local affair, negotiated between a city’s political and business elites. But the power of public-private partnerships to make postindustrial places was shaped and constrained, materially and discursively, at the metropolitan, national, and global scales. National governments handled demands for resources from ascendant and declining regions in different ways, which limited local government budgets as well as the policy options available to urban growth coalitions. Within metropolitan regions, municipal officials’ autonomy over allocation of public resources for urban development varied, as did local executives’ interest in directing civic projects. In Pittsburgh and Hamilton, distinctions between the city’s position in its metropolitan region, national political institutions, and growth coalitions’ abilities to harness internationally circulating ideas about how to remake manufacturing centers meant that postindustrialism unfolded in spatially and temporally uneven ways.
Public-Private Partnerships for Urban Redevelopment
Postindustrialism opened a new chapter in a long history of idea sharing among municipal officials and city planners in the North Atlantic region. The mid-nineteenth-century industrialization of the same cities that sought shared solutions to the decline of manufacturing a hundred years later led boosters, social reformers, and policymakers to develop a network of people, institutions, and frameworks that facilitated the exchange of urban planning and policy ideas between North American, Western European, and colonial cities from Calcutta to Nairobi to Fez. In the late nineteenth century, boosters intensified these informal international transfers through selective borrowing among (or imperial imposition by) the elected officials, national policymakers, and bureaucrats tasked with solving the problems of modern industrial cities. Their fertile intellectual exchange continued into the early twentieth century, when urban experts in specialized institutions, philanthropic foundations, and nongovernmental organizations established formal exchange organizations to disseminate what contemporary planners might call “best practices” for urban social and physical development.8
As a result of shared ideas and policy circulation, early twentieth-century plans for U.S. and Canadian cities replicated the grand boulevards of European capitals, while London and Paris adopted skyscrapers, industrial architecture, and technological innovations from the United States. In the interwar period, Americans traveled to Berlin to study zoning, to Birmingham to investigate municipal ownership of utilities, and to Vienna to visit social housing. British and German planners, in turn, kept a close eye on New Deal housing and infrastructure programs. In the 1940s, modernist design aesthetics pioneered in France and Germany influenced planners and architects in the United States and Canada, even as American planning ideas and discourses increasingly permeated European cities.9
After World War II, urban renewal programs occupied planners on both sides of the Atlantic. The ad hoc public-private partnerships that had built railroads across the United States and Canada and remade nineteenth-century Paris began to transition to more formal partnerships in the 1940s and 1950s.10 In the midwestern and northeastern United States, cities emerged from the Depression and war with decayed downtowns, deteriorated residential neighborhoods, and severe housing shortages. New Deal programs had laid the groundwork for federally funded housing programs, and subsidies for suburban development and for industrial decentralization to the suburbs and the Southwest threatened manufacturing centers’ tax revenues. To secure the economic futures of the cities in which their enterprises operated, local businessmen and corporate elites joined forces with municipal officials to make over troubled downtowns, protect their capital investments, and restore investor confidence in industrial centers. Federal, state, and local officials used public funds to “leverage” private investment, typically under the auspices
