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The American city is in the final stages of a major transformation. The services sector has largely replaced manufacturing. This shift has left vacant industrial facilities, brownfield sites, and nearly empty rail yards. Jobs have migrated to homogenized edge cities without the perceived environmental and sociocultural baggage of the industrial city. In this chapter, we will analyze two primary strategies that are being used to make postindustrial cities livable. First, environmental damage that has pushed capital to the suburbs must be mitigated. To address the contamination left over from the industrial era, postindustrial cities have embarked on aggressive restoration programs. Brownfield sites, where smokestack industries and rail yards once stood, have been cleared and built on. The second strategy is perhaps more challenging . To attract capital and residents, postindustrial cities need to be made livable through appropriate public investments. Postindustrial cities must attract postindustrial workers whose previous options have been the office towers, shopping malls, and subdivisions of suburbia. To draw private development that supports social equity, environmental sustainability, and livability, postindustrial cities need to reinvent themselves by restoring damaged landscapes and building vibrant public realms. They can do this through a variety of strategies , but our focus is on transforming unsightly freeways into urban parkways and parks that are magnets for redevelopment. In the first section of this chapter, we focus briefly on the transformation from industry to services in developed countries and highlight the spatial ramification of this change. In the second section brownfield redevelopment is the focus, and four case studies show how cities across the United States are transforming rail yards and industrial zones into livable districts. These districts initially attract a vanguard of artists who can see the benefit of and seek the low cost of living in rejuvenated warehouses and former industrial buildings. These artists are followed by developers who oftentimes use public and private funding to transform the districts into vibrant mixed-use urban villages. In the third section, the focus turns to parkways and parks. Three case studies show how investments in the public realm make postindustrial cities more livable. We conclude by highlighting a few common themes in this transformative process. From Industry to Services What do Americans make anymore? It seems that, apart from cars and construction materials, more and more goods are produced in developing countries like China and Vietnam. With their low labor costs and lax environmental regulations, these countries have a distinct advantage over developed Chapter Seven Making Postindustrial Cities Livable Mark L. Gil lem wit h Val erie H edrick Mark L. Gillem, with Valerie Hedrick 80 80 countries when it comes to producing things. As a result, cities in the United States and in many developed countries are solidly in a postindustrial era. These cities, and the countries they are in, no longer exist as centers of manufacturing; rather, they are now centers of service-related industries. In G8 countries, for example, the shift is profound. The precursor to the G8 started as an organization of the largest industrialized countries, but now the organization can be considered more of a meeting between the largest postindustrial countries (graph 7.1). Services are the largest sector in all of these countries, with industry and agriculture lagging far behind. This shift away from manufacturing and toward services is largely driving the transformation of cities and is leading to new models of space that support new models of economic development. The spaces that supported industrial production are now open for transformation. Sociologist Mark Gottdiener (1994) emphasizes that space is an important concept not because it promises some new form of life but because the built environment is critical to the transformation of everyday life. Built form works like a stage on which people act out their lives. It can be transformative if it supports the needs of the people it serves. Gottdiener argues that spatial forms result from the interplay between action and structure. The actions are what people do, and the structure is the sociospatial framework in which they function. In the twentieth century, when America was an industrial powerhouse, the spatial framework of cities supported production. Industrial zones, rail yards, and even highways were built to support the making and transportation of goods. Now, with fewer goods produced in American cities, the rail yards and highways that were used to transport those goods across an expanding nation have either found new uses or have fallen into disuse. Making these postindustrial cities livable necessitates a repurposing of these...

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