Remaking the Rust Belt: The Postindustrial Transformation of North America by Tracy Neumann (review)

Historians have written so many stories about the post-World War II urban crisis, the challenges of de-industrialization, and the perils of urban and economic revitalization that the form is now quite familiar. This is especially true of US historians, who have narrated the decline and halting, uneven, and incomplete rebirth of Rust Belt cities including Detroit, Chicago, Cleveland, and more. In these stories, we catch fleeting glimpses of the global paths of capital flow, but the narratives usually stay rooted within the city limits and the metropolitan region, with a gesture at federal programs and politicians in Washington, DC.

In Remaking the Rust Belt, Tracy Neumann has done something that few American urban historians have done — noted the proximity and enduring economic and political relationships between Canada and the United States. Even more impressively, she has employed the Atlantic World framework that only rarely appears in scholarship on the twentieth century. She illustrates a set of alliances and shared conditions that Canadian, American, and European business and civic leaders all faced. In the process, she broadens the analysis of industrial cities from an American Rust Belt story to one of a North Atlantic industrial transformation. Specifically, Neumann examines the divergent fortunes of Hamilton, Ontario, and Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, steel cities that faced similar economic forces in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. However, the two cities were led by far different coalitions of civic elites. Fundamentally different legal and political frameworks also directed their trajectories of redevelopment.

This was not for lack of trying on Hamilton's part. In Pittsburgh, the Allegheny Conference included representatives of the region's leading business families, such as Heinz and Mellon, and led the pro-growth redevelopment policy agenda, with the key feature being the 1970s pro-technology plan, Renaissance II. In this plan, Pittsburgh leaders "tried to downplay the devastating effects of industrial restructuring on the urban economy and focused instead on cultural development, high technology, and service sector job creation" (55). Hamilton's political leaders often looked enviously at Pittsburgh as a model of successful metropolitan reinvention and tried to copy the Pittsburgh formula — urban redevelopment, attraction of corporate headquarters and white-collar work, and creation of cultural amenities. Hamilton's economic development commissioner in the 1960s arranged trips to visit Pittsburgh and meet its civic leaders, and the Canadian city also marketed post-industrial changes in its labour force and landscape.

Hamilton tried to follow the Pittsburgh script, but differences in the two cities' business leadership and in their legal and political structures produced different results. The Hamilton business community, for example, lacked a cohesive coalition like the Allegheny Conference to mobilize support for redevelopment and relied on ad-hoc alliances, project by project, instead. And in contrast to the US, "Canada's federal government only subsidized low- and moderate-income housing, not commercial development," limiting federal investment in redevelopment (31).

Neumann's discussion of regional politics and metropolitan geography is detailed and insightful, rooting these discussions in a place. For example, the slow closure of the steel facilities in the Pittsburgh industrial neigh-bourhoods of South Side and Hazelwood, across the Monongahela River from each other, left the two communities in very different positions. South Side invested in historic preservation and slowly gentrified, leading to the development of retail and entertainment district on the site of the old mill, called SouthSide Works, that traded on the neighbourhood's history. The city of Pittsburgh's spending of $103 million on roads and a parking garage for the retail centre was "more money than it had invested in the South Side in the previous thirty years" (150).

In the end, Neumann shows, the North Atlantic tides of deindustrialization, the global winds of neoliberalism, and popular theorizing by policy-oriented intellectuals like Richard Florida brought Hamilton and Pittsburgh to nearly the same place. Pittsburgh got there first and is seen as a winner in the...