The City After Abandonment

Acknowledgments

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Creating a cohesive book that addresses an issue that literature covers well— the d istress o f U .S. c entral c ities, pa rticularly w here ma nufacturing ha s declined—and yet focuses with depth on a topic that is not addressed well at all—how to understand and what to do about cities that have experienced high levels of abandonment, as a whole and in their neighborhoods—proved a difficult task. We tackled this challenge with our authors with a great deal of research, revision, and rounds of dialogue and feedback. We thank the Center for Local, State, and Urban Policy at the University of Michigan for funding for research assistance and for a symposium, held in summer 2010, which brought this volume’s authors together to c ritique each other’s drafts. Our ability to b ring together most of the authors and several other commentators helped us develop coherence of vision and refine our purpose. Research assistants Catherine Coenen, Erin Evenhouse, Diana F lora, A ngela For tino, K ate Humphrey, S ophonie Jo seph, Robert Linn, Daniel Stern, and Erin Thoresen contributed enormously. Robert Linn also provided cartography for individual chapters and brought consistency to t he b ook’s maps . Debbie B echer, Robert B eckley, Robin B oyle, Da niel D’Oca, Den nis Ke ating, Brian L arkin, Avis Vidal, a nd Matthew Weber provided helpful feedback on many chapters a nd on the book as a whole, and many chapter authors offered comments, either in the symposium or in memos, on others’ work. In subsequent months authors obligingly revised their chapters several times, strengthening the quality of the whole. All this helped make this truly a collaborative project. We thank as well the editors of Penn Press and of the City in the TwentyFirst Century Series for their support throughout the process of publishing this book—Peter Agree, Eugenie Birch, and Susan Wachter. Th ey encouraged our proposed ma nuscript; t hey i mmediately b elieved i n t he project and its merit and offered helpful advice along the way to final product. 388 Acknowledgments The co-editors were also chapter a uthors. Margaret Dewar thanks the Lincoln I nstitute o f L and P olicy a nd t he fac ulty d irector f und f rom t he Ginsberg Center, University of Michigan, for funding the research for Chapter 8. Melon Wedick, Erin Thoresen, Emily Schemper, Claire V lach, Lisa Morris, Mark Hansford, Ashley Fuller, Janet Nelson, and Kelly Koss contributed research assistance. Roz Greenstein, Dan Immergluck, Dennis Keating , Alan Mallach, Avis Vidal, Christopher Walker, and participants in several symposia provided very helpful comments. June Thomas thanks the Office of the Vice President for Research and the Taubman College of Architecture a nd Urban Planning, University of Michigan, for f unding t he research for Chapter 9. She thanks as well the graduate students who supported this project, Angela Fortino, Brian Larkin, Scott Pitera, and Robert Linn. Other helpful reviewers included Eric Dueweke, Robert Beauregard, Margaret Dewar, and one anonymous scholar. ...