Reversing Urban Decline

Detroit’s bankruptcy is the most severe example of the financial implications of the movement of wealth to the suburbs. When residents and businesses leave, central cities have a disproportionate share of most regions’ lower-income households. At the same time, many central cities collect less revenue as states cut financial support. So, we are left with the question: can central cities change patterns of economic activity? In Reversing Urban Decline: Why and How Sports, Entertainment, and Culture Turn Cities into Major League Winners, Second Edition author Mark Rosentraub details how central cities facing increasing levels of economic segregation can use new urban areas anchored by sports venues to enhance their financial position. See What’s New in the Second Edition: Increased focus on urban revitalization, urban theory, and urban planning Two additional case studies (Denver and Fort Wayne) to give the book a broader appeal and more material to make the book a good fit for urban planning, urban studies, and public policy classes New data based on additional research and follow up on several of the original cases Rosentraub anchors the book more closely in the center of the debate on urban revitalization, the financial issues facing central cities, and the ways in which public leaders can respond to the economic segregation developing between central cities and their suburban areas. That disparity is reducing the taxes that central cities receive, reducing their ability to provide the services residents need. Rather than just provide us with a brief escape from our problems, sports and entertainment, with the right leadership, can create opportunities for our cities to reinvent and reinvigorate themselves. Placing sports as one of the central elements to revitalize urban centers, this book uses several case studies to develop a set of rules to help cities plan for the effective use and returns from their investments in sports, entertainment, and cultural centers.

Detroit’s bankruptcy is the most severe example of the financial implications of the movement of wealth to the suburbs. When residents and businesses leave, central cities have a disproportionate share of most regions’ lower-income households. At the same time, many central cities collect less revenue as states cut financial support. So, we are left with the question: can central cities change patterns of economic activity? In Reversing Urban Decline: Why and How Sports, Entertainment, and Culture Turn Cities into Major League Winners, Second Edition author Mark Rosentraub details how central cities facing increasing levels of economic segregation can use new urban areas anchored by sports venues to enhance their financial position. See What’s New in the Second Edition: Increased focus on urban revitalization, urban theory, and urban planning Two additional case studies (Denver and Fort Wayne) to give the book a broader appeal and more material to make the book a good fit for urban planning, urban studies, and public policy classes New data based on additional research and follow up on several of the original cases Rosentraub anchors the book more closely in the center of the debate on urban revitalization, the financial issues facing central cities, and the ways in which public leaders can respond to the economic segregation developing between central cities and their suburban areas. That disparity is reducing the taxes that central cities receive, reducing their ability to provide the services residents need. Rather than just provide us with a brief escape from our problems, sports and entertainment, with the right leadership, can create opportunities for our cities to reinvent and reinvigorate themselves. Placing sports as one of the central elements to revitalize urban centers, this book uses several case studies to develop a set of rules to help cities plan for the effective use and returns from their investments in sports, entertainment, and cultural centers.

Shrinking Cities: Understanding Shrinkage and Decline in the United States offers a contemporary look at patterns of shrinkage and decline in the United States. The book juxtaposes the complex and numerous processes that contribute to these patterns with broader policy frameworks that have been under consideration to address shrinkage in U.S. cities. A range of methods are employed to answer theoretically-grounded questions about patterns of shrinkage and decline, the relationships between the two, and the empirical associations among shrinkage, decline, and several socio-economic variables. In doing so, the book examines new spaces of shrinkage in the United States. The book also explores pro-growth and decline-centered governance, which has important implications for questions of sustainability and resilience in U.S. cities. Finally, the book draws attention to U.S.-wide demographic shifts and argues for further research on socio-economic pathways of various groups of population, contextualized within population trends at various geographic scales. This timely contribution contends that an understanding of what the city has become, as it faces shrinkage, is essential toward a critical analysis of development both within and beyond city boundaries. The book will appeal to urban and regional studies scholars from a variety of disciplinary backgrounds, as well as practitioners and policymakers.

During the past two decades, most large American cities have lost population, yet some have continued to grow. Does this trend foreshadow the “death” of our largest cities? Or is urban decline a temporary phenomenon likely to be reversed by high energy costs? This ambitious book tackles these questions by analyzing the nature and extent of urban decline and growth of large U.S. cities. It includes and integrates five substudies. The first examines urban decline and some of its long-run causes, and whether cities that are losing population are performing their economic and social functions less effectively. The second substudy is a multivariate analysis of factors associated with the growth and decline of 121 large U.S. cities and their metropolitan areas. Although its causes vary, urban decline appears closely related to processes that have both upgraded individual households and generated serious problems for city governments and poor neighborhoods. A third substudy shows that neighborhood decline is part of a systematic process related to the influx of poor households into metropolitan areas. Another substudy simulates five antidecline strategies in a single metropolitan area, that of Cleveland, Ohio, and finds that severe decline (occurring in about one-fourth of large U.S. cities) could be slowed, though not stopped by vigorous policies. From the last substudy it emerges that, even if gasoline prices rose to over $2 a gallon, resulting adjustments by commuters and firms would produce little net centralization of future urban development—though many older neighborhoods would probably be rehabilitated. The book concludes that further losses of population and jobs in most severely declining cities are unavoidable in the near future. Even Southern and Western cities, now growing fast, will find their rate of growth slowing as further annexation of surrounding territory is limited. The book ends with two chapters discussing policies designed both to help declining population and job losses and to minimize such loses in other cities.

Explores the consequences of the losses of population, employment and local government powers which are currently being experienced by the nation's major cities.

Richard Florida, one of the world's leading urbanists and author of The Rise of the Creative Class, confronts the dark side of the back-to-the-city movement In recent years, the young, educated, and affluent have surged back into cities, reversing decades of suburban flight and urban decline. and yet all is not well. In The New Urban Crisis, Richard Florida, one of the first scholars to anticipate this back-to-the-city movement, demonstrates how the forces that drive urban growth also generate cities' vexing challenges, such as gentrification, segregation, and inequality. Meanwhile, many more cities still stagnate, and middle-class neighborhoods everywhere are disappearing. We must rebuild cities and suburbs by empowering them to address their challenges. The New Urban Crisis is a bracingly original work of research and analysis that offers a compelling diagnosis of our economic ills and a bold prescription for more inclusive cities capable of ensuring prosperity for all.

Examines the educational programs American Indians developed to preserve their cultural and ethnic identity, improve their livelihood, and serve the needs of their youth in Chicago. After World War II, American Indians began relocating to urban areas in large numbers, in search of employment. Partly influenced by the Bureau of Indian Affairs, this migration from rural reservations to metropolitan centers presented both challenges and opportunities. This history examines the educational programs American Indians developed in Chicago and gives particular attention to how the American Indian community chose its own distinct path within and outside of the larger American Indian self-determination movement. In what John J. Laukaitis terms community self-determination, American Indians in Chicago demonstrated considerable agency as they developed their own programs and worked within already existent institutions. The community-based initiatives included youth programs at the American Indian Center and St. Augustine’s Center for American Indians, the Native American Committee’s Adult Learning Center, Little Big Horn High School, O-Wai-Ya-Wa Elementary School, Native American Educational Services College, and the Institute for Native American Development at Truman College. Community Self-Determination presents the first major examination of these initiatives and programs and provides an understanding of how education functioned as a form of activism for Chicago’s American Indian community. John J. Laukaitis is Assistant Professor of Education at North Park University.

In recent years there has been a growing focus on urban and environmental studies, and the skills and techniques needed to address the wider challenges of how to create sustainable communities. Central to that demand is the increasing urgency of addressing the issue of urban decline, and the response has almost always been to pursue growth policies to attempt to reverse that decline. The track record of growth policies has been mixed at best. Until the first decade of the twenty-first century decline was assumed to be an issue only for former industrial cities – the so-called Rust Belt. But the sudden reversal in growth in the major cities of the American Sunbelt has shown that urban decline can be a much wider issue. Justin Hollander’s research into urban decline in both the Sun and Rust Belts draws lessons planners and policy makers that can be applied universally. Hollander addresses the reasons and statistics behind these "shrinking cities" with a positive outlook, arguing that growth for growth’s sake is not beneficial for communities, suggesting instead that urban development could be achieved through shrinkage. Case studies on Phoenix, Flint, Orlando and Fresno support the argument, and Hollander delves into the numbers, literature and individual lives affected and how they have changed in response to the declining regions. Written for urban scholars and to suit a wide range of courses focused on contemporary urban studies, this text forms a base for all study on shrinking cities for professionals, academics and students in urban design, planning, public administration and sociology.