Unlocking The Potential Of Post Industrial Cities

Unlocking the Economic Potential of Post-Industrial Cities provides a roadmap for how urban policy makers, community members, and practitioners in the public and private sector can work together with researchers to discover how all cities can solve the most pressing modern urban challenges.

How can urban leaders in Baltimore, Cleveland, Detroit, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, and St. Louis make the smart choices that can lead their city to make a comeback? The urban centers of New York City, Seattle, and San Francisco have enjoyed tremendous economic success and population growth in recent years. At the same time, cities like Baltimore and Detroit have experienced population loss and economic decline. People living in these cities are not enjoying the American Dream of upward mobility. How can post-industrial cities struggling with crime, pollution, poverty, and economic decline make a comeback? In Unlocking the Potential of Post-Industrial Cities, Matthew E. Kahn and Mac McComas explore why some people and places thrive during a time of growing economic inequality and polarization—and some don't. They examine six underperforming cities—Baltimore, Cleveland, Detroit, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, and St. Louis—that have struggled from 1970 to present. Drawing from the field of urban economics, Kahn and McComas ask how the public and private sectors can craft policies and make investments that create safe, green cities where young people reach their full potential. The authors analyze long-run economic and demographic trends. They also highlight recent lessons from urban economics in labor market demand and supply, neighborhood quality of life, and local governance while scrutinizing strategies to lift people out of poverty. These cities are all at a fork in the road. Depending on choices made today, they could enjoy a significant comeback—but only if local leaders are open to experimentation and innovation while being honest about failure and constructive evaluation. Unlocking the Potential of Post-Industrial Cities provides a roadmap for how urban policy makers, community members, and practitioners in the public and private sector can work together with researchers to discover how all cities can solve the most pressing modern urban challenges.

"In Slow and Sudden Violence, Derek Hyra weaves together a persuasive unrest narrative, linking police aggression to an ongoing cycle of racial and spatial urban redevelopment repression. By delving into the real estate history of the St. Louis region and Baltimore, Hyra shows how rounds of urban renewal decisions to segregate, divest, displace, and gentrify Black communities advance neighborhood inequality. Despite moments of racial political representation, repeated decisions to 'upgrade' the urban fabric and uproot low-income Black populations, result in Black poverty pockets inhabited by people experiencing chronic displacement trauma and unrelenting police surveillance. These interconnected sets of accumulated frustrations powerfully culminate and surface when tragic and unjust police killings occur. To confront the core components of U.S. unrest, Hyra suggests we must end racialized policing, stop Black community destruction and displacement, and reduce neighborhood inequality"--

This book examines contemporary policy debates from opposing perspectives. It considers seven key topics in today’s society: land use, education, international trade, health insurance, technological change, and recreational alcohol and drugs. Two scholars with differing viewpoints discuss each topic, one working in the classical liberal tradition and the other advocating slower, incremental societal change. While classical liberalism historically presents a vision of society comprised of free and responsible individuals, this book shows the importance of considering the nuances of this vision today. Beyond theoretical regulation vs. de-regulation debates, the book highlights challenges for classical liberals by considering how dynamism and creative destruction may disrupt communities, leading to worse outcomes for some groups. This edited volume aims to deepen understanding of this challenge to a free society and partake in and encourage civil intellectual discourse and debate. It will interest students and scholars from various fields, including economics, political science, public health, and environmental studies.

Since Garrett Hardin published The Tragedy of the Commons in 1968, critics have argued that population growth and capitalism contribute to overuse of natural resources and degradation of the global environment. They propose coercive, state-centric solutions. This book offers an alternative view. Employing insights from new institutional economics, the authors argue that property rights, competitive markets, polycentric political institutions, and social institutions such as trust, patience and individualism enable society to conserve natural resources and mitigate harms to the global environment.

City greening has been heralded for contributing to environmental governance and critiqued for exacerbating displacement and inequality.? Bringing these two disparate analyses into conversation, this book offers a comparative understanding of how tensions between growth, environmental protection, and social equity are playing out in practice. Examining Chicago, USA, Birmingham, UK, and Vancouver, Canada, McKendry argues that city greening efforts were closely connected to processes of post-industrial branding in the neoliberal economy. While this brought some benefits, concerns about the unequal distribution of these benefits and greening’s limited environmental impact challenged its legitimacy. In response, city leaders have moved toward initiatives that strive to better address environmental effectiveness and social equity while still spurring growth. Through an analysis that highlights how different varieties of liberal environmentalism are manifested in each case, this book illustrates that cities, though constrained by inconsistent political will and broader political and economic contexts, are making contributions to more effective, socially just environmental governance. Both critical and hopeful, McKendry’s work will interest scholars of city greening, environmental governance, and comparative urban politics.

How can markets help us adapt to the challenges of climate change? Editor Terry L. Anderson brings together this collection of essays featuring the work of nine leading policy analysts, who argue that market forces are just as important as government regulation in shaping climate policy—and should be at the heart of our response to helping societies adapt to climate change. Anderson notes in his introduction that most current climate policies such as the Paris Agreement require hard-to-enforce collective action and focus on reducing or mitigating greenhouse gases rather than adapting to their negative effects. Adaptive actions can typically deliver much more, faster and more cheaply than any realistic climate policy. The authors tackle a range of issues: the hidden costs of renewable energy sources, the political obstacles surrounding climate change policy, insurance and financial instruments for pricing risk of exposure to the effects of climate change, and more. Reliance on emerging renewable energies and a carbon tax are not enough to prevent the effects of global warming, they argue. We must encourage more private action and market incentives to adapt to a rapidly changing climate.

With the publication of The Rise of the Creative Class by Richard Florida in 2002, the 'creative city' became the new hot topic among urban policymakers, planners and economists. Florida has developed one of three path-breaking theories about the relationship between creative individuals and urban environments. The economist Åke E. Andersson and the psychologist Dean Simonton are the other members of this 'creative troika'. In the Handbook of Creative Cities, Florida, Andersson and Simonton appear in the same volume for the first time. The expert contributors in this timely Handbook extend their insights with a varied set of theoretical and empirical tools. The diversity of the contributions reflect the multidisciplinary nature of creative city theorizing, which encompasses urban economics, economic geography, social psychology, urban sociology, and urban planning. The stated policy implications are equally diverse, ranging from libertarian to social democratic visions of our shared creative and urban future. Being truly international in its scope, this major Handbook will be particularly useful for policy makers that are involved in urban development, academics in urban economics, economic geography, urban sociology, social psychology, and urban planning, as well as graduate and advanced undergraduate students across the social sciences and in business.