The Roots of Postindustrialism

      In declining manufacturing centers throughout the North Atlantic, public-private partnerships that allowed political and civic leaders to provide public subsidies for private development were vital to postindustrialism. Such partnerships flourished in U.S. cities like Pittsburgh in the 1950s and 1960s but emerged more slowly in other parts of the world. In Canada, for instance, public development corporations were “difficult to form,” according to the U.S. consultants who had advised Hamilton Mayor Vic Copps to look to Pittsburgh for a redevelopment model.¹ Yet when Copps sent Jack Moore to Pittsburgh to study the Allegheny Conference in 1968, neither the mayor nor the economic development commissioner appeared to give much thought to why that was the case. This was perhaps because the consultants had cavalierly assured city officials that there was “nothing to prevent the Hamilton Economic Development Commission or some other body from encouraging interested private citizens to form a development corporation.”²

      While it may have been true that Canadian laws did not prohibit formation of a private development corporation, Arthur D. Little’s “Lunchpail Report,” as local officials referred to it, ignored the influence of national political frameworks on when and where public-private partnerships formed and how they functioned. The consultants instead stressed the importance of strong mayoral leadership and the participation of “highly influential private citizens” in U.S. cities after World War II. In Pittsburgh, they wrote, the city’s famed Renaissance could not have occurred “unless well intentioned men decided to act.”³ They overlooked the fact that securing the long-term cooperation of those “well intentioned men,” in Pittsburgh and elsewhere, rested on changing state and federal laws to create an institutional framework for public-private cooperation that allowed business leaders to profit handsomely from their participation in publicly sponsored urban redevelopment plans.⁴

      Public-private partnerships had a long history in North America by the time Arthur D. Little submitted the Lunchpail Report. In U.S. cities, ad hoc booster relationships established in the early nineteenth century transformed into informal partnerships around 1850, when businessmen formed civic associations and clubs through which to rationalize the urban landscape and create new opportunities for real estate development.⁵ Nineteenth-century U.S. and Canadian public works projects were often public-private ventures. Boosters on both sides of the border assembled subsidies and loans to attract private railroad companies in a way that foreshadowed the interurban competition for jobs common among North Atlantic cities by the 1970s.⁶ In Europe, Louis Napoléon’s reconstruction of Paris in cooperation with Crédit Mobilier was a nineteenth-century forerunner of the partnerships that implemented urban renewal projects in the 1950s and 1960s. And in the United States the federal government began to underwrite locally led partnerships through New Deal housing and public works programs.⁷

      From the ground, public-private cooperation often looked like a purely local affair, negotiated between a city’s political and business elites. But the power of public-private partnerships to make postindustrial places was shaped and constrained, materially and discursively, at the metropolitan, national, and global scales. National governments handled demands for resources from ascendant and declining regions in different ways, which limited local government budgets as well as the policy options available to urban growth coalitions. Within metropolitan regions, municipal officials’ autonomy over allocation of public resources for urban development varied, as did local executives’ interest in directing civic projects. In Pittsburgh and Hamilton, distinctions between the city’s position in its metropolitan region, national political institutions, and growth coalitions’ abilities to harness internationally circulating ideas about how to remake manufacturing centers meant that postindustrialism unfolded in spatially and temporally uneven ways.

       Public-Private Partnerships for Urban Redevelopment

      Postindustrialism opened a new chapter in a long history of idea sharing among municipal officials and city planners in the North Atlantic region. The mid-nineteenth-century industrialization of the same cities that sought shared solutions to the decline of manufacturing a hundred years later led boosters, social reformers, and policymakers to develop a network of people, institutions, and frameworks that facilitated the exchange of urban planning and policy ideas between North American, Western European, and colonial cities from Calcutta to Nairobi to Fez. In the late nineteenth century, boosters intensified these informal international transfers through selective borrowing among (or imperial imposition by) the elected officials, national policymakers, and bureaucrats tasked with solving the problems of modern industrial cities. Their fertile intellectual exchange continued into the early twentieth century, when urban experts in specialized institutions, philanthropic foundations, and nongovernmental organizations established formal exchange organizations to disseminate what contemporary planners might call “best practices” for urban social and physical development.⁸

      As a result of shared ideas and policy circulation, early twentieth-century plans for U.S. and Canadian cities replicated the grand boulevards of European capitals, while London and Paris adopted skyscrapers, industrial architecture, and technological innovations from the United States. In the interwar period, Americans traveled to Berlin to study zoning, to Birmingham to investigate municipal ownership of utilities, and to Vienna to visit social housing. British and German planners, in turn, kept a close eye on New Deal housing and infrastructure programs. In the 1940s, modernist design aesthetics pioneered in France and Germany influenced planners and architects in the United States and Canada, even as American planning ideas and discourses increasingly permeated European cities.⁹

      After World War II, urban renewal programs occupied planners on both sides of the Atlantic. The ad hoc public-private partnerships that had built railroads across the United States and Canada and remade nineteenth-century Paris began to transition to more formal partnerships in the 1940s and 1950s.¹⁰ In the midwestern and northeastern United States, cities emerged from the Depression and war with decayed downtowns, deteriorated residential neighborhoods, and severe housing shortages. New Deal programs had laid the groundwork for federally funded housing programs, and subsidies for suburban development and for industrial decentralization to the suburbs and the Southwest threatened manufacturing centers’ tax revenues. To secure the economic futures of the cities in which their enterprises operated, local businessmen and corporate elites joined forces with municipal officials to make over troubled downtowns, protect their capital investments, and restore investor confidence in industrial centers. Federal, state, and local officials used public funds to “leverage” private investment, typically under the auspices of federal urban renewal programs. Federal housing acts passed in 1949 and 1954, together with the 1956 Highway Act and various pieces of state legislation dating to the 1940s, provided the legal foundation for urban renewal. State and federal programs for the first time formally embedded public-private partnerships into government funding structures for urban development conceived during the New Deal.¹¹

      In the United States, urban renewal was ostensibly intended to address urban housing shortages after World War II and provide decent shelter for all Americans. Coalitions of Democratic politicians, Republican businessmen, real estate developers, and unionists from the construction trades lobbied for renewal legislation and the federal funding that made it possible. Federal urban renewal funds required cities to use their powers of eminent domain to acquire land and transfer it to private developers at low or no cost; once they had done so, federal funds could be used for clearance and development subsidies. Making funds contingent on public-private partnerships was a new requirement, but the redevelopment partnerships that carried out federally sponsored urban renewal programs in the 1950s and 1960s often had much longer histories. In places such as Pittsburgh, Chicago, and St. Louis, mayors and local businessmen collaborated on large-scale slum removal and downtown redevelopment projects before federal urban renewal funds became available. State and local enabling legislation passed to support downtown redevelopment in those cities became models for federal renewal programs.¹² Whether using state or federal programs, however, the private-sector members of redevelopment partnerships typically took the lead, because urban renewal funds could