Chicago's Industrial Decline

Chicago's Industrial Decline PDF

Author: Robert Lewis

Publisher: Cornell University Press

Published: 2020-12-15

Total Pages: 271

ISBN-13: 1501752642

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In Chicago's Industrial Decline Robert Lewis charts the city's decline since the 1920s and describes the early development of Chicago's famed (and reviled) growth machine. Beginning in the 1940s and led by local politicians, downtown business interest, financial institutions, and real estate groups, place-dependent organizations in Chicago implemented several industrial renewal initiatives with the dual purpose of stopping factory closings and attracting new firms in order to turn blighted property into modern industrial sites. At the same time, a more powerful coalition sought to adapt the urban fabric to appeal to middle-class consumption and residential living. As Lewis shows, the two aims were never well integrated, and the result was on-going disinvestment and the inexorable decline of Chicago's industrial space. By the 1950s, Lewis argues, it was evident that the early incarnation of the growth machine had failed to maintain Chicago's economic center in industry. Although larger economic and social forces—specifically, competition for business and for residential development from the suburbs in the Chicagoland region and across the whole United States—played a role in the city's industrial decline, Lewis stresses the deep incoherence of post-WWII economic policy and urban planning that hoped to square the circle by supporting both heavy industry and middle- to upper-class amenities in downtown Chicago.

Chicago's Industrial Decline

Chicago's Industrial Decline PDF

Author: Robert D. Lewis

Publisher:

Published: 2020

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9781501752629

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"This book outlines the decline of Chicago's industrial base and the rise of the suburbs as a substantial industrial district between 1920 and 1975, explores the attempts by the city's political and business leaders to deal with industrial decline, and shows why these initiatives have failed"--

Exit Zero

Exit Zero PDF

Author: Christine J. Walley

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2013-01-17

Total Pages: 237

ISBN-13: 0226871819

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Winner of CLR James Book Prize from the Working Class Studies Association and 2nd Place for the Victor Turner Prize in Ethnographic Writing. In 1980, Christine J. Walley’s world was turned upside down when the steel mill in Southeast Chicago where her father worked abruptly closed. In the ensuing years, ninety thousand other area residents would also lose their jobs in the mills—just one example of the vast scale of deindustrialization occurring across the United States. The disruption of this event propelled Walley into a career as a cultural anthropologist, and now, in Exit Zero, she brings her anthropological perspective home, examining the fate of her family and that of blue-collar America at large. Interweaving personal narratives and family photos with a nuanced assessment of the social impacts of deindustrialization, Exit Zero is one part memoir and one part ethnography— providing a much-needed female and familial perspective on cultures of labor and their decline. Through vivid accounts of her family’s struggles and her own upward mobility, Walley reveals the social landscapes of America’s industrial fallout, navigating complex tensions among class, labor, economy, and environment. Unsatisfied with the notion that her family’s turmoil was inevitable in the ever-forward progress of the United States, she provides a fresh and important counternarrative that gives a new voice to the many Americans whose distress resulting from deindustrialization has too often been ignored. This book is part of a project that also includes a documentary film.

Making a New Deal

Making a New Deal PDF

Author: Lizabeth Cohen

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2014-11-06

Total Pages: 569

ISBN-13: 1107431794

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Examines how ordinary factory workers became unionists and national political participants by the mid-1930s.

Remaking Chicago

Remaking Chicago PDF

Author: Joel Rast

Publisher:

Published: 2002-06

Total Pages: 216

ISBN-13: 9780875805931

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Examining Chicago as a model for urban economic development in the post-World War II era, Joel Rast challenges the conventional belief that structural economic change has forced cities to concentrate resources on downtown revitalization efforts in order to remain fiscally viable. Rast argues instead that cities face multiple economic development choices and that politics play a fundamental role in deciding among them. During the late 1950s, a coalition of city officials and downtown business leaders initiated planning efforts that would help reshape central Chicago into a modern mecca of service industries and affluent residential neighborhoods, chasing viable manufacturers from the near downtown area in the process. More recently, however, manufacturers have sought protection and support from city government, forming alliances with labor and community organizations concerned with the decline of well-paying industrial job opportunities. Responding to these pressures, city officials from the Harold Washington, Eugene Sawyer, and Richard M. Daley administrations have taken steps to implement a citywide industrial policy. Remaking Chicago portrays urban economic development as open-ended and politically contested. It demonstrates that who governs matters and shows how opportunities exist for creative local responses to urban economic restructuring. Based on extensive research, this well-written case study will appeal to those interested in urban planning and politics, economic development, and Chicago history and politics.

The Third City

The Third City PDF

Author: Larry Bennett

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2012-08-01

Total Pages: 254

ISBN-13: 0226042952

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Our traditional image of Chicago—as a gritty metropolis carved into ethnically defined enclaves where the game of machine politics overshadows its ends—is such a powerful shaper of the city’s identity that many of its closest observers fail to notice that a new Chicago has emerged over the past two decades. Larry Bennett here tackles some of our more commonly held ideas about the Windy City—inherited from such icons as Theodore Dreiser, Carl Sandburg, Daniel Burnham, Robert Park, Sara Paretsky, and Mike Royko—with the goal of better understanding Chicago as it is now: the third city. Bennett calls contemporary Chicago the third city to distinguish it from its two predecessors: the first city, a sprawling industrial center whose historical arc ran from the Civil War to the Great Depression; and the second city, the Rustbelt exemplar of the period from around 1950 to 1990. The third city features a dramatically revitalized urban core, a shifting population mix that includes new immigrant streams, and a growing number of middle-class professionals working in new economy sectors. It is also a city utterly transformed by the top-to-bottom reconstruction of public housing developments and the ambitious provision of public works like Millennium Park. It is, according to Bennett, a work in progress spearheaded by Richard M. Daley, a self-consciously innovative mayor whose strategy of neighborhood revitalization and urban renewal is a prototype of city governance for the twenty-first century. The Third City ultimately contends that to understand Chicago under Daley’s charge is to understand what metropolitan life across North America may well look like in the coming decades.

Chicago's Southeast Side

Chicago's Southeast Side PDF

Author: Rod Sellers

Publisher: Arcadia Publishing

Published: 1998-10

Total Pages: 132

ISBN-13: 9780738534039

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Steel and the steel industry are the backbone of Chicago's southeast side, an often overlooked neighborhood with a rich ethnic heritage. Bolstered by the prosperous steel industry, the community attracted numerous, strong-willed people with a desire to work from distinct cultural backgrounds. In recent years, the vitality of the steel industry has diminished. Chicago's Southeast Side displays many rare and interesting pictures that capture the spirit of the community when the steel industry was a vibrant force. Although annexed in 1889 by the city of Chicago, the community has maintained its own identity through the years. In an attempt to remain connected to their homelands, many immigrants established businesses, churches, and organizations to ease their transition to a new and unfamiliar land. The southeast side had its own schools, shopping districts, and factories. As a result, it became a prosperous, yet separate, enclave within the city of Chicago.

Garbage Wars

Garbage Wars PDF

Author: David Naguib Pellow

Publisher: MIT Press

Published: 2004-09-17

Total Pages: 255

ISBN-13: 026266187X

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A study of the struggle for environmental justice, focusing on conflicts over solid waste and pollution in Chicago. In Garbage Wars, the sociologist David Pellow describes the politics of garbage in Chicago. He shows how garbage affects residents in vulnerable communities and poses health risks to those who dispose of it. He follows the trash, the pollution, the hazards, and the people who encountered them in the period 1880-2000. What unfolds is a tug of war among social movements, government, and industry over how we manage our waste, who benefits, and who pays the costs. Studies demonstrate that minority and low-income communities bear a disproportionate burden of environmental hazards. Pellow analyzes how and why environmental inequalities are created. He also explains how class and racial politics have influenced the waste industry throughout the history of Chicago and the United States. After examining the roles of social movements and workers in defining, resisting, and shaping garbage disposal in the United States, he concludes that some environmental groups and people of color have actually contributed to environmental inequality. By highlighting conflicts over waste dumping, incineration, landfills, and recycling, Pellow provides a historical view of the garbage industry throughout the life cycle of waste. Although his focus is on Chicago, he places the trends and conflicts in a broader context, describing how communities throughout the United States have resisted the waste industry's efforts to locate hazardous facilities in their backyards. The book closes with suggestions for how communities can work more effectively for environmental justice and safe, sustainable waste management.

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