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作者

来源

JOURNAL OF URBAN AFFAIRS,Vol.41,Issue2,P.264-265

语言

英文

关键字

作者单位

University of Cincinnati

摘要

J. Mark Souther’s recent contribution to Temple University Press’s Urban Life, Landscape, and Policy series is a dense, exhaustively researched history of simultaneous growth and decline in Cleveland from the 1940s to the 1980s. In it, Souther unpacks monolithic concepts such as growth coalitions, urban image, perceptions, and rhetoric. His considered findings make for multiple valuable contributions to the understanding of mid-century urbanism.One of the strongest features of the book is the way in which Souther, and one would presume editors at Temple University Press, structured it. They employ a parallel structure for the first through third and fifth through seventh chapters; both sets of three chapters focus on Cleveland’s downtown, neighborhoods, and industry, respectively. The first set takes place in the 20 years immediately after World War II and the second set pick up with the same topic areas in the early 1970s. Later in this review, I discuss the book’s fourth, “bridging” chapter.The decision to separate each era into three primary themes enables in-depth discussion of one topic area across a time period; it also enables readers to see interrelationships both between topics and across multiple time periods. Unfortunately, the advantage of structuring the book in this unusual manner is not immediately apparent to the reader and only becomes comprehensible in retrospect. The structure of the book also limits the ability of an instructor to pull out any one chapter for inclusion in a set of course readings; only by combining chapters into a set of two topic pair readings or a time-period set of three does a reader get a complete picture. The two sets of three readings would be valuable resources in urban history, theory, or administration courses on mid-century U.S. municipal urban policy.Chapters 1 through 3 examine how city leaders, boosters, and business leaders in the 1940s through 1960s attempted to revive a flagging downtown, rehabilitate disinvested neighborhoods across the city, and retain industries. In all three cases, Cleveland took on projects intended to catalyze transformation on the city scale and burnish the city’s image nationally. In the second three-chapter set, Souther picksup Cleveland’s story in the 1970s. Here, comparison with the first set illustrates both changing national trends related to urban and industrial development as well as how they played out in Cleveland. Whereas downtown projects in the earlier era were crafted to strengthen the area’s traditional economic primacy and increase the city’s image among competitors, suburbanization fundamentally altered downtown’s importance as an economic center. The 1970s saw Cleveland instead attempt to mimic, with mixed results, urban entertainment districts like those in Boston and Baltimore by renovating historic buildings into retail and entertainment destinations. A strength of Souther’s choice of Cleveland as a subject is the representativeness of the city’s response to deindustrialization, suburbanization, and efforts at reinvention. Though other cities, like Detroit, with more dramatic trajectories have been well-documented, less remarkable cities with more typical histories have been overlooked—to the detriment of urban studies scholarship.By considering the two neighborhood chapters as a pair and comparing Cleveland’s postwar approach to revitalization with that of the post–civil rights era, planning history is brought into focus. Here, Souther coins the term bellweather neighborhood to describe areas of the city that act as indicators for the viability of urban renaissance. The author’s decision to focus the first chapter on only one of these—the Hough neighborhood—as urban renewal, riots, cultural investments, demonstration projects, and blight rampaged freely, is a smart one. This focus enables the reader to get a multifaceted perspective of the uncertainty affecting urban neighborhoods nationally, seeing both the neighborhood and those active in its remaking, as characteristic of this era. In the second chapter of the pair, the author focuses on revitalization efforts in another bellweather neighborhood, Ohio City. As seen in the downtown chapters, changes wrought during the 1960s limited the ability or desire of cities to undertake large-scale planning and redevelopment efforts, and revitalization in this latter era was left mainly in the hands of private-sector individual actors and groups.The final set of chapters is paired around the topic of industry. They trace a well-known trajectory of deindustrialization, suburbanization, and economic transformation. In the first of these chapters, Souther deftly teases apart underlying conflicts between regional and city-led economic development initiatives. Deindustrialization sparked the development of regional growth actors like the Greater Cleveland Growth Board, which, on behalf of an understaffed city government, worked with industries departing the city to keep them in the Cleveland region. This metropolitan-scale approach, and the suburbanization of industry it facilitated, worked directly against Cleveland’s own attempt to keep industry within the city’s boundaries. By the 1970s, both city and regional business leaders were working together to attract service-sector employers, largely through expanded promotion of the city’s cultural assets. These chapters question the concept of a unified “growth coalition” at work in U.S. cities, illustrating the inherent tensions between city and regional boosters and the difficulties of serving the varied interests of industrial, service, and technology firms.In the book’s fourth, bridging chapter, we see how Cleveland’s image became a concern in its own right as Souther details the 1967–1971 reign of Mayor Carl Stokes. During this time, Cleveland’s image changed from being largely the province of boosters and began to be used to package municipal reform policies and alter residents’ perceptions of their city. Though this chapter adequately details Stokes’s earnest “Cleveland: NOW!” initiative, it suffers in comparison to the preceding and following chapters. Rather than the singularly focused analysis of its bookend chapters, here Souther surveys downtown, neighborhoods, and industry all within one chapter. Though this chapter covers only the mayor’s 4-year term, its wide-ranging analysis cannot but come off as scattered in comparison.Souther highlights the multiple slogans boosters penned over the years to advertise the city as a location for investment, relocation, and tourism. Catchphrases such as “The Best Location in the Nation” were largely aspirational rather than accurate, suggesting that they were intended to drive economic growth, engender optimistic national perceptions of Cleveland’s image, and, in the later period, improve citizens’ own assessments of their city. Yet boosters would continue over time to have difficulty in managing both internal dissatisfaction and external perceptions with a singular campaign, as shown in reactions to 1974’s “Best Things” campaign. The campaign was designed to appeal to both executives who might relocate corporate headquarters to the city as well as residents pessimistic about large-scale societal and economic disturbances being seen in the city. However, the campaign’s nine national ads touting the region’s cultural institutions, natural environment, medical care, concentration of headquarters, and short commuting times, among others, did not resonate with citizens’ daily struggles with the reality of life in Cleveland, which included failing schools, unemployment, poor access to health care, and neighborhood instability.Indeed, Souther’s focus on the importance of perceptions of a city, by its citizens and by outsiders, is one of the prime contributions of this book. The perception of decline or improvement is not always positively correlated with reality and yet perceptions are influential in how they direct the types of actions that municipal leaders take in response to them. Understanding urban history as a series of facts, actions, and policies, without clearly making connections to how these are perceived, means seeing only one part of reality. By investigating perceptions and their influence, Souther excels in illuminating Cleveland’s recent history.