Capital mobility and the role of the state in mediating urban economic crisis are central to Robert Lewis’ expansive study on manufacturing decline and redevelopment initiatives in Chicago between the 1920s and the 1970s. The book offers two primary correctives to the scholarship on deindustrialization and urban decline. First, Lewis presents a novel challenge to the dominant paradigm surrounding the timeline of deindustrialization in North America. Rather than rooting the dawn of the industrial crisis in the 1970s, he argues that the systemic decline of manufacturing in northern urban centres can be more accurately traced back to the 1920s when the growth of suburbs prompted a wave of factory relocations and solidified new articulations of production and property relations. Drawing upon an extensive dataset containing hundreds of entries for new factory construction, Lewis convincingly shows that suburban Chicago benefited directly from infrastructure and investment while the city’s industrial base had already begun to wane. Second, the author complicates the prevailing notion that governments in the United States were laissez-faire in their responses to the structural decline of manufacturing. Contrarily, Chicago’s Industrial Decline reveals a complex interplay between state and local governments, development agencies, corporations, scientific ‘site selection’ companies and industrial capitalists in an overarching – if futile – effort at industrial redevelopment during the post-war period.
The first part of the book is dedicated to unpacking the exodus of industrial jobs from metropolitan Chicago between the 1920s and 1940s and examining the rise of the industrial suburb in the aftermath of World War II. In these chapters, Lewis describes deindustrialization not as a singular cataclysm but as an unfolding process that begins with suburbanization and urban manufacturing decline long before the concept gains a foothold in popular discourses surrounding offshoring and capital mobility during the latter half of the twentieth century. Lewis’ examination of the rise of ‘scientific site selection’ and the professionalization of industrial relocation services (p. 49) is especially strong, serving to denaturalize the process of industrial decline and revealing how such decisions were – and continue to be – beholden to the inexorable logic of capital accumulation. The inevitability of decline is absent here; rather, Lewis traces the decisions that were made during these decades and their results – not only in terms of spatial economic relocation, but also the ways in which such decisions ultimately served as a bulwark against working-class or racial solidarity.
After establishing the spatial reconfiguration of industry in Chicago, Lewis moves towards an analysis of industrial redevelopment in ‘blighted’ areas of the city. While residential redevelopment in the aftermath of the 1937 Housing Act has attracted a great deal of scholarly attention, the place of industrial strategy has been relatively understudied and represents another significant contribution of this work. ‘Urban blight’, an imprecise and malleable concept employed to justify land expropriation and reallocation, was a central concept in this effort. In the 1940s, changing conceptions of property directly underpinned these growth strategies – including state actions like the Blighted Areas Act of 1947 – and brought federal and state attention to bear on urban property issues. Chapters 3 and 4 examine these issues in depth, and the author successfully connects changing and conflicting property relations and legalistic frameworks with the growth and failure of several industrial redevelopment initiatives.
The book’s final section is comprised of three case-studies of various strategies for industrial development in Chicago between the 1950s and 1970s. These include the actions of the Chicago Land Clearance Commission (CLCC), the mayor’s Committee for Economic and Cultural Development (CECD) and an industrial parks strategy enacted during the late 1960s. The CLCC, described by Lewis as a ‘quasigovernment agency with police and financial powers to refashion property relations’ (p. 113), failed in its effort at industrial redevelopment but succeeded in legitimizing state economic interventionism and allowing significant subsidy to fall into the hands of private property holders. Efforts shifted during the 1960s, with a focus on science and defence-driven research and development as industrial incubators throughout Chicago. Ultimately, place-based capitalists and middle-class growth strategists were incapable of responding effectively to structural change, but their efforts at changing property relations, disrupting and displacing existing neighbourhoods and ‘blighted’ areas, and employing eminent domain in their efforts allowed for the emergence of a new urban space – one that was profoundly post-industrial and characterized by neoliberal principles – the ‘New Chicago’.
