Innovators and gravediggers: Capital restructuring and class formation in Ann Arbor, Michigan, 1945-1994.

Abstract

This dissertation examines how international economic transformations converged with capital restructuring efforts and local progrowth coalitions to redesign Ann Arbor's physical and cultural landscape. It also studies the effects on working-class communities and the shifting contours of class formation. I begin with the area's largest economic institution, the University of Michigan, and the evolution of federal and corporate spending on scientific research. Consequently, U-M restructured fundraising efforts, research programs, and administrative departments to attract venture capital. Business and political leaders reacted by coordinating campaigns to attract R&D companies to Ann Arbor, the self-proclaimed "Research Center of the Midwest." Yet, subsequent development displaced working-class neighborhoods, particularly the African-American community on the city's Northside. After WWII, these neighborhoods possessed economic institutions and cultural organizations that buttressed a powerful local civil rights movement. While gaining strength from national events, most efforts grew from traditional cultural practices and community networks that had historically empowered fights for dignity and survival in a racist community. The final chapters examine how all of these changes reflect and reinforce transformations in class structures and cultures: a new petite bourgeoisie ushers in a scientific paradigm integrating research and enterprise; peripheral development forces downtown merchants to meet the new tastes of sophisticated and globalized consumption practices; and new disciplinary narratives rationalize postindustrial production and postmodern culture. However, fragments of working-class resistance have drawn on experiences with the new socio-spatial organization of economic and social life to challenge postindustrial policies and ideologies. By drawing on emerging and residual notions of community, groups of homeless activists and public housing tenants have integrated life experiences with political action to struggle against elite progrowth visions of the postindustrial city. This study employs methodologies including archival and oral history work as well as ethnographic and participatory research to investigate the dialectical dynamics of capital accumulation, institutional restructuring and class struggle in a postindustrial city.