“Dirty Factory Town” or “A Good City?”: Neoliberalism and the Cultural Politics of Rust Belt Urban Revitalization.

Abstract

On July 4, 1984, AutoWorld opened in Flint, Michigan. A curious combination of Disney-style theme park and historical museum, the $80 million dollar urban revitalization project was also an attempt by a “Rust Belt” city to transform its image and economy following the devastating deindustrialization of the late 1970s and early 1980s. AutoWorld closed its doors less than a year after opening due to lack of visitors, unable to succeed in its mission. Through analysis of the development and execution of this project, as well as contemporary culturally based urban revitalization projects throughout the “Rust Belt” including Cleveland’s Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, Youngstown’s Historical Center of Labor and Industry, and Baltimore’s Harborplace development, this dissertation investigates the complex cultural, political, and economic strategies undertaken by former industrial urban centers in the wake of deindustrialization and during the emergence of neoliberalism in the 1970s and 80s. In these urban revitalization sites, we can see the economic and cultural logics of neoliberalism intersecting on the ground as cities struggled over the terms of their image and their place in a “post-industrial,” post-New Deal America, and such sites are thus crucial for understanding the complex interactions of capital, culture, and urban politics both in their own historical moment and our own. In chapters focusing on the roots of the neoliberal turn, the development and implications of the “Rust Belt” image in the national imagination, the roles of organized labor and its representation in these cultural projects, and the various institutional identities that these projects took on, this study illuminates the ways that “Rust Belt” cities negotiated the economic, moral and cultural dimensions of the neoliberal turn of the late 1970s and 1980s, and how that framework has guided those cities since.