Industry and the Smart City

Industry and the smart city ZELDA BRONSTEIN These days, U.S. city planning exudes an funded the Smart Growth Network. The net- audacious air. The suburban sprawl that has work’s nearly forty partners include environ- dominated U.S. development since the Second mental groups; historic preservation organiza- World War is under assault from a multitude of tions; professional associations; developers; real policy makers and activists bent on protecting estate interests; and local, state, and govern- the environment and revitalizing city life. Rally- ment entities. One partner, Smart Growth ing to varied watchwords—smart growth, new America, is itself a coalition of more than one urbanism, sustainable development, green de- hundred national, state, and local organizations, velopment, livable communities, traditional including the Sierra Club, the Congress for the neighborhood development—the insurgent ur- New Urbanism, the American Farmland Trust, banists share key goals: mixing land uses, rais- the National Trust for Historic Preservation, and ing density, and ramping up public transit. In the American Planning Association. Working place of auto-centric, single-use districts both together and independently, these groups reached only via traffic-choked roads, they put sponsor numerous conferences, tours, exposi- housing, shops, and offices close to each other tions, focus groups, forums, publications, and and to ample transit options. Given such op- research projects. They vigorously lobby every tions, they contend, people readily abandon level of government. A copious literature rang- their cars and walk or bike to and from work or ing from books to blogs disseminates smart to the bus, train, trolley, ferry, or light or heavy growth’s principles, showcases its success sto- rail that will carry them to and from work. Only ries, critiques its opponents, and publicizes its “densification” and “infill”—building at higher latest undertakings. Smart growth is now a cur- densities, preferably in already settled areas— ricular staple at the nation’s best planning can provide mass transit with the substantial schools. Most important, in the past two number of riders it needs to be financially feasi- decades thousands of development projects that ble. The widespread realization of this scenario, meet smart growth specifications have been say its proponents, will not only revive urban completed. America; it will benefit the environment at For a movement that’s just twenty years old, large. By drawing people out of their private ve- smart growth has compiled an impressive ré- hicles, compact, transit-oriented development sumé. That résumé, however, is not as impres- will reduce traffic congestion, cut down air pol- sive as its adherents would like. What others re- lution, and diminish global warming; by con- gard as a profound achievement—say, the pas- centrating new construction in city centers, it sage in September 2008 of California’s will protect farmland and open space from first-in-the-nation law to reduce greenhouse gas being further devoured by suburbia. emissions by curbing sprawl—they’re likely to Of all the constituencies embracing this vi- deem a mere step, albeit a big one, in the right sion, smart growth has the highest visibility, the direction. Appraising the new law, prominent broadest agenda, the farthest institutional reach, planner and smart growth advocate William and the greatest political leverage. Since 1996, Fulton notes that, at bottom, it’s about control- the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s ling air pollution, not mandating comprehen- Urban Economic Development Division has sive growth management or land use reform. DISSENT Summer 2009 27 THE NEW AMERICAN CITY “It’s an incremental change,” he writes, “not a bunk the myth that U.S. manufacturing is obso- revolution.” Indeed, to accomplish its goals, the lete. smart growth movement must overcome formi- In depicting industry as basically irrelevant to dable obstacles: the huge extent of existing twenty-first-century urban America, smart sprawl, the political clout of the highway lobby, growth perpetuates a common misconception. the recalcitrance of unreconstructed builders Yes, the nation’s older cities are littered with va- and lenders, the local opposition often elicited cant or underutilized old factory buildings, by the prospect of increased density, and the many in need of remediation. Their presence abiding desire of many Americans to live in a testifies to a very real, decades-long decline. In single-family house with a yard and a garage. 1979 nearly twenty million Americans worked In the name of urban revitalization and envi- in manufacturing; as of February 2009 that ronmental protection, smart growth defies pow- number had fallen to 12.5 million. In the same erful interests and entrenched attitudes. But it period, manufacturing as a share of national scarcely challenges the status quo across the employment plummeted from 22 percent to 9 board. On the contrary, smart growth abets one percent. Brownfields are just one troublesome of the most debilitating phenomena to have legacy of this staggering loss. The disappearance beset American cities in the past half-century: of seven-and-a-half million jobs in a generation deindustrialization. This move is never openly has shuttered downtowns, blighted neighbor- avowed; “postindustrial” is not in the smart hoods, depleted public coffers, and devastated growth lexicon. The contents of that lexicon, lives. however, indicate that the renovated American But, as we have been hearing lately, though metropolis envisioned by its authors has little U.S. manufacturing is down, it’s far from out. need of, and thus scant room for, industry. By Twelve million five hundred thousand jobs is industry, I mean the production, distribution, still a lot of jobs. Add the numbers from other repair, and recycling of manufactured goods. industrial occupations—wholesale trade (5.8 None of these activities figures in smart million), transportation and warehousing (4.3 growth’s standard inventory of desirable urban million), waste management and remediation land uses. At most, working industrial enter- (361,000), repair and maintenance (1.2 mil- prise merits an occasional passing reference. lion)—and you have 24.1 million jobs amount- ing to almost one-fifth of the nation’s employment. But industry does have a role in the These jobs are valuable for their quality as smart growth tableau: it’s cast as a relic, if not a well as their quantity. Dollar for dollar, manu- ruin. At best it takes the form of an empty facturing generates more economic growth—job warehouse suitable for adaptive reuse. More creation, investment, and innovation in direct often it appears as a “brownfield,” a site that’s production and elsewhere—than other sectors not only abandoned or “underutilized” but also of the economy. It also does more for social eq- contaminated and in need of detoxification. In uity. While manufacturing and other industrial any case, for smart growth advocates, the desig- jobs increasingly demand technical skills, they nated future of an industrial site is redevelop- rarely require an advanced degree; they thereby ment with a mix of housing, retail, and offices. offer Americans an unusually accessible career The reindustrialization of the American city path into the middle class—no small thing in a ought to have a place on the smart growth country where less than 30 percent of the pop- agenda—and a place near the top at that—if ulation has graduated from college. (In the only because sustaining urban industry fends inner city, that figure is about 12 percent.) off sprawl. Sprawl busting aside, a vital industri- Workers with less education can obtain higher al sector fosters social equity, supports the serv- wages, better benefits, and readier advancement ice economy, propels innovation, and builds in industry than in retail or office employment. economic resilience. Smart growth should be “The average manufacturing worker,” writes safeguarding urban industry; instead, its land economist Susan Helper in a 2008 report to the use policies facilitate industrial displacement. Economic Policy Institute, “earns a weekly The first step in reversing that strategy is to de- wage of $725, 20% higher than the national average.” 28 DISSENT Summer 2009 THE NEW AMERICAN CITY If the green economy envisioned by Barack indispensable support. This crucial function is Obama comes to pass, industry will also provide overlooked in the effusive tributes paid by millions of American workers with good jobs Richard Florida and others to the “new econo- that improve the environment. According to my” and its amenity-rich “consumer cities.” economist Robert Pollin, the president’s eco- Granted, no such encomiums are to be found in nomic stimulus plan, passed by Congress in the discourse of smart growth, where the February, directs between $50 billion and $140 phrase “new economy” is almost as scarce as billion to clean energy investments, “depending the word “postindustrial.” But insofar as the on how one counts the patchwork of direct smart metropolis is conceived as a place of resi- public spending and private-sector initiatives.” dences, offices, and shops with no essential ties Five hundred million dollars have been desig- to industrial activity, its economy is arguably nated for training workers for careers in energy new. In real cities, however, the old and the efficiency and renewable energy fields. Pollin new are deeply intertwined. marks the modesty of this effort: “[B]uilding a clean-energy economy,” he writes, “is the work of a generation and takes only its first baby Their mutual dependency in one exem- steps within the two-year Obama stimulus pro- plary new economy town is graphically illus- gram.” At the same time, he hails the measure trated by a 2007 report prepared by the City of for defying conventional wisdom and coupling San Francisco’s Back Streets Businesses Adviso- environmental protection with economic op- ry Board. The report includes linkage maps that portunity.

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