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Since the 1970s, waves of deindustrialization have dramatically transformed the urban Rust Belt. The plight of cities in this region is well documented by scholars. The story they present upholds central assumptions in theories of urban growth, mainly new cities grow in new economic regions at the expense of others. This dissertation challenges this notion by addressing the following question: What are the different economic trajectories Rust Belt cities have taken over the course of global economic restructuring from 1970 to 2000? In this research, 69 Rust Belt cities are classified into three different categories based on their performance on a quality of life index over this time period: stable, struggling, and devastated. Then, conventional quantitative methods are used to map changes in employment trends onto the cities in each category. This step provides a general picture of economic restructuring experiences in these cities, which shows all lose manufacturing employment, but increases in business services employment distinguishes stable cities while increases in professional services employment distinguishes devastated cities. Next, an innovative methodology is used to identify different kinds of economic transitions for different types of cities. The analysis shows larger, stable cities have been able to reorganize their local economies into producer service-based economies. It also indicates manufacturing remains central to the local economies in smaller, stable cities, and finally, all devastated cities are developing healthcare-based local economies. Finally, two stable and two devastated cities are examined in-depth to provide a detailed description of local economic transformations. The stable cities have combined local R&D facilities with a strong infrastructure of specialty manufacturers to become high-tech production sites. This change has fueled business services development in these cities. Devastated cities are holding onto old manufacturing while greatly expanding hospital-based employment. Overall, this dissertation makes a contribution by using multiple and innovative methods to develop a rich portrait of the economic reorganization of the urban Rust Belt. This portrait questions central assumptions in theoretical understandings of urban growth and serves as a foundation for an examination of the causes of successful local economic transformation.

Rust Belt and Other Stories is a collection of stories exploring characters in the bleak moments when social oppression challenge the perceived meaning of their lives. The disenchantments are influenced by distinctive settings, which set the tone for the stories. Place is an active force shaping the protagonists and adding to the nuance of character relationships, dialogue and philosophical outlooks.

This dissertation argues that the symbolic force of deindustrial Rust Belt decline is expressed through patterns of rhetorical invention, what I call ruination rhetorics. Ruination, I argue, works to construct divergent orientations toward space and time in representations of the Rust Belt. I trace these orientations as a way of charting the contours of how we understand domestic urban decay in our contemporary political and economic climate. This project argues that ruination's inventive force hints at a number of thematics including: ruination as urban waste; ruination as a claim to forms of nostalgia and authenticity; ruination as a linkage between temporal configurations of the past and the present; and ruination as a narrative form enabling what I call a "melancholic" rhetorical style. In all of these instances, ruination supports differentiated orientations toward time and space, creating temporal and geographical connections and boundaries through rhetorical manipulations. In this way, the times and spaces of and for industrial ruination shift, and in so doing, their discursive manifestations elucidate the diversity and instability of spatio-temporal structures. Conceptually, I argue that ruination shapes an understanding of space and time as fluid concepts, rather than stagnant or pre-determined categories. And by unpacking the ways that ruination traffics in representations of Rust Belt geographies and citizens, we discover an increasingly complex discursive field out of which meaningful relationships to decay and renewal might be forged. In this way, ruination does not weave a cohesive narrative of what the Rust Belt is, where the Rust Belt is, or who does or does not lay claim to its political realities and challenges. Rather, its divergent and contradictory modes of rhetorical invention suggest ruination expresses the incoherencies and compatibilities constitutive of an everyday life lived in the ebbs and flows of a material space that is always-already a site of ongoing decay and renewal.

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This thesis establishes the concept of Rust Belt aesthetics, a term for the artistic and cultural narratives that define, analyze, critique, or otherwise describe the deindustrialized U.S. Midwest, a region commonly referred to as the Rust Belt. This thesis explores how aesthetic projects re-present the experience of deindustrialization. The locus of this analysis is the region, and the thesis argues that the region operates as a discursive device that can mediate between and through other spatial “levels,” like the local or the global. Rust Belt aesthetics emerge from a moment of regional, national, and global transformations, and these aesthetics can construct the region to various political ends. The thesis analyzes aesthetics projects like advertisements, literature, and visual art in order to provide insight into the shifting economic, cultural, and social forces at play in the region and beyond. The goal of my analysis is not to arrive at a static definition of Rust Belt aesthetics. Instead, I hope to understand how aesthetic projects from and about the region communicate specific narratives about the Rust Belt, often through the lens of critical regionalism and the everyday life of the working class. / Thesis / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

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According to Kent Portney's seminal two-part study, cities across the U.S. are taking sustainability seriously by implementing a range of sustainable policies and programs. Yet by doing so, low-income people are seemingly pushed further into poverty. Local government officials and policymakers however, are urged to take sustainability seriously, often by well meaning constituencies that may but do not necessarily include the poor. They thus have significant interest in continuing to implement such practices and policies. This thesis seeks to address the problem of the impacts that result from cities taking sustainability seriously. I ask two main questions: are cities that take sustainability seriously experiencing a boost in economic growth? And are these cities potentially experiencing a negative side effect of a rise in poverty rates? The findings from these research questions are provided through a mixed methods approach, first by quantitative data analysis. Secondly, and to supplement this, the thesis provides a qualitative case study analysis of three U.S. cities in the 'Rust Belt' region. Cleveland, OH, Indianapolis, IN, and Milwaukee, WI all 'take sustainability seriously' while addressing the problems of economic development and poverty. I conclude that these cities are hindered in their efforts to take sustainability, economic development and poverty seriously. The three cities have boosted local economic growth yet also experience an increase in poverty as a result of the economic recession of 2007-'08. The primary hindrance experienced by the cities is state level jurisdictional authority, exercised as 'neoliberalism' that undermines 'interventionist' efforts on the part of city governments to 'seriously' address sustainability, growth and poverty as interwoven problems. / Master of Arts

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