TY - JOUR
T1 - Decline machines and economic development
T2 - rust belt cities and Flint, Michigan
AU - Wilson, David
AU - Heil, Melissa
N1 - A second major exclusionary practice, the police department’s policy of youth policing, now blankets downtown. This, more than a standard, brutal cleansing of downtown to facilitate land valorization that many urbanists chronicle across urban America, is a nuanced removal done under the auspices of therapeutizing the race-class poor. This poor, in stated objective, is best kept away from the downtown to their betterment. The rationale: Flint’s racialized poor continue a tradition of becoming devastated by their making of toxic communities that feed back to affect them. The downtown, notably, has been devastated by their living there that has afflicted them, it is now time to assist them by curtailing poor residency here. “Poor African-Americans in Flint have already dinged themselves by pockmarking downtown,” it is said, “it has hurt them, for their own sake let’s encourage their residency elsewhere” (Harris Construction, ). In this context, “ghetto ills” and “social disorder,” using Councilperson A. Hinds’s () terms, are to be removed from downtown. At the strategy’s core, a youth policing regime – funded by the Mott Foundation – prioritizes a dispersing of congregations; increases on-street engagements with small crimes; operates a network of security cameras across downtown; and establishes a quick-to-indict and remove-from-downtown violations Bureau (Mott Foundation, ). These activities concentrate at key sections of streets (e.g., the emergent Saginaw Street “sushi belt”), evening hot-spots (e.g., Cork on Saginaw, Blackstones Smokehouse) and downtown public spaces and parks.
PY - 2022
Y1 - 2022
N2 - We develop the concept of decline machines, only recently invoked by urbanists, to understand city economic development in America’s urban rust belt. We chronicle this notion and show that it currently spearheads economic development in one of America’s paradigmatic rust belt cities, Flint, Michigan. We highlight, first, that Flint’s machine actors creatively use imaginaries of decline to propel economic development; and second, that race is one core dimension through which this process proceeds. Coalition actors use dominant understandings of poor blackness and Latinoness–as people both primitivist exotic and frightening–to help drive economic development. The underpinning: Â austerity and neoliberal days impose profound constraints on key coalition actors, notably local planners, and local government, to create wider-ranging hunts for political resources like decline. Using this decline, economic development in Flint is shown to be more complicated in its staging, implementing, and outcomes than previously believed.
AB - We develop the concept of decline machines, only recently invoked by urbanists, to understand city economic development in America’s urban rust belt. We chronicle this notion and show that it currently spearheads economic development in one of America’s paradigmatic rust belt cities, Flint, Michigan. We highlight, first, that Flint’s machine actors creatively use imaginaries of decline to propel economic development; and second, that race is one core dimension through which this process proceeds. Coalition actors use dominant understandings of poor blackness and Latinoness–as people both primitivist exotic and frightening–to help drive economic development. The underpinning: Â austerity and neoliberal days impose profound constraints on key coalition actors, notably local planners, and local government, to create wider-ranging hunts for political resources like decline. Using this decline, economic development in Flint is shown to be more complicated in its staging, implementing, and outcomes than previously believed.
KW - Decline machines
KW - Flint
KW - economic development
KW - racialization
KW - rust belt
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85096093702&partnerID=8YFLogxK
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/citedby.url?scp=85096093702&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1080/02723638.2020.1840736
DO - 10.1080/02723638.2020.1840736
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85096093702
SN - 0272-3638
VL - 43
SP - 163
EP - 183
JO - Urban Geography
JF - Urban Geography
IS - 2
ER -