A Good Place to Do Business
eBook - PDF

A Good Place to Do Business

The Politics of Downtown Renewal since 1945

  1. 360 pages
  2. English
  3. PDF
  4. Available on iOS & Android
eBook - PDF

A Good Place to Do Business

The Politics of Downtown Renewal since 1945

About this book

The "Pittsburgh Renaissance," an urban renewal effort launched in the late 1940s, transformed the smoky rust belt city's downtown. Working-class residents and people of color saw their neighborhoods cleared and replaced with upscale, white residents and with large corporations housed in massive skyscrapers. Pittsburgh's Renaissance's apparent success quickly became a model for several struggling industrial cities, including St. Louis, Cleveland, Detroit, Chicago, and Philadelphia. 

In A Good Place to Do Business, Roger Biles and Mark Rose chronicle these urban "makeovers" which promised increased tourism and fashionable shopping as well as the development of sports stadiums, convention centers, downtown parks, and more. They examine the politics of these government-funded redevelopment programs and show how city politics (and policymakers) often dictated the level of success. 

As city officials and business elites determined to reorganize their downtowns, a deeply racialized politics sacrificed neighborhoods and the livelihoods of those pushed out. Yet, as A Good Place to Do Business demonstrates, more often than not, costly efforts to bring about the hoped-for improvements failed to revitalize those cities, or even their downtowns.

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Yes, you can access A Good Place to Do Business by Roger Biles,Mark H. Rose in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in Social Sciences & Business General. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.

Table of contents

  1. Contents
  2. Preface
  3. Acknowledgments
  4. Part I. Downtown Politics after World War II
  5. Part II. Refashioning the American City, 1970-2000
  6. Part III. Downtown's Continuing Allure, 2000-2020
  7. Notes
  8. Index