A Grassroots Alternative to Urban Shrinkage?
A Comparative Analysis of Place Reputational Remaking in Buffalo and Cleveland
Randolph Hohle
The struggle to revitalize America’s Rust Belt has been going on for so long that it’s hard to find anyone alive who lived during its heyday when it was the epicenter of American industrial capitalism. Today’s Rust Belt inhabitants work through a spiral of competing narratives, symbols, and collective memories of the past as they try to rehab and reimagine the present Rust Belt city. We call these cultural meanings place reputations, and the construction of new place reputations play a vital role in the Rust Belt’s urban regeneration.
New York, Ohio, Michigan, and Pennsylvania have tried a range of solutions to revive their Rust Belt regions, ranging from investing in research universities and medical campuses and transforming central business districts into entertainment zones, to embracing neoliberal austerity policies that implement control boards to limit spending and shrink the urban geography in order to “save the city,” to creating public-private partnerships to direct public funds to private developers and tax incentives for private companies willing to expand or relocate to these cities. Nevertheless, since the mid 1940s, Rust Belt cities have endured what scholars have dubbed “urban shrinkage” to capture continual population loss and caused by economic restructuring from an industrial to post industrial economy (Coppola 2019). The limits to either supply or demand side economic solutions to urban shrinkage is that they cannot change the city’s aura or racial stigma that haunts the Rust Belt. The enduring racialized stigmas, created by the conservative movement in response to urban renewal and the race riots of the late 1960s, racialized notions of blight, abandonment, and crime, and continue to define the Rust Belt as an undesirable place to live.
Grassroots actors do the cultural work that state level policy makers and elites cannot. I analyzed how ordinary grassroots actors in Buffalo, New York and Cleveland, Ohio used garden tourism to rehabilitate communities, debunk racialized urban stigmas, and remake place reputations. I found that in the process of debunking racial stigmas, white grassroots actors were negating Black people from the new place reputation. The paradox of white residents’ efforts to remake racially stigmatized place reputations is that as they rejected racist narratives and created value in stigmatized spaces, they inadvertently embedded a different form of whiteness into the place’s reputations. Enduring racial structures are powerful. Even well intentioned white actors can inadvertently exclude other groups as they construct new place reputations.
My article analyzes how grassroots actors used garden tourism as reputational remaking social activities. The concept of reputational remaking is based on an understanding of place as giving the capacity for agency, which is found in grassroots social and civic activities, directed at changing the existing place's reputation (Hohle 2023). I used the concepts of civic actions and scene styles (Lichterman and Eliasoph 2014) to explain how actors coordinate social activities as they work for and construct their idea of the common good. Civic actions create scene styles. Scene styles shape how a group acts, the form of solidarity within a group, and how they implement their idea of the good place. Scene styles are embedded in larger discursive fields, which is how groups learn how others use scene styles to solve similar problems. Discursive fields reside in racialized spaces – white or Black spaces – because racial inequalities have historically been spatialized (Dantzler 2021).
The gardeners in Buffalo worked through a symbolic purity scene style white the gardeners in Cleveland worked through a Diversity scene style. Mary Douglas (2002) used the metaphor of symbolic purity to capture how groups identify unwanted cultural attributes as pollution and matter out of place that must be removed in order to restore the purity or sacred meaning of a group’s identity. The symbolic purity scene style seeks to remove all elements that reflect the urban stigma by replacing the racialized imagery of urban blight and poverty with the image of idealized middle-class white residents with elite cultural tastes. However, Black residents used the symbolic purity scene style to define what constitutes a good Black neighborhood by shifting the narrative away from racialized concepts like blight and crime, to emphasizing the positive elements of the community, including how Black neighborhoods have value and are good places to raise a family. In contrast, Cleveland residents constructed a diversity scene style to create a multicultural place reputation that addressed Cleveland’s internal racial, ethnic, and class divisions. The diversity scene style reflects the “development-inclusionary” (Pottie-Sherman 2018) efforts and policies Rust Belt actors pursue that links diversity with economic development by highlighting the non-threatening aspects of Blackness (Summers 2019). The different scene styles show the importance of place in granting agency and how there is no one size fits all approach to urban regeneration.
While it’s unfair to place the burden on local Rust Belt residents to revive these regions, it’s clear that they will have to shepherd the cultural changes necessary to regenerate the Rust Belt. Can they do this without triggering dispossession and displacement? If they are going to be successful, they will have to work with elites to direct investments in communities rather than the same neoliberal urban policies responsible for their city’s demise.
Read the full UAR article here.
References
Coppola, Alessandro. 2019. “Projects of Becoming in a Right Sizing Shrinking City.” Urban Geography 40(2): 237-256.
Dantzler, Prentiss. 2021. “The Urban Process Under Racial Capitalism: Race, Anti-Blackness, and Capital Accumulation.” Journal of Race, Ethnicity and the City 2(2): 113-134.
Douglas, Mary. 2002. Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo. New York: Routledge.
Hohle, Randolph. 2023. “Rusty Gardens: Stigma and the Making of a New Place Reputation in Buffalo, New York.” American Journal of Cultural Sociology 11(2): 193-219.
Lichterman, Paul and Nina Eliasoph. 2014. “Civic Action” American Journal of Sociology 120 (3): 798-863.
Pottie-Sherman, Yolande. 2018. “Austerity Urbanism and the Promise of Immigrant and Refugee-Centered Urban Revitalization in the US Rust Belt.” Urban Geography 39(3): 438-457.
Summers, Brandi Thompson. 2019. Black in Place: The Spatial Aesthetics of Race in a Post-Industrial City. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
Randolph Hohle is a professor of Sociology at SUNY Fredonia. Some of his recent work includes The American Housing Question: Racism, Urban Citizenship, and the Privilege of Mobility (Lexington Press, 2021), Racism in the Neoliberal Era: A Meta History of Elite White Power (Routledge, 2018), Race and the Orgins of American Neoliberalism (Routledge, 2015), and co-authored the 6th edition of the New Urban Sociology (Routledge, 2019).