![]() It is a thoughtful, stimulating, and efficient read at the intersection of urban geography, planning, and the social sciences. cities via privation, demolition, and desertion. ![]() Heather Ann Thompson, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and Its Legacy Manufacturing Decline implicates conservative thought leadership, anti-urban interests, and elite-and ordinary-laissez-faire racism in a deliberate, decades-long degradation of U.S. As Jason Hackworth makes clear, just as America’s inner cities can be deliberately unmade to serve the political agenda of conservatives, so might they be remade in ways that could actually benefit all citizens equally. This recovery of the politics behind-and, indeed, that created-the devastating decline of key cities such as Detroit is deeply unsettling but ultimately uplifting. Manufacturing Decline is a sobering yet essential read for anyone who is interested in the fate of America’s inner cities. Weaving together analyses of urban policy, movement conservatism, and market fundamentalism, Manufacturing Decline highlights the central role of racial reaction in creating the problems American cities still face. Decline, Hackworth contends, was manufactured both literally and rhetorically in an effort to advance austerity and punitive policies. The othering of predominantly black industrial cities has served as the basis for disinvestment and deprivation that exacerbated the flight of people and capital. ![]() In particular, conservatives have used images of urban decay to craft “dog-whistle” messages to racially resentful whites, garnering votes for the Republican Party and helping justify limits on local autonomy in distressed cities. Through a comparative study of shrinking Rust Belt cities, he argues that the rhetoric of the troubled “inner city” has served as a proxy for other social conflicts around race and class. Hackworth traces how the conservative movement has used the imagery and ideas of urban decline since the 1970s to advance their cause. In Manufacturing Decline, Jason Hackworth offers a powerful critique of the role of Rust Belt cities in American political discourse, arguing that antigovernment conservatives capitalized on-and perpetuated-these cities’ misfortunes by stoking racial resentment. The debate about why the fortunes of cities such as Detroit have fallen looms large over questions of social policy. For decades, the distressed cities of the Rust Belt have been symbols of deindustrialization and postindustrial decay, their troubles cast as the inevitable outcome of economic change.
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