Rebuilding America's Legacy Cities: New Directions for the Industrial Heartland

For America’s Legacy Cities—cities losing population and their economic base—this book puts forth strategies to create smaller, healthier cities. Creative strategies for using vacant land need to be matched with successful efforts to stabilize the local economy and re-engage residents in the workforce, and to reinvigorate the city’s still-viable neighborhoods. This volume offers a broader discussion which recognizes the complex relationships between today’s problems and their solutions. The rich material contained in this volume provides thought-provoking reading for anyone concerned with the transformation of America’s older industrial cities, either with respect to a specific city or from a broader perspective, whether the reader is a policymaker, practitioner, or concerned layperson. These chapters do not suggest that that the process of change will be an easy one. They do offer a robust collection of ideas and directions that can help animate local action or state policy and help practitioners and policymakers take the steps that may indeed lead to the smaller, stronger, and healthier city that the authors believe is possible.