Moving beyond our
"post-industrial" mindset

Forget about recapturing our industrial glory days. Can’t we imagine a city that’s smaller, healthier, greener, and more sustainable? That’s what Youngstown is doing. The Fall 2004 issue of Kent State University’s Urban Design Center’s quarterly newsletter covers the planning process that is rethinking Youngstown. The following essay from that newsletter prompts us to confront our “post-industrial” future.

By Steve Rugare

Our era is afflicted by a tendency to define itself mostly in terms of what we think is no longer happening, hence the welter of “Post” terms we use to describe trends in society and culture. While one hears a lot less these days about “postmodernism” or “the end of history,” the notion that we are now in a “post-industrial” age has proven durable indeed.

That’s odd, because in one sense it’s patently false. People probably encounter fewer handmade or “craft” objects now than ever before, and many writers tell us that the industrial system of Europe and North America is going global at a staggering pace, with consequences that are hard to predict.

So, when we say the world is “post-industrial,” we’re really saying that research and management are now increasingly separated from production. The shift from industrial to post-industrial isn’t happening globally. It’s happening locally, as cities and regions must change rapidly — re-tooling environments and populations — from the production economy to the “knowledge” economy.

This post-industrial state is a recipe for high civic anxiety. Success in attracting “the jobs of the future” doesn’t prevent losses of employment, because those jobs are highly paid but fewer in number. It doesn’t guarantee the future, because the new jobs are absurdly portable. And the new economy gives us few cues about the physical environment, other than clichés dealing with “quality of life,” “digital cities,” and the “creative class.” Meanwhile, there’s the abandoned industrial infrastructure, a memory of past ways of life that decays silently or gets sold for scrap.

Is it any wonder that cities like Youngstown and Cleveland suffer from chronic nervous breakdowns? As recently as the 1950s, everything was working. Now, even success in the “new economy” seems to mean a shrinking employment base and an increasingly stratified population, among which the have-nots subsist on a puzzled nostalgia for the old economy that abandoned them.

Moreover, these cities are still judged by the unrevised and implacable standards of a global industrial order that sees growth as inevitable and perpetual. No one thought that way before the 19th century. Historically, cities have waxed and waned and been abandoned. It was only with rapid industrialization that rapid growth became the norm, and “planning” came into being to manage growth. One could argue that it doesn’t really know how to do anything else. Planning for shrinkage — even shrinkage into something more beautiful, just and livable — will look like failure until we get past the slogans and really ask ourselves what we expect of the “post-industrial” age.

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Copyright 2002-2004

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Historically, cities have waxed and waned and been abandoned. It was only with rapid industrialization that rapid growth became the norm, and “planning” came into being to manage growth. One could argue that it doesn’t really know how to do anything else. Planning for shrinkage — even shrinkage into something more beautiful, just and livable — will look like failure until we get past the slogans and really ask ourselves what we expect of the “post-industrial” age.