In 1997, after General Motors shuttered a massive complex of factories
in the gritty industrial city of Flint, Michigan, signs were placed
around the empty facility reading, "Demolition Means Progress,"
suggesting that the struggling metropolis could not move forward to
greatness until the old plants met the wrecking ball. Much more than a
trite corporate slogan, the phrase encapsulates the operating ethos of
the nation's metropolitan leadership from at least the 1930s to the
present. Throughout, the leaders of Flint and other municipalities
repeatedly tried to revitalize their communities by demolishing outdated
and inefficient structures and institutions and overseeing numerous
urban renewal campaigns--many of which yielded only more impoverished
and more divided metropolises. After decades of these efforts, the dawn
of the twenty-first century found Flint one of the most racially
segregated and economically polarized metropolitan areas in the nation.
In one of the most comprehensive works yet written on the history of
inequality and metropolitan development in modern America, Andrew R.
Highsmith uses the case of Flint to explain how the perennial quest for
urban renewal--even more than white flight, corporate abandonment, and
other forces--contributed to mass suburbanization, racial and economic
division, deindustrialization, and political fragmentation. Challenging
much of the conventional wisdom about structural inequality and the
roots of the nation's "urban crisis," Demolition Means Progress shows
in vivid detail how public policies and programs designed to revitalize
the Flint area ultimately led to the hardening of social divisions.
