Physical Renewal of the Industrial City

Abstract

The industrial city is an urban form that evolved very quickly from the late eighteenth to the early twentieth century and just as quickly grew obsolete. The challenges cities confront vary substantially, depending upon each city's economic history. Long-standing cities that simply accreted manufacturing as a major new addition to their economies have had an easier time developing and attracting new economic functions and adapting to them physically than have cities that developed almost exclusively as mass production centers. All have substantial inventories of surplus industrial buildings and housing. All have an infrastructure designed to support a nineteenth-and early twentieth-century industrial system. All have had larger populations in the past than will be necessary to staff their economies in the future. Since the 1950s, the physical renewal and adaptation of these cities have passed through several phases, from large-scale clearance and redevelopment projects to adaptive reuse. Major emphasis is now being placed upon efforts to enhance the livability of these centers in order to make them attractive to a more diversified and balanced set of economic activities than they have known in the past.