Decline and Renewal in North American Cities

Daniel Okrent , "Detroit: The Death-and Possible Life-of a Great City," Time, September 24, 2009.

See, for instance, Robert A. Beauregard, Voices of Decline: The Postwar Fate of US Cities (Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 1993).

Thomas J. Sugrue, The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996), 3.

Heather Ann Thompson, Whose Detroit? Politics, Labor, and Race in a Modern American City (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001), 8. Thompson made a similar point in "Rethinking the Politics of White Flight in the Postwar City: Detroit, 1945-1980," Journal of Urban History 25 (January 1999): 167. For a journalistic adaptation of Thompson’s argument, see R. L’Heureux Lewis, "Abandon Detroit, Abandon Black America," Atlanta Post, June 2, 2010.

Bryant Simon, Boardwalk of Dreams: Atlantic City and the Fate of Urban America (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2004); Howard Gillette Jr., Camden after the Fall: Decline and Renewal in a Post-Industrial City (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005); Alison Isenberg, Downtown America: A History of the Place and the People Who Made It (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2005); and Derek S. Hyra, The New Urban Renewal: The Economic Transformation of Harlem and Bronzeville (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2008).

See, for example, Sugrue, Origins of the Urban Crisis.

David M. P. Freund , Colored Property: State Policy and White Racial Politics in Suburban America (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2007).

See Gordon, Mapping Decline. For an insightful critique of this tendency, see Manuel Castells , The City and the Grassroots: A Cross-Cultural Theory of Urban Social Movements (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1983), 3.

Alan Brinkley , The End of Reform: New Deal Liberalism in Recession and War ( New York, NY: Vintage Books, 1995 ). See also Robert M. Collins , More: The Politics of Economic Growth in Postwar America (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2000).

For recent iterations of this popular narrative, see Lisa McGirr , Suburban Warriors: The Origins of the New American Right (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001); Kevin M. Kruse , White Flight: Atlanta and the Making of Modern Conservatism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005); and Bethany Moreton , To Serve God and Wal-Mart: The Making of Christian Free Enterprise ( Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009).

On disaster pornography, see David Sirota , "Our Addiction to Disaster Porn," In These Times, January 30, 2010. Available at http://www.inthesetimes.com/article/5487/ ; and Noreen Malone , "The Case against Economic Disaster Porn," The New Republic, January 22, 2011. Available at http://www.tnr.com/article/metro-policy/81954/Detroit-economic-disaster-porn .