Why the Garden Club Couldn't Save Youngstown: The Transformation of the Rust Belt
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | 4.60 (948 Votes) |
| Asin | : | 0674031768 |
| Format Type | : | paperback |
| Number of Pages | : | 224 Pages |
| Publish Date | : | 2013-06-05 |
| Language | : | English |
DESCRIPTION:
T. P. Dolembo said Timely and useful. I picked this book up as an afterthought, the title was intriguing. When I opened it and read Professor Safford's work, I was caught up in the subject. Today, rebuilding rust belt towns is relevant just about everywhere, and the book tells the story of two cities who tried their best to use their cultures to make new economic prosperity happen. Allentown succeeded but her sister city Youngstown failed. It is a very strong lesson in how community volunteer organizations, cultures and local histories figure in remaking economies. It w. I better understand my hometown I grew up in a suburb of Youngstown, Ohio. My father, an accountant, was laid off from Youngstown Sheet & Tube. I was born in 1970, so I heard stories throughout my childhood of the glory days of Youngstown and various theories as to why the steel industry suffered as it did and why Youngstown could not recover. We compared ourselves more to Pittsburgh (it is closer geographically) than to Allentown, but I understand why Allentown was selected for this book. I have degrees in Mathematics and Economics, but I still found some of the . "interesting if not completely persuasive" according to Michael Lewyn. In the middle of the 20th century, Allentown, Pa.and Youngstown, Ohio looked pretty similar: two small, working-class industrial cities. But today, Allentown is richer, more populous, better educated and more entrepreneurial. When Allentown businesses grew, they grew in and around Allentown, while Youngstown's industry was leaving the region. What went wrong in Youngstown?Safford focuses on the power of networks: interlocking groups of people who sit on the same boards and dominate a city's civic life. He creates a measurement of pr
It challenges the benefits of being a tight-knit community and shows, instead, that the people who bridge and connect among a city's networks prove most valuable. (Doug McAdam, Stanford University)This extraordinary look inside the fates of two down-and-out Rust Belt citieshow one came back from decline and the other went into a death spiralhas lessons for cities everywhere. (Keith Provan, University of Arizona)Safford offers a compelling account of the very different paths taken by Allentown and Youngstown in response to the 'rust belt' crisis of the 1980s. Situated at the intersection of social movement and organizational theory, this body of scholarship is emerging as an influential and fundamentally sociological challenge to rational choice and other theories of collective action. (Carol Coletta, President and CEO, CEOs for Cities) . He prese
. Sean Safford is Visiting Professor of Management at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania
Facing a collapse of its steel-making firms, its economy has reinvented itself by transforming existing companies, building an entrepreneurial sector, and attracting inward investment. In this book, Sean Safford compares the recent history of Allentown, Pennsylvania, with that of Youngstown, Ohio. It offers a probing historical explanation for the decline, fall, and unlikely rejuvenation of the Rust Belt. Youngstown was similar to Allentown in its industrial history, the composition of its labor force, and other important variables, and yet instead of adapting in the face of acute economic crisis, it fell into a mean race to the bottom. Challenging various theoretical perspectives on regional socioeconomic change, Why the Garden Club Couldn’t Save Youngstown argues that the structure of social networks among the cities’ economic, political, and civic leaders account for the divergent trajectories of post-industrial regions. Emphasizing the power of social networks to shape action, determine access to and control over information and resources, define the contexts in which problems are viewed, and enable collective action in the face of externally generated crises, th