American Cities

Eric Stewart

American Cities

Title

American cities the latter half of the Twentieth Century experienced a tremendous transformation. The industrial cities which experienced large growth and production had to find a change in their forms of production, or face declination. Detroit faced issues answering this question as the city's dominant industry weakened. Las Vegas, which also relied heavily on a single industry, improved. Cities like Los Angeles and Portland found solutions to the deterioration of post-war deindustrialization. Unique formulas were constructed for an individual city to prosper. The second half of the Twentieth Century saw urban one-industrial cities such as Detroit shrink as new methods of economic industry thinned out employment opportunities and housing began to move outside the city, taking with it both jobs and workers. A City like Las Vegas created a unique service with broad boundaries that excelled in entertainment and, unlike Detroit, remains ever expanding. Because of a deteriorating industrial production in cities, Los Angeles and Portland developed strategies to stimulate new development on a local and global scale.

Detroit experienced the most severe decline of any American industrial city after the Second World War. As the cities population grew during the early 1940s, locals fled the inner city, migrating into the nearby suburbs at the end of the war. The suburbs absorbed the city's large, growing population, however, the suburbs brought with them the city's industry. Historian Thomas Sugrue refers to this as Detroit's "...deindustrialization, the flight of jobs away from the city." More improved methods of industry began to surround Detroit's industry as jobs fled the city. Automated machinery took over the need of manual laborers. Nearly 134,000 manufacturing jobs alone were lost between the years 1947-1963. Detroit began to unravel as an industrial city. The heart of the city, its manual workforce, began to diminish. The cities deteriorated industry produced urban crises.

The decrease in Detroit's production critically affected the city's ability to run itself smoothly. The loss of production and fewer businesses meant a shortfall of taxes within the city. A social crisis involving a large amount of unemployed citizens resulted from fewer businesses. The city's fiscal was down. A chain reaction developed from the fleeting industry; however, the problem faced in Detroit may be reversible. A Yahoo News article from 2010 sheds light on the possibility of Detroit reclaiming its prominence from a few factors; a large increase in the cities population resulted from immigration from Middle Eastern Countries. The city benefits twice from the immigrants. First, an infusion of new citizens provides the city with much needed population boost. Second, the immigrants bring with them an economic boost and capital from other countries, ameliorating Detroit from its declining trend. A city dominated by an industry did not always result in declination. Las Vegas prospered with its unique services, and doing so indicated a different trend.

Las Vegas' unique services of entertainment made the city prosperous despite its single dominant industry. From its origin as a gambling city, to its transformation as world entertainment, Las Vegas has spread its reach, capital and investment, across the world. Highways were the first methods for connecting Las Vegas to nearby cities. As the city grew, an airport expanded the reach of Las Vegas. It created an international port of entry. Capital had expanded Las Vegas and unlike Detroit, the city's deterioration would rely on a larger, global population rather than a single cities community. The cities production occurred form global accommodations. The influx of worldly tourists brought with it investment and the economy of other nations. Las Vegas took one-industry towns to a new direction but expanding the pool of production that it draws from. Las Vegas established itself as a new trend of development. Global production and revenue. The American city was headed into a new direction with industry; outward. This strategy also helped other cities which sought to revitalize development.

Los Angeles relied on revitalizing its city from an influx of immigrants and the arrival of capital from foreign countries. As disinvestment occurred economically, it also occurred socially. After the Watts Riots in Los Angeles, the economy and society were bifurcated. African Americans were disinvested, losing employment for the city. The decentralization of workers made the workforce became further globalized. The dynamics which shaped urban growth now reached for a new global space. New immigration prohibited the breaking down of the cities economic workforce. An article from The Los Angeles Times states how the workforce is continually growing. Bruce Kelley refers to the regional work force and the change 150,000 workers has provided for business in Los Angeles. A vast majority of the new immigrants came from Latin America and Asian countries, like Mexico and Korea. The flow of labor and capital from the immigrants assumed responsible for the restructuring