Small Gritty and Green: The Promise of Smaller Industrial Cities in a Low-Carbon World

Not a lot of people have done what Catherine Tumber has done, which is to travel extensively to small and mid-sized American cities researching the impact of industry withdrawal. The author traveled to 25 "rust belt" cities in the American Northeast and Midwest from Buffalo to Detroit, Rochester, Syracuse, Akron, Flint and many in-between.
This book is of value to Canadian readers in an age where so many Canadian cities suffer similar effects of manufacturer abandonment. This book is a relevant read to people concerned about the Ontario rust belt, where towns such as Peterborough, London, Sudbury, Sault-Ste Marie, North Bay, to name only a few, find decent jobs and even minimum wage jobs are scarce. In such towns good communities are plagued with strained services, with issues of unemployment, homelessness poverty, drug abuse and crime that were unheard of a few decades earlier. Such economics are turning hometowns into challenging places of brain-drain and talent flight where bright young people are eager to leave.
Small industrial cities deserve hope, and the book delivers this. Tumber provides excellent historic backgrounds on the challenges of these American cities, conducting extensive interviews with mayors, urban planners, and green entrepreneurs, as well as with local farmers and conservationists. These cities, once vibrant, “increasingly resemble urban wastelands.” The author writes how these American cities "gutted by deindustrialization, outsourcing and middle-class flight” were further battered by highway development, failed projects, the displacement of the urban poor, and the classic issues of crime and decay.
Yet these smaller cities offer many assets and the book is full of hope for such places. This was what I wanted the book to provide and it delivers. But it also delivers the vital details behind the broken cities we see sometimes only from the highway as we pass through. The book includes discussion of the earlier origins of beautiful city planning that seemed lost, such as The City Beautiful movement, Russell van Nest Black's 1934 planning for the smaller American city, and an era of snobbery over cosmopolitanism for cities that were a satellite of larger industrial metropolises.
Catherine Tumber has also included the relevant political history behind these once-proud places who suffered the brunt of Reagan's slashes to the Department of Housing and Development HUD which had concentrated on affordable housing, while Reagan disproportionately funneled money into larger cities and big metro projects. Tumber writes of the damage incurred during the Reagan era as “closely tied to this obsession with all things mega was an ethic of disposability, drawn from ramped-up consumer culture and applied heartlessly to any 'loser' that could not stand up to the inexorable forces of privatization and globalization...Their pride as home to America's producers, the world's breadbasket, and the shop floor heartland-already eroded by decades of deskilling and mechanization, now became a joke.”
However these proud communities do stand up, and Tumber also interviews some of the activists who for decades have pursued things like highway tear-down projects, where big money and political stakes are high. Beyond the local resistance to damage and squalor, Tumber and the larger new urbanist view have identified what local people have been desperately needing funding support to enhance- small to mid-sized cities have potentially unparalleled assets for sustainable living. Addressing urban fringe and agriculture in Chapter 3, Tumber remarks, “smaller cities had a lot of advantage in developing what new urbanists are calling agricultural urbanism in their rural and suburban areas.” Nearby fertile farmland for solar farms, windmills and urban but local agricultural assets are only the beginning.
Tumber then digs into the real-life examples existing in these towns, point-of-pride specializations that are competitive and homespun. Advances and changes to Toledo's glass industry have developed a solar panel industry innovating thin-film solar “with a serious national commitment to renewable energy." More than this, "other smaller cities that contribute to Auto Alley's second and third-tier levels of the supply chain benefit as well." Tumber travels to Akron, "the historic home for the tire industry and synthetic rubber" now reinventing itself as a research and production centre for polymers, and to Canton, Ohio where industry creates solar sealing and water filtration systems. The author remarks that these cities will require complex multi-layered regional economic development arrangements. China has subsidized its export business, making “clean energy and other green technologies” while keeping wages “crushingly low” leading to a massive US trade deficit.
By helping these domestic advances through subsidies and similar support that challenge trade with China, as well as empowering their special assets in urban sustainability, the American economy can once again experience a significant and positive impact from small city ingenuity.
Meanwhile, the small city advantage is gaining momentum as these gritty towns present a fertile ground for green entrepreneurialism welcoming low-carbon economic revitalization with farmland at their doorsteps. This book has a huge number of notes and sources at the back, making it seem almost like a handbook for action. It belongs in the library of every Canadian city with similar issues as a point of inspiration and common identity through adversity.

Tumber, C. (2013). Small, gritty, and green: The promise of America's smaller industrial cities in a low-carbon world. The MIT Press.