Robert Beauregard: Urban Decline and Postindustrial Cities

Urban decline is the sustained loss of population, jobs and economic activity suffered by the industrial cities of the United States from the mid-twentieth century, and Robert Beauregard, a planner and professor emeritus at Columbia University, is the scholar who best explained how that decline was at once a fact and a discourse. In Voices of Decline: The Postwar Fate of U.S. Cities (1993, expanded in 2003) he analysed how the press, politicians and experts talked about cities for half a century, and showed that the narrative of decline, with its images of abandonment, crime and decay, not only described what happened in Detroit or Cleveland but helped produce it, justifying the flight to the suburbs and the policies that accelerated it.

Detroit, Cleveland, St. Louis: the facts of decline

The facts are stark. Detroit went from 1.85 million residents in 1950 to about 640,000 in 2020; St. Louis and Cleveland lost more than half their population in the same period; Pittsburgh, Buffalo and Youngstown saw their steel mills and factories close and whole neighbourhoods empty. Beauregard locates the causes in deindustrialisation, the shift of jobs to the South and abroad, suburbanization financed by highways and federal mortgages, and the racial segregation that turned central cities into places of Black poverty surrounded by white suburbs. Decline, he insists, was a distributed decision, not a fate.

Voices of Decline: the discourse that shifts the blame

His contribution is the analysis of discourse. Beauregard read decades of articles, reports and speeches and found that decline was narrated with moral anxiety: the city as sick, as jungle, as failure, and its residents as responsible for their lot. That narrative, he shows, served to shift blame from policies to victims, to legitimise the urban renewal that demolished neighbourhoods in the 1950s and 1960s, and to justify the later fiscal abandonment. In When America Became Suburban (2006) he completed the picture: the suburb was presented as the natural solution while the city became the problem.

Renewal, stadiums and culture: responses that miss the causes

Responses to decline, in his analysis, have often failed because they do not address its causes. Urban renewal replaced poor neighbourhoods with highways and towers; the tax incentives, stadiums, casinos and convention centres of the 1980s and 1990s produced islands of investment in empty downtowns; and culture- and tourism-led regeneration benefited specific sectors while the most vulnerable communities remained marginalised. Beauregard proposes instead accepting shrinkage as a condition and planning with it, as Youngstown attempted with its 2010 plan and Detroit with Detroit Future City in 2012.

Shrinking cities, nuances and the discourse of renaissance

His work converses with the literature on shrinking cities, from Karina Pallagst to the European Shrinking Cities network, and with the critique of planning by Thomas Campanella and Ananya Roy. It has also received nuances: decline is uneven within each city, with downtowns recovering while inner peripheries keep emptying, and some Rust Belt cities, such as Pittsburgh, have found new specialisations in healthcare and universities. Beauregard acknowledges those trajectories and warns against the opposite discourse, that of renaissance, when it hides those the renaissance leaves out.

Robert Beauregard's lesson is that the words used to describe a city are part of its fate. The discourse of decline turned deindustrialisation into the cities' fault and justified their abandonment, and the discourse of renaissance can do the same to the neighbourhoods that do not fit it. For planning, the task is to describe precisely what happens, to whom and through which decisions, and to plan for those who live in the city that exists, not the one the narrative promises or mourns.