Corridors of Flight, Zones of Renewal

Abstract

This article examine show St. Louis public officials, business leaders, and urban planners responded to large-scale industrial disinvestment after World War II. The authors consider three major clusters of policy and planning activity: urban renewal, high-tech R&D, and tourism and entertainment. In each of these, they illuminate the values, assumptions, and institutional networks of political and business leaders as they shaped postwar industrial development. The authors demonstrate that local public officials and business leaders in St. Louis articulated a new vision for development based on an emerging metropolitan definition of problems and solutions. In effect, planners responded to inner-city industrial decline by restructuring spatial-economic relations across the metropolitan area. This metropolitan articulation of development and space guided restructuring and yielded a range of tangible yet uneven outcomes on the postwar landscape.