Introduction

Abstract

100 The Michigan Historical Review Andrew R. Highsmith. Demolition Means Progress: Flint, Michigan, and the Fate of the American Metropolis. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015. Pp. 376. Illustrations. Index. Notes. Cloth: $45.00. The title of Andrew Highsmith’s book is a quote from a placard outside the razed site of the General Motors Buick City plant in Flint, Michigan: Demolition Means Progress (p. 266). The subject of the book, however, reaches far beyond the Vehicle City’s post-1970s deindustrialization. Highsmith traces the long history of metropolitan Flint and its “ceaseless quest for revitalization” to argue that “progress” has been associated with large-scale clearance and reinvention from the early twentieth century to today (p. 20). But even the best-intentioned urban renewal policies, his research makes clear, instead hardened social and economic inequalities as Flint became a poster-city for Rust Belt decay. While individual threads of Highsmith’s interlocking narratives of suburbanization, racial segregation, and deindustrialization seem at first blush familiar to urban historians, this work is notable for its comprehensive, metropolitan approach and for adding a small-city case study to the literature on urban renewal and decline. With chronological chapters focusing on Flint’s housing and education policies, workplace discrimination, industrial decentralization, and slum clearance, Highsmith provides a fine-grained analysis of how economic and racial inequality in American cities is spatialized and planned from the federal to municipal levels. He adds the useful concept of “administrative segregation” to the customary de jure/de facto binary as he details the processes by which officials drew school district boundaries around racial enclaves, suburbs incorporated to protect property values, and developers maximized government subsidies by building substandard housing. Highsmith convincingly demonstrates that it was the implementation of policies as much as the letter of the law or individual choice that led to widespread urban inequality. In foregrounding the uneven effects of pro-growth renewal, Highsmith rejects the simplified declension narrative that corporate abandonment and white flight drove urban decline. Instead, he pivots the book around General Motors’ failed push for a “New Flint” metropolitan government in the late 1950s, insisting that the corporation maintained ties to Flint even after relocating its plants to the urban fringes. Rather than reify the image of the homogenous and upwardly mobile postwar suburb, Highsmith reveals little-discussed policies of “suburban redlining” in working-class white neighborhoods and federally backed Book Reviews 101 “Section 235” predatory lending practices that preceded the most recent housing crisis by four decades. With his long view, Highsmith shows that citizen demands for civil rights, such as open housing and school desegregation, have been time and again overshadowed by economic development agendas. Despite his concluding optimism for an alternative future, the cumulative weight of Highsmith’s research leaves a deep and durable imprint of spatially embedded inequality on Flint’s poor and working-class African Americans. As such, Demolition Means Progress offers a case study that puts national metropolitan trends in the twentieth century into sharp relief. Readers with an interest in the racial and economic histories and transformations of Flint and the industrial North will find it of particular value. Chloe Taft Yale University Holly M. Karibo. Sin City North: Sex, Drugs, and Citizenship in the DetroitWindsor Borderland. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015. Pp. 226. Bibliography. Illustrations. Index. Notes. Paper: $29.95. Holly Karibo’s Sin City North explores the role of cross-border prostitution and heroin-trafficking in shaping the communities and local economies of the postwar Detroit-Windsor borderland. She posits that the rise of crime and vice exposed the “contradictory nature of the border” as it made both travel and trade easier while also attempting to filter out illegal or unwanted products and people (p. 3). Karibo argues the study of vice provides insight into the ways in which men and women defined citizenship and determined belonging within the social space of the national border (p. 156). The relative economic success and rising interest in leisure tourism following the war aided the boom in illicit economies, and Karibo reads participation in vice economy as an alternative and viable path to a consumer-based identity in the era of postwar...