Architecture Commons^™

Much of the literature and debate over the last decade has been on understanding service-based economies, neglecting manufacturing and its effects on the economy. The current financial crisis has been associated with political debates that revolve around the ‘real’ economy and a call for rebalancing regional and national economies. Over the last decade or so, manufacturing has been transformed but academic understanding has not kept pace with these alterations. Many of these alterations revolve around the development of new forms of expertise-driven manufacturing, new geographies of production, jobless growth and new forms of financialisation applied to manufacturing. These on-going transformations …

Manufacturing has long been the focus for progressive reforms. But these reforms, pushed by labor in the 1930s and 1940s, did not particularly involve city planners, and the idea of “progressive planning” that emerged in the 1960s focused on community and neighborhood struggles over urban renewal, highway clearances and the depredations of real estate developers—not necessarily manufacturing. The question now is whether, with changes in manufacturing, and new initiatives from the Obama administration, progressives can make a contribution through the manufacturing sector, and whether professional planners can play a role at all.We asked a group of geographers and planners—academics and …