Governing infrastructure, development and inequality around deindustrialized US cities

ABSTRACT

This paper examines the interaction of regional spatial patterns and multiscalar governance processes of water infrastructure systems and economic development networks around US cities following deindustrialization. Deindustrialization contributed to significant hardships in cities and their surrounding regions, such as increasing blight, ageing infrastructure and fiscal constraints. These challenges combine and multiply in central cities, often alongside population and economic growth in other parts of a metropolitan area. The study applies the emerging infrastructural regionalism framework to questions of how economic development networks and infrastructure systems are designed and governed to distribute value across the urban landscape. The comparative case study focuses on Scranton, Pennsylvania, and Providence, Rhode Island, where the cities’ water infrastructure systems represent two different responses to their changing position in the region. In both cases this analysis shows how governance is fragmented across supra-municipal scales and metropolitan institutions in ways that reduce the power of central cities and that enable uneven redevelopment. The findings inform how an equitable approach to governing infrastructure and development requires addressing regional biases in vertical hierarchies and reorienting public policies towards central cities.

KEYWORD:

• multiscalar governance
• water infrastructure
• urban development
• regional equity
• public policy
• deindustrialization

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The author is grateful for the comments made by the reviewers and journal editor. The feedback from the Regional Studies Association Network on Infrastructural Regionalism (NOIR) workshop, and especially from the NOIR facilitators Jean-Paul Addie, Michael R. Glass and Jen Nelles, was particularly helpful. Thanks to Kate Derickson for additional guidance, and to Richard Sadler for the maps.

DISCLOSURE STATEMENT

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.