Industrial Decline and the Rise of the Suburbs

Abstract

This chapter focuses on the uneven industrial decline in metropolitan Chicago. It describes the extensive decanting of manufacturing employment from the central city from the 1920s and the wholesale exodus of industrial jobs from Chicago after 1945. It also discusses the spatial reconfiguration of manufacturing investment at both the metropolitan and regional levels in Chicago as firms began to rethink their geographies of production and to search for alternate investment sites. The chapter analyses the interwar reconfiguration that was predicated on the relative decline of Chicago and the rise of the suburbs as the preeminent location for industrial production and employment. It traces the deindustrialization that started in the 1970s as an outcome of a process that dates back to the breakdown of an old system of industrial organization in the interwar period and the poorly directed affairs of wartime mobilization.