A nice place to visit : Tourism, urban revitalization, and the transformation of postwar American cities

A nice place to visit : Tourism, urban revitalization, and the transformation of postwar American cities

urban history, urban planning, urban renewal, tourism, urban policy

This dissertation examines the growth of tourism as a strategy for downtown renewal in the postwar American city. In the years after World War II, American cities declined precipitously as residents and businesses relocated to rapidly-expanding suburbs. Governmental and corporate leaders, seeking to arrest this decline, embarked upon an ambitious program of physical renewal of downtowns. The postwar urban crisis was a boon for the urban tourist industry. Finding early renewal efforts ineffective in stemming the tide of deindustrialization and suburbanization, urban leaders subsidized, with billions of dollars in public finances, the construction of an infrastructure of tourism within American downtowns. By the latter decades of the period, tourist development had moved from a relatively minor strategy for urban renewal to a key measure of urban success. This dissertation traces the development of postwar urban tourism in the cities of Baltimore, Cincinnati, Pittsburgh, and St. Louis. Each city provides a case study for a different type of urban tourist development: hotels, convention centers, stadiums, and festival marketplaces. Such tourist development fulfilled a multiplicity of desires and needs in the postwar city. First, tourism catered to the growing consumerist ethic of postwar America, in which not only goods but experiences became consumer objects; thus cities were remade into easily consumable entities. Secondly, it offered opportunities for urban revitalization that required little in the way of sacrifice from middle-class Americans, an attribute that became especially attractive after the conservative backlash of the late 1960s. Finally, tourist development allowed city leaders to project an image of urban vitality even while much of their cities remained in dire straits. While much of the scholarship on urban tourism has either celebrated its ability to renew cities or condemned its inauthenticity and delocalizing tendencies, this dissertation argues that tourism's often exploitative nature had little to do with its inherent characteristics but rather lay in the choices of leaders who saw a revitalized downtown as their highest goal, and were often willing to sacrifice the traditional measures of civic improvement to achieve that end.

Cowan, Aaron B

University of Cincinnati

2008

Stradling, David. Committee Chair

en

Thesis

http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=ucin1203655126

http://lallier.msh-vdl.fr/theses/items/show/901

http://lallier.msh-vdl.fr/theses/archive/files/b90ab1b911713514909e7e82181ac66c.jpg