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Midwestern towns embrace their identities
By David Giffels
Beacon Journal columnist
Published on Saturday, Mar 29, 2008
I'm not sure when the term ''Rust Belt'' made the transition from mark of dishonor to badge of honor. I'm not even sure if that's happened, or at least if it's happened completely.
But there's definitely plenty of evidence that, in the past half-generation or so, the phrase has been adapted by people who came of age after the rust had already formed. Instead of growing up with the smell of factory smoke, they grew up with stories of that smell, and so their perspective is unique, and uniquely ''postindustrial.''
Their notion of the Rust Belt represents the beginning of something, not the end.
Whatever caused the end of the Industrial Age doesn't have much to do with them, but it has defined their identity profoundly. Anyone from Akron or Detroit or Buffalo or Pittsburgh or Gary will look at a picture of a brick building with a soot darkened facade, lightless windows, round smokestacks and blocky, stylized lettering whose paint has chipped and faded and react to it in a specific way. It looks like where they came from, but it feels like something they never experienced directly.
For a long time, from around the early 1980s until the mid-'90s, younger people in cities like ours felt isolated by that feeling; a lingering sense of failure seemed to float out from the broken windows in all those abandoned factories. But slowly and organically, a sense of unity has formed. Some of that probably has to do with new ways of communication — primarily the Internet — across a broad and nebulous region. And some has to do with the distance of time: The last passenger tire was built in Akron in 1982; a child born that year would now be turning 26 years old.
That, perhaps not coincidentally, is the same age Abby Wilson was when she moved back to her native Pittsburgh after living away since high school, most of that time in New York City, where she earned a degree in cultural anthropology. She made her choice deliberately, and her return to that ''Rust Belt'' city in 2006 prompted her to recognize herself as part of a broad community of people who either have remained in or rejoined cities like hers.
She began a conversation with a colleague, Sarah Szurpicki, who similarly had moved back to her hometown of Detroit. They had worked together on political campaigns and shared an instinct for organizing. As they talked, they began to identify cities like theirs, which they — very tellingly — defined not by some notion of diminished industrial strength, but rather by their shared connection to the Great Lakes, the natural resource that was a key to industrial development 100 years ago and remains a resource today.
Last year, they secured a grant from the Brookings Institution's Great Lakes Economic Initiative and launched a collective called the Great Lakes Urban Exchange, or GLUE.
The idea is to identify and strengthen the bond between two dozen cities like theirs — and ours — especially among people between the ages of 18 and 40.
They have launched a Web site — http://www.gluespace.org — that is actually a place holder for a permanent site still under construction.
And they have begun a conversation that has never before taken place in this way, among younger people in places that once felt isolated and now are being brought together.
Those cities include all of Ohio's urban centers, and range north to Lansing, south to Louisville, east to Rochester and west to Des Moines.
The first goal is to help people in these cities connect, to establish a broad conversation among people with a shared identity. At the beginning of February, GLUE held a conference in Buffalo. About 50 people from 19 cities attended. The visit included a bus tour hosted by an urban planner, which showed the bright and dark sides of the city that looked very familiar, even to those who'd never been to Buffalo.
''The people on the bus recognized it as a laboratory and as an archaeological record,'' Wilson said in a phone conversation. ''We saw it as Flint, as Cleveland, as Youngstown. We all felt like, 'It's just like my city.' It was like — we're all in this together. This was a dynamic group, and they all could live anywhere they wanted. They chose to live in these 'wounded soldier' cities because they saw their potential.''
GLUE is in its infancy. Eventually, Wilson would like so see an advocacy role grow from the collaboration, but for now she and Szurpicki are working on growing the community. They want these Great Lakes cities to share ideas, to relay success stories, to offer connections. One small example is an independent filmmaker from Detroit who has received offers from GLUE members in Cleveland and Pittsburgh to help get his movie shown there.
Akron has barely entered this new conversation, and Wilson encourages anyone who's interested to join in. You can start that by visiting the Web site.
While you're there, try a little experiment. Click on the ''GLUE on Flickr'' images on the right side of the home page and see how familiar many of the pictures look, even though most were taken far away from here. They all seem very close to home.
David Giffels is a Beacon Journal columnist. He can be reached at 330-996-3572 or at dgiffels@thebeaconjournal.com.
I'm not sure when the term ''Rust Belt'' made the transition from mark of dishonor to badge of honor. I'm not even sure if that's happened, or at least if it's happened completely.
Get the full article here.
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