I ran across this book review in a magazine somewhere.  Sounds like the author is talking about Urban Ohios second and third tier cities.

 

Small Gritty & Green: The Promise of America's Smaller Industrial Cities in a Low Carbon World

 

America’s once-vibrant small-to-midsize cities--Syracuse, Worcester, Akron, Flint, Rockford, and others--increasingly resemble urban wastelands. Gutted by deindustrialization, outsourcing, and middle-class flight, disproportionately devastated by metro freeway systems that laid waste to the urban fabric and displaced the working poor, and struggling with pockets of poverty reminiscent of postcolonial squalor, small industrial cities--as a class--have become invisible to a public distracted by the Wall Street (big city) versus Main Street (small town) matchup. These cities would seem to be part of America’s past, not its future. And yet, journalist and historian Catherine Tumber argues in this provocative book, America’s gritty Rust Belt cities could play a central role in a greener, low-carbon, relocalized future

 

...I havn't read it (apparently it has not been released yet?)  but it sounds quite relevant to places like Dayton, Akron, Toledo, etc (the author teaches..or taught...at the University of Toledo).

 

And, a negative review:

Industrial Strength

 

....At times it sounds like in the future everyone is supposed to be a peasant farmer growing vegetables for local consumption in places like Flint. These cities are valiantly installing riverfront trails, remediating brownfields, restoring wetlands, and land-banking disused lots. But the die-hard localism Tumber champions is not new: it’s part of a deeply conservative tradition that isn’t expanding the economy, it’s shrinking it, year after year. Ironically the suburbs in areas she describes are often more economically and ethnically diverse than the cities.

 

 

 

 

The cover image clearly shows the Columbus skyline on the left.

I didnt pay much attention to the cover.  It looked like some generic "city" stuff behind a green field.

 

 

Hey now!

 

haha

^

hey, lets debate the book cover.  Mayday is some sort of graphic designer or art director, so he can offer his expert opinion.

 

 

"Disproportionally devasted by metro freeway systems."

 

I thought the more prevalent pattern was that the interstates passed around the outskirts of the small cities. Granted, a lot of sprawly new businesses developed between the interchange and the city, taking some of the life away from the city, but if there was any wholesale demolition, it wasn't anything like the it was in the big cities.

^That was the goal originally, and certainly happened in quite a few cities including Huntington. But, in other smaller cities, the downtown business communities were afraid of lost business if there weren't any freeway exits leading directly into the CBD. Since grade-separated highways were a newer concept at that time, the communities didn't know that leaving the city center intact would promote better urbanity. Streets were converted to one-way to speed drivers out to the highways or sprawl areas. One-way streets, especially high speed ones, are kryponite to a business.

 

Also, smaller cities sometimes want to clone what's going on in larger cities near them to get a piece of that success. If the big cities got freeways right though the middle of town the little guys wanted them too. It's kinda like how much of Portsmouth and Springfield are being bulldozed to be more like Columbus was in the '70s. "Well, Columbus tore down a bunch of old stuff and look how well they're doing."