Growth, prosperity, and inequality after the great recession: A regionalist cultural political economy of Chicagoland

Planey, Donald A.

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Description

Title

Growth, prosperity, and inequality after the great recession: A regionalist cultural political economy of Chicagoland

Author(s)

Planey, Donald A.

Issue Date

2020-03-13

Director of Research (if dissertation) or Advisor (if thesis)

Cidell, Julie L

Doctoral Committee Chair(s)

Cidell, Julie L

Committee Member(s)

• Wilson, David
• Doussard, Marc
• Allred, Dustin

Department of Study

Geography & Geographic InfoSci

Discipline

Geography

Degree Granting Institution

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Degree Name

Ph.D.

Degree Level

Dissertation

Keyword(s)

• Cultural Political Economy
• Regional Development
• Economic Development
• Industrial Policy
• Regional Planning
• Chicago
• Chicagoland
• Economic Geography

Abstract

In the 2010s, major public, civic, and private institutions began to promote new regional planning and coordination projects in the Chicago region. Shortly after the recovery from the 2007-8 economic crash began, regionalist institutions in the Chicago metropolitan area formed a series of new public-private partnerships, technical assistance programs, and community development projects meant to serve as new solutions to socio-economic inequality and stunted economic growth in the Chicago region. Common areas of focus in this new Chicagoland regionalism included industrial policy support for legacy manufacturing industries, financing for infrastructure, and service consolidation across municipal and county boundaries. This dissertation looks into the political strategies concerning the how and why of the new regional push in Chicagoland, split into three manuscripts (chapters 2, 3 and 3) on components of Chicagoland regionalism that hold broader significance for regional planning and regional coordination in the twenty-first century: (i) A new project shared among regionalist institutions to organize support for legacy industries in the region, and the re-incorporation of “productive” industries into the imperative for city-regions to “globalize.” (ii) The deep history of regional planning in the Chicago region, and the ways in which policy agendas and political ideologies specific to the region are deployed and reproduced across generations. (iii) Regionalist institutions’ formulation of new regional imaginaries in the 2010s and their political strategies for securing public and private sector support for new regionalist projects. Out of the three chapters, a model of regionalist cultural political economy (rCPE) is formed that is meant to facilitate geographic investigation into the creation of regionalisms by intersecting networks from the public, private, and civic sectors of specific-city-regions, and the ways in which regional actors impose local/regional imperatives onto broader policy trends.

Graduation Semester

2020-05

Type of Resource

Thesis

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Copyright 2020 Donald Planey

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