Small, Gritty, and 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 thatlaid waste to the urban fabric and displaced the working poor, small industrial cities seem to bepart of America's past, not its future. And yet, Catherine Tumber argues in this provocative book,America's gritty Rust Belt cities could play a central role in a greener, low-carbon, relocalizedfuture.

As we wean ourselves from fossil fuels and realize the environmental costsof suburban sprawl, we will see that small cities offer many assets for sustainable living notshared by their big city or small town counterparts, including population density and nearby,fertile farmland available for new environmentally friendly uses.

Tumber traveledto twenty-five cities in the Northeast and Midwest -- from Buffalo to Peoria to Detroit to Rochester-- interviewing planners, city officials, and activists, and weaving their stories into thisexploration of small-scale urbanism. Smaller cities can be a critical part of a sustainable futureand a productive green economy. Small, Gritty, and Green will help us develop themoral and political imagination we need to realize this.

Catherine Tumber, a journalist and historian, is the author of American Feminism and the Birth of New Age Spirituality: Searching for the Higher Self, 1875--1915. She is a Research Affiliate in the Community Innovators Lab in MIT's Department of Urban Studies and Planning.