Connecting the Dots for Urban Revitalization

This case study grows out of the Cities in Transition initiative of the German Marshall Fund of the United States, through which close to 50 key planners, policymakers, and practitioners in five United States older industrial cities -- Cleveland, OH; Detroit, MI; Flint, MI; Pittsburgh, PA; and Youngstown, OH -- participated in a sustained knowledge transfer effort from 2010 through 2012 through site visits and conversations with counterparts in a number of European cities, including...
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This case study grows out of the Cities in Transition initiative of the German Marshall Fund of the United States, through which close to 50 key planners, policymakers, and practitioners in five United States older industrial cities -- Cleveland, OH; Detroit, MI; Flint, MI; Pittsburgh, PA; and Youngstown, OH -- participated in a sustained knowledge transfer effort from 2010 through 2012 through site visits and conversations with counterparts in a number of European cities, including Manchester, U.K.; Barcelona, Spain; and Leipzig and Dortmund, Germany. The threshold issue in the workshop and for thinking about regeneration in general is to adequately define urban regeneration. This paper offers a framework for an integrated way of thinking about urban regeneration and explains why a case study of Dortmund offers both a useful way of applying that framework and valuable lessons for the many United States cities that it so closely resembles.