ABSTRACT
Over the past decade, the concept of “economic resilience” within regional and urban studies has gained significant momentum. Usually economic resilience is examined as the ability of the regional economy to recover or adjust to negative impacts and shocks. In the United States several cities are transitioning away from their manufacturing past and decline, initiating strategies for diversifying their economic base. These strategies reflect an “adaptive” element in their resilience process. This work provides an overview of the changes in the industrial base and the reformation of the economy of four cities: Grand Rapids (MI), South Bend (IN), Duluth (MN), and Racine (WI). These medium to-small-sized cities reflect the demographic spread of the region. The work explores changes in key indicators, such as employment and earnings, in manufacturing and service clusters.
The study covers the paths that these cities followed to recover during the different hardship periods of the last 15 years. Some cities maintained and expanded their specialization, but others could not recover equally well, and are still facing economic hardship. Overall, we observed more adaptation and transformation in the regional economy than forms of “recovery”, while the economic diversity, availability of skilled labor and the institutional capacity have been important factors for adaptive resilience of the cities.
