| "Made in Manhattan: Industrial Retention Advocacy, Neighborhood Change, and New Forms of Creative Production, 1993-2013" examines how industrial neighborhoods in downtown Manhattan have been reimagined and remade during the rise of the so-called creative class, a period of both intensified and prolonged gentrification locally and tremendous global reorientation of labor markets and activities toward creative sectors and work in postindustrial cities. This dissertation investigates how the policy and practice of industrial retention and innovation have operated over the past twenty years, and how their effectiveness is both shaped by and helps shape urban change processes and experiences of work. Countering the mainstream planning view of highest and best use as the organizing principle for urban land use particularly in competitive land markets, industrial retention advocates have argued for preserving manufacturing and related uses in the heart of established FIRE (finance, insurance, real estate) districts and luxury enclaves.;Through analysis of census data, policy papers, archival research, and interviews with more than eighty policymakers, planners, activists, residents, workers, and manufacturers, my research explores how residents of Chinatown, Chelsea, the South Village (Greenwich Village), the Lower East Side, and New York City more broadly have contested the policy boosterism around creativity through the experience of preserving production activity and jobs in their neighborhoods. I argue that industrial retention, located at a crucial centerpoint in the struggle over urban space and the right to the city has a two-fold agenda: first, to advance economic justice objectives by protecting "good jobs," especially for the immigrants and people of color who primarily comprise the industrial workforce in New York City; second, to counter or insulate historically diverse neighborhoods from the homogenizing effects of gentrification, particularly in those highly competitive, central city locations. In laying claim to definitions of creative labor and to place in ways that reflect new discourses and forms of manufacturing, especially immigrant- and artisanal-driven production, retention advocates have the potential to challenge a more generalized condition of urban precarity. |
