ABSTRACT
The growing national and international interest in Shrinking or Legacy Cities is important to Rust Belt regions and other regions grappling with the ill-effects of deindustrialization and outmigration. One of the main identifying features of the Rust Belt region is the pronounced losses that most of its metropolitan areas saw during deindustrialization, which is in and of itself a contentious term. Beyond the Rust Belt there is a growing body of scholarship investigating similarly challenged cities and regions across the world. Deindustrialization as an idea was made popular in 1982 when Bluestone and Harrison released their benchmark study, The Deindustrialization of America, but the trend was underway long beforehand. Part of the difficulty in understanding deindustrialization stems from the fact that the term is not often used by researchers today; in the United States, deindustrialization typically refers to the changes seen in the economy and in broader society during the late 1970s and early 1980s.
