جستن به عقب و یا حرکت: انعطاف پذیری منطقه ای و برنامه ریزی توسعه اقتصادی

While psychologists and ecologists have identified many factors that increase the odds of resilience in a person or an ecosystem, economic development officials and planning scholars do not yet have a firm grasp on how economic development planning relates to regional resilience. This study explores how two regions – Buffalo, New York and Cleveland, Ohio – have adapted and responded to deindustrialization using economic development. Interviews were conducted with past and present planning and economic development leaders and historical and current economic development plans were analyzed in order to increase our understanding of how regions respond to challenges, how economic development planning shapes these responses, and how both economic development planning and the larger response relate to adaptive resilience in distressed regions.

Just as people may be resilient, so too may places. And just as people may not be resilient, so too may metropolitan regions and their core cities. In recent years, numerous scholars have begun to grapple with the question of what makes a region resilient. While psychologists and ecologists have made great strides to identify the factors that increase the odds of resilience in a person or an ecosystem confronting a problem, economic development officials and planning scholars do not yet have a firm grasp on the factors that affect a region’s resilience in response to a given challenge. In this study, the focus is on deindustrialization and how two regions have adapted and responded to this challenge using economic development planning. Frequently mistaken for a cyclical recession or temporary economic downturn, deindustrialization unfolds over time, often coinciding with population out-migration, economic restructuring and widespread employment losses. Regional responses to the challenge of deindustrialization have varied in both their approaches and in their outcomes. While some regions have successfully weathered the trend, others have fought, and in some cases continue to fight, diligently to reverse or curtail its negative effects. Such divergent processes and outcomes highlight the importance of using case studies to understand what features of a region, including regional asset bases, modes of governance, civic capacity, leadership, and various external factors contribute to decline or facilitate recovery. Theories of resilience from an array of disciplines provide a conceptual framework through which these questions can be answered. Using resilience as a lens, this research seeks to apply established theory and methods from the resilience literature to the question of deindustrialization, allowing for the emergence of a more specific understanding of how and why regions varied in their abilities to respond to this challenge. In this study, I examine two comparable United States metropolitan regions – Buffalo, New York and Cleveland, Ohio – that confronted the challenge of deindustrialization beginning in the late 1970s. In both regions, I conducted interviews with past and present planning and economic development leaders and analyzed historical and current economic development plans in order to compare how plans have changed, priorities have shifted, and the tone of both have adjusted to the new realities of the post-industrial economy. Using the analytical framework of resilience, I then conclude with a discussion of adaptive resilience vis-à-vis these two case study regions. The goal of this research is to increase our understanding of how regions respond to challenges, how economic development planning shapes these responses, and how both economic development planning and the larger response relate to adaptive resilience in distressed regions. Resilience, regions and adaptation Though psychologists have long used resilience as a way to describe an individual’s response to a specific challenge or traumatic event, the application of resilience to places and structures has only lately been explored (Bonanno, 2004 and Kaplan, 1999). Recent investigations of urban and regional resilience have found that cities and regions tend to be resilient in the face of natural disasters; meaning that they often revert back to their pre-disaster state as measured by tangible indicators like population and jobs, or the slightly more ambiguous concepts of resumed economic activity or regional traffic flow (Vale & Campanella, 2005). In all, the literature says much about resilience in the face of sudden or episodic disruptions and comparatively little about the ability of places to recover in the face of other types of disasters, including the longer-term stress of deindustrialization (Berke & Campanella, 2006). Given that resilience remains such an ambiguous, or fuzzy, concept, further exploration seems warranted ( Markusen, 1999; for more on resilience as it relates to fuzziness, see Pendall, Foster, & Cowell, 2010). The concept of resilience has been analyzed and defined differently by scholars across a variety of disciplines, including ecology, psychology, economics, disaster studies, political science and assorted other fields. We learn from ecologists and engineers that there are two main types of resilience: ecological resilience, which describes instances when some sort of disruption pushes a system from one equilibrium to another; and engineering resilience, which pertains to instances when a system returns to its presumed steady-state after a disruption, as measured in this case by indicators like water quality and the rate of return of certain species ( Berkes & Folke, 1998, 12). It is this second definition that is utilized most often by fields that are associated with urban planning because it emphasizes the recovery of people and places in the wake of some specific shock or prolonged stress ( Pickett et al., 2004 and Vale and Campanella, 2005). In the end though, none of these traditional conceptualizations of resilience are appropriate for the type of research being conducted here. When regional actors develop a response to a long-term shock like deindustrialization, they are not looking to achieve (or maintain) a new equilibrium, nor are they looking to simply ‘bounce back’ to their pre-challenge state, especially if that state was less than desirable to begin with. More importantly, a ‘return to normal’ in the face of global restructuring would not generally be possible anyway. Both the ecological view and the engineering view are therefore imperfect in that they are overly concerned with how fast or how easily a region ‘bounces back’ or recovers from a particular challenge. Such frameworks say nothing about the tradeoffs associated with ‘bouncing back’ or adjusting to a new sub-optimal equilibrium. Nor do they say anything about how regional actors might prepare themselves to deal with future problems or might learn from the mistakes they have made in response to a given challenge. One way to incorporate the ideas of regional adaptation, preparation or experiential learning and to help clarify our discussion of resilience is to think about an individual region as a complex adaptive system. Rather than merely striving for a return to normalcy or a resumption of pre-challenge behaviors or outcomes, an adaptive system is one that has the ability to change or adapt in response to stresses and strains (Carpenter, Westley, & Turner, 2005). In such systems, resilience is not related to equilibrium, a return to ‘normal’, or even to resilient outcomes; it is instead a “dynamic attribute associated with a process of continual development” ( Pendall et al., 2010). In Buffalo and Cleveland, where decades of restructuring have eroded any sense of ‘normalcy’, it is this adaptive systems perspective of resilience that is most applicable. Adaptive resilience is most often explained through the use of a ‘figure 8’ diagram, which depicts the four phases of a region’s adaptive cycle as it adjusts to internal and external challenges (Holling, Gunderson, & Peterson, 2002). Each of the four phases – conservation, release, reorganization and exploitation – relates to the process of adaptive resilience, exhibited by the system’s susceptibility to stresses or shocks (see Fig. 1). As Holling et al. (2002) describe in their panarchy model of adaptive resilience, systems, and presumably regions, cycle through these four stages over time. Any given region will experience varying levels of resilience, depending on where it is within the four-phase cycle. Each phase reflects the characteristics of the system or region and describes the level and direction of resilience at a given moment in time.

In any discussion of regional resilience, it is important that we ask whether the region’s leaders have responded in a way that improves the overall chances for a healthy region in the long run. Or, in other words, we must ask whether regional leaders have taken effective steps to increase the region’s adaptive resilience. For both Buffalo and Cleveland, the answer is a qualified yes; despite ongoing challenges in both regions, leaders have utilized economic development planning to adapt to the evolving challenges of deindustrialization over the last three decades. A thorough analysis of economic development plans as well as conversations with current and past economic development officials suggest that both regions have likely moved from the ‘release’ phase, where resilience is low and uncertainty is high, to the ‘reorganization’ phase, where resilience is high and innovation and restructuring are emphasized. Though the updated plan for Buffalo suggests a more pronounced awareness of the challenges at hand, leaders in both regions acknowledge that past decisions were far too often based on what Shiller (2000) calls irrational exuberance, or wishful thinking that may have blinded them from the truth of their situations. Today, both regions have reached an understanding that reliance on heavy industry no longer makes sense. In Buffalo, we see a marked shift in approach and a more realistic vision of a future devoid of most heavy manufacturing. In Cleveland, economic development plans now call for increased educational opportunities, civic entrepreneurship, and public/private co-investment. In both cases, this acknowledgment suggests a conscious shift in intentionality; one that reflects the changing realities of each region’s economic landscape. These shifts highlight a marked change in the economic development goals and strategies in both Buffalo and Cleveland. The tone in both regions, as reflected in both the interview data and the updated economic development plans, has gradually adjusted to the new realities of these regional economies and of economic development today. History has shown that it can be very difficult for a region to organize an effective economic development response to deindustrialization. In the midst of population outmigration, rising unemployment, and assorted disinvestment, these cases demonstrate that it is helpful to know what strengths are available for regional leaders to draw upon and deploy in order to increase the likelihood of good outcomes in the longer term. As these cases suggest, a region with strong and responsible leadership and a solid understanding of both its strengths and weaknesses, may not only be more likely to draft a plan for moving forward in the face of a challenge like deindustrialization but it may also be more likely to exhibit adaptive resilience. As resilience research in the fields of urban planning and policy continues to evolve, scholars may draw from the more quantitative measures utilized in ecology, psychology, and disaster studies. Such data – together, with the qualitative data afforded by plans, interviews, and document analysis – may help to further our understanding of regional resilience and adaptation in the face of stresses like deindustrialization. Nevertheless, the qualitative case studies outlined above take an important first step in helping urban planners and policymakers understand how economic development planning relates to adaptive resilience in the face of deindustrialization.