No Miracles Here
Subtitle: Fighting Urban Decline in Japan and the United States (Suny Series in Popular Culture and Political Change)
Publisher: State University of New York Press
Published: February 2001
Language: eng
Format: Hardcover
Number of pages: 208
ISBN-13: 9780791447918
Subjects: POLITICS & GOVERNMENT; Urban Renewal; Social conditions; Public Affairs & Administration; Political Science; Sociology; Urban Policy; Politics/International Relations; United States; Public Policy - City Planning & Urban Dev.; Sociology - Urban; Public Policy - Regional Planning; Japan
Description: "This probing comparison of two struggling company towns, one in Japan and one in the United States, offers valuable urban revitalization lessons. The author compares urban revitalization efforts in Flint, Michigan, the declining automobile industry town, and Omuta, Fukuoka Prefecture, home of the largest coal mine in Japan, from the early 1970s through the early 1990s. Striking similarites emerge, both in the way redevelopment policy is made and in policy content.

For example, both cities work to create new jobs, attract tourism, and diversify their economic bases. Despite these similarities, there are also differences that help the Japanese system do a better job of managing socioeconomic decline. Notably, the Japanese system is better suited to effecting incremental improvements in local socioeconomic conditions, while the American system often takes the big gamble that, if successful, dramatically improves conditions. This gamble, however, can also result in a failure to reverse the city's economic decline.

No Miracles Here finds that although Japanese and American cities rarely achieve truly successful revitalization, the Japanese have been more successful at avoiding the pitfalls of bad redevelopment policy."--BOOK JACKET.