Policy cohesion and post-recession economic imaginaries: manufacturing discourse in the Chicago metropolitan region

Abstract

This paper examines the proliferation of the Chicago metropolitan region’s post-recession regional economic development initiatives, and a consequent shift towards manufacturing-centric development programmes among regional planning bodies and public–private institutions. This phenomenon provides important insights about the post-recession economic development policy terrain in mature city-regions and the politics of economic development imaginaries. While there has been justified celebration of a new creativity in urban and regional economic development and industrial policy in the geographical literature, the Chicagoland case indicates that defensive actions, meant to recode older, disciplinary attitudes towards the region’s labour pools and lobbying from region’s industrial capitals, are an important element of the region’s post-recession policy coordination. What is dubbed herein as ‘manufacturing discourse’ in Chicagoland originates in institutions endogenous to the region’s industrial capitals and represents a longer term project of maintaining a specific type of socio-spatial fix as the predominant mode of crisis response among the region’s governance bodies, civil society and fractions of capital. In turn, it is argued that geographers and urban scholars need to theorize properly about the link between ‘soft’ economic imaginaries and the protection of power centres within city-regions, particularly amid state rationality crises and bursts of policy experimentation.