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In this text, Robert Lewis charts the city's decline since the 1920s and describes the early development of Chicago's famed (and reviled) growth machine. Beginning in the 1940s, downtown business interest, financial institutions, and real estate groups, place-dependent organisations in Chicago implemented several industrial renewal initiatives with the dual purpose of stopping factory closings and attracting new firms in order to turn blighted property into modern industrial sites. At the same time, a more powerful coalition sought to adapt the urban fabric to appeal to middle-class consumption and residential living. As Lewis shows, the two aims were never well integrated, and the result was on-going disinvestment and the inexorable decline of Chicago's industrial space. By the 1950s, it was evident that the early incarnation of the growth machine had failed to maintain Chicago's economic centre in industry.

Industrialization --- City planning --- History --- Chicago (Ill.) --- Economic conditions --- Urban redevelopment in Chicago, Industrial decline and central-city job loss, Growth coalitions and urban renewa, Industrial property relations and public-private interaction, industrial suburbanization.