Strategies to Address Decommissioned Automotive Plants

This chapter considers the complexity of dealing with decommissioned automotive plants and focuses on the site, neighborhood, and city scales. Using Flint, Michigan, and Toledo, Ohio as examples, we categorize a set of five widely used strategies that shape the physical evolution and repurposing of automotive plants and their sites after closure. These are brownfield remediation, infrastructure, the use of catalytic projects, creating enterprise zones, and developing nodes. We highlight the physical impacts that the auto industry’s restructuring has at the scale of the neighborhood and city, as well as its profound influence on the morphology of a region. We conclude that no current models offer a truly successful approach to dealing with decommissioned automotive plants.