Beyond Corporate Abandonment: General Motors and the Politics of Metropolitan Capitalism in Flint, Michigan

In the decade following World War II, executives from the General Motors Corporation (GM) devised an aggressive corporate growth strategy that centered on the spatial decentralization of manufacturing.  As part of this agenda, company officials implemented a suburban investment strategy that shifted capital and jobs away from the city of Flint, Michigan, GM's birthplace and manufacturing headquarters.  Between 1940 and 1960, GM opened eight new industrial complexes in Genesee County, all of them in the suburbs surrounding Flint.  Although scholars have tended to frame such decisions as examples of corporate abandonment, GM's postwar capital migrations were not simply acts of secession from the central city.  Rather, GM's investment policies were part of a larger metropolitan growth agenda to expand the city’s boundaries and create a Sunbelt-style regional government.  When GM executives built new plants outside of Flint, they did so with the hope that the city would one day annex those factories.  Moreover, GM officials actively supported a 1958 initiative known as "New Flint," which promised to consolidate the Vehicle City and its urbanized suburbs under a more efficient "super government."  Although suburban voters ultimately derailed the New Flint plan, GM's steadfast support for metropolitan government belies the notions of corporate abandonment at the heart of most historical literature on the Rust Belt and the urban crisis.  As the Flint case suggests, single causal frameworks such as "corporate abandonment" and "globalization" cannot fully explain either the complexity of metropolitan capital networks or the spatial calculus that drove postwar corporate growth strategies.  Indeed, "Beyond Corporate Abandonment" shows how local actors and metropolitan politics played a decisive role in driving the spatial reorganization of capital, work, and poverty in postwar America.