Boston Renaissance

This volume documents metropolitan Boston''s metamorphosis from a casualty of manufacturing decline in the 1970s to a paragon of the high-tech and service industries in the 1990s. The city''s rebound has been part of a wider regional renaissance, as new commercial centers have sprung up outside the city limits. A stream of immigrants have flowed into the area, redrawing the map of ethnic relations in the city. While Boston''s vaunted mind-based economy rewards the highly educated, many unskilled workers have also found opportunities servicing the city''s growing health and education industries. Boston''s renaissance remains uneven, and the authors identify a variety of handicaps (low education, unstable employment, single parenthood) that still hold minorities back. Nonetheless this book presents Boston as a hopeful example of how America''s older cities can reinvent themselves in the wake of suburbanization and deindustrialization. A Volume in the Multi-City Study of Urban Inequality