A new grand narrative of decline

International audienceMax Rousseau-Review Forum Jason Hackworth's book is to be given due credit, for it provides an extremely cohesive and powerful account of the astonishing trajectory of America's former industrial strongholds. In doing so, this book not only resonates in the Rust Belt and the United States, but the thesis it defends clearly deserves to be discussed in other contexts. Hackworth sums up the book's main thesis as follows: « a multifaceted, multiscalar policy reaction among urban decline, racial threat, and the conservative movement has created the policy intertia supporting organized deprivation in the American Rust Belt. » Hackworth's understanding of organized deprivation therefore offers a broader vision of austerity encompassing not only its wellknown direct effects (such as cuts in social budgets) but also its lesser-known local indirect effects (such as the right-sizing strategies implemented in the Rust Belt). Why is there such a persistence of a clearly anti-urban and antisocial strategy in US urban governance? Hackworth gives two main answers, which constitute the main architecture of his book. The first is the patient construction and reactivation by interest groups organized around conservative politicians: a concerted effort to frame racialized cities as irredeemable 'others.' This construction is itself based on the white reaction to the advances of Black Americans at the turn of the 1970s. The second element results from and reinforces the first in a vicious circle which ultimately explains the extreme abandonment to which the towns of the Rust Belt are subject: what Hackworth calls the "remote government" of the cities of the Rust Belt. As Hackworth observes, "locally, organized deprivation persists because the forces provoking and reproducing it are ensconced elsewhere"