Community-Centered Urban Redevelopment: Case Study of Carlisle, PA

Carlisle, a Central Pennsylvania borough positioned twenty-five miles west of Harrisburg, has a deep and rich history through the American Revolution and Civil War until today. Especially during the Industrial Revolution and the latter part of the 20th century, many factories provided a majority of the jobs in the town and were the economic foundation for the community.

However, as seen in countless other communities across the country, these factories fell away and left the town in quick succession due to widespread deindustrialization and globalization: the International Automotive Components factory closed in 2008, the Tyco Electronics factory in 2009, and the Carlisle Tire & Wheel factory in 2010.

The Borough of Carlisle was faced with an enormous challenge yet an enormous opportunity in how to develop the three brownfield sites on the northern side of town. In 2013, after a long and deliberative process, the Carlisle Urban Redevelopment Plan was published, and is an interesting case study to highlight how the CED-SS model can and has been applied in urban communities.

19 East Chocolate: A Case Study for the CED-SS Model

The community economic development-social sustainability (CED-SS) model that we’ve built over the past eight posts is primarily aimed at being a framework to look at creating new policies in a community. It can also be used, however, to evaluate past policies to extract lessons for future policymaking so that it can fully maximize opportunity and foster strong social sustainability.

Let’s take a look at a case study where there was a breakdown in the model and an impending erosion of social sustainability in the community to highlight some of these lessons: the demolition of the Hershey chocolate factory in 2012.

Rounding out the Cycle: Completing the CED-SS Model

In my last post, I built the first portion of the community economic development-opportunity-social sustainability model and explaining the relationship between the first two. Now, it’s time to take it one step further and see how the model rounds out and comes full circle.

Opportunity is at the center of the model, and we saw it is supported and enhanced through community economic development. How do opportunity and social sustainability relate, though?

Community Capital: A Lens for Social Sustainability

The past few posts have focused primarily on opportunity and what exactly I mean by that. Yet, you may be wondering how that is relevant to what this blog is supposed to be about: social sustainability and community economic development.

That’s a fair point, I’ll give you that. But give me a chance to connect the dots. I swear it won’t be for naught.

Embracing a Culture of Opportunity

“It is not a dream of motor cars and high wages merely, but a dream of social order in which each man and each woman shall be able to attain the fullest stature of which they are innately capable, and be recognized by others for what they are, regardless of the fortuitous circumstances of birth or position.”

The American Dream sounds a lot like what social sustainability should look like, at least intuitively. When James Truslow Adams first introduced the term in his 1931 book The Epic of America, the American Dream was a reality in which “life should be better and richer and fuller for everyone, with opportunity for each according to ability and achievement.”

Potential. Achievement. Opportunity. For all. These are what Adams saw as major tenets upon which a society should be built.

Social Sustainability: The Shorter Leg

Sustainable development has become the gold standard for policy-making around the world as awareness has grown of the inability to continue along the traditional development path taken generations before us. There is a popular analogy for sustainable development as a three-legged stool, with environmental, economic, and social factors working together to keep the stool stable. However, as it has been deployed over the past three decades, the three legs have not been developed evenly and, thus, the stool is not as even and effective as it was intended to be. Social sustainability has not been given the same attention and implementation as its counterparts, and that has held back sustainable development around the world from reaching its maximum potential.

Why, then, has social sustainability been treated like the neglected stepchild of the three?