For those who came of age within driving distance of Baltimore's National Aquarium in the 1980s, a field trip or family vacation to the gilded new harbor was a rite of passage. Decades later, The Wire offered an award-winning, precedent-breaking counterpoint, depicting the systematic corruption and institutional failure that deindustrialization and divestment had wrought.
While scholars have long recognized the interrelationships between the two souls of cities like Baltimore, they have rarely been explored with the kind of nuance offered by Jane Berger. Artfully integrating analysis of the political economy of the Rust Belt city with the community activism of predominantly Black welfare and human service workers, A New Working Class turns on the most unusual of declension narratives. The book's drive comes less from the erosion of a once-proud manufacturing sector than from the rise and fall of a public sector—led, “redistributive approach” to local development (3). In part...
