About

Andrew R. Highsmith is an Associate Professor of History at the University of California, Irvine, and a Faculty Affiliate at the Center in Law, Society and Culture. He holds a Ph.D. in History from the University of Michigan, earned in 2009. His research specializes in modern U.S. history with particular interests in metropolitan development, public policy, racial and economic inequalities, and public health. Highsmith's first book, Demolition Means Progress: Flint, Michigan, and the Fate of the American Metropolis, explores the spatial and structural barriers to racial equality and economic opportunity in metropolitan Flint from the early twentieth century to the present, analyzing how urban renewal efforts contributed to suburbanization, racial and economic division, deindustrialization, and political fragmentation. His current book project, A Toxic Republic: Life and Death along the Color Line in Modern America, examines the root causes and consequences of racial health inequality in the U.S. from 1900 to the present, highlighting how migration, metropolitan development, and broader social forces have shaped enduring health disparities among racial minorities. Highsmith's work has been recognized with numerous awards, including the Best Dissertation Award from the Urban History Association and the John Reps Prize for the best doctoral dissertation in American city and regional planning history. His scholarly contributions include a range of journal articles, book chapters, and op-eds addressing urban history, racial segregation, public health, and policy issues.

Research topics

• Political Science
• Mathematics
• Aesthetics
• Mathematical analysis
• Art
• Law
• Economics

Selected publications

• Deindustrialization in the United States

  2025-11-21

  reference-entry1st authorCorresponding

  The term deindustrialization generally refers to the reduction or elimination of an area’s industrial capacity, often resulting in worker displacement. Although the word first gained currency during the 1970s and 1980s amid a devastating wave of factory closures and corporate downsizing that walloped manufacturing centers in the Midwest, Northeast, and Mid-Atlantic—areas that came to be known as the “Rust Belt”—the deindustrialization of the United States began much earlier than that, from the decline of the New England textile industry after World War I in the face of rising competition from low-wage producers in the South to the shift in production from congested city neighborhoods to suburban greenfield sites in locales such as Chicago as early as the 1920s. Even so, processes of deindustrialization accelerated dramatically following World War II as workers, especially whites, migrated away from big cities and employers shifted investment from urban industrial centers to suburbs, rural areas, the Sunbelt, and abroad. Numerous public policies, including Cold War defense initiatives, freeway construction projects, and federal housing programs, hastened these outmigrations of people, jobs, and wealth. Automation, too, played a significant role in reducing industrial employment. In response to such challenges, trade unionists, civil rights activists, and other community stakeholders waged vigorous campaigns against corporate abandonment, but few halted the outward migrations of jobs and resources. Others, including public officials and investors, looked to revitalize deindustrializing communities through economic diversification and a host of redevelopment projects, including sports arenas, office parks, shopping centers, casinos, and hospitals. Some hard-hit metropolitan areas reinvented themselves as postindustrial job centers, but many others continued to struggle with high rates of unemployment, poverty, and social inequality. Deindustrialization remains prominent in early-21st-century social and political discourse, with politicians using “bring back jobs” as a slogan for various trade and economic policies, including the tariffs levied on American trade partners by the two Trump presidential administrations. Researchers from various fields have responded to the challenges of deindustrialization by producing a flurry of scholarship. Much of this work centers on the political economy of capital flight in the late twentieth century and the consequences of deindustrialization on workers, the poor, and racial minorities, particularly in the Rust Belt. More recently, scholarship in this area has moved centrifugally, with works addressing deindustrialization’s local, global, cultural, and environmental dimensions; industrial job loss and the politics of race, class, gender, and sexuality; and responses to plant closures by workers, activists, public officials, civic boosters, and others. Scholars have also created more expansive chronologies of deindustrialization, challenged the generalizations at the heart of the Rust Belt–Sunbelt regional model, and critiqued the field’s emphasis on decline and ruination. These and other works make up the vibrant interdisciplinary field known as deindustrialization studies.

  PublisherDOI

• The Long and Wide Environmental Justice Movement

  The American Historical Review · 2024

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Political Science
  • Political Science
  • Law

  Journal Article The Long and Wide Environmental Justice Movement: Dispatches from Flint and Detroit Get access Katrinell M. Davis. Tainted Tap: Flint's Journey from Crisis to Recovery. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2021. Pp. 280. Paper $24.95. Benjamin J. Pauli. Flint Fights Back: Environmental Justice and Democracy in the Flint Water Crisis. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2019. Pp. 432. Paper $40.00. Ebook, open access. Josiah Rector. Toxic Debt: An Environmental Justice History of Detroit. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2022. Pp. 344. Paper $39.95. Andrew R Highsmith Andrew R Highsmith University of California, Irvine, US Email: highsmia@uci.edu Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The American Historical Review, Volume 129, Issue 2, June 2024, Pages 683–687, https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/rhae084 Published: 13 June 2024

  PublisherDOI

• 1 Health and Inequality in the Postwar Metropolis

  Edinburgh University Press eBooks · 2022

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Economics
  • Mathematics
  • Mathematical analysis
  PublisherDOI

• Moving Beyond the First Rough Draft: The Emerging History of the Flint Water Crisis

  Reviews in American History · 2019-01-01

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Moving Beyond the First Rough Draft:The Emerging History of the Flint Water Crisis Andrew R. Highsmith (bio) Anna Clark, The Poisoned City: Flint's Water and the American Urban Tragedy. New York: Metropolitan Books, 2018. 320 pp. Figures, maps, notes, select bibliography, and index. $30.00. If contemporary news reports about the Flint water crisis constituted the "first rough draft" of that calamity's distressing history, then the 2018 publication of Anna Clark's powerful book The Poisoned City: Flint's Water and the American Urban Tragedy marked the completion of a second, and significantly revised, version of that story. By now, the outlines of the first draft of the history of Flint's water disaster are familiar to millions. According to most news accounts, the trouble began in April 2014, when the city government—then under the tight grip of an unelected "emergency manager" appointed by Michigan's Republican governor Rick Snyder—canceled its longstanding water service agreement with Detroit in order to affiliate with a new regional water authority that was constructing a pipeline to Lake Huron. The city's emergency managers, with support from Mayor Dayne Walling and numerous other local elected officials, opted to use the Flint River as a temporary water source while the pipeline was under construction. The switch was part of a larger, sharply contested plan to balance the budget and impose severe austerity in this impoverished, majority-black city of one hundred thousand people. Soon after the switch, however, residents began to complain about the odor, taste, and color of the water. Late in the summer of 2014, city officials issued three separate boil water advisories after discovering coliform bacteria in the water on Flint's west side. At around the same time, numerous water users across the city reported suffering from hair loss, skin rashes, and other mysterious illnesses. There was also a significant spike in local cases of Legionnaires' disease in 2014 and 2015. Researchers later connected the outbreak to the city's drinking water. The problem, as investigators ultimately determined, was that water from the highly acidic Flint River was corroding the city's aging, lead-laden pipes. Because state and local officials had neglected to implement a corrosion control program, the pipes had leached lead, copper, bacteria [End Page 642] and other toxins into the drinking water. Government officials brushed off a chorus of complaints from local residents and allowed the contamination to continue for over a year and a half. By the time Governor Snyder announced the switch back to the Detroit system in October 2015, Flint's tainted water had caused incalculable harm to the city and its people. In addition to the spate of Legionnaires' disease cases, which killed at least twelve people locally, researchers reported that the number of young children with elevated blood lead levels had doubled. Moreover, the consumption of Flint's poisoned water left thousands of residents citywide suffering from myriad health problems including pulmonary disorders, psychological distress, and child developmental delays, to name but a few. Journalists who covered the Flint story as it unfolded were quick to point out that the city's water trouble stemmed from a tragic case of government mismanagement and political malfeasance. As part of that effort, they documented the puzzling failure to provide federally mandated corrosion control; the water's deleterious health effects on local residents; the disdain with which state officials responded to citizen activists; and, perhaps most seriously, the months-long coverup of evidence that pointed to the severity of Flint's infrastructure and public health disasters. Journalists and photographers covering the developments in Flint won well-deserved acclaim for their work, including the Michigan Press Association's Journalist of the Year Award, a Michigan Associated Press Media Editors award for investigative reporting, and even a Pulitzer Prize nomination for feature photography. By and large, however, these first drafts of the story of Flint's water emergency were insufficiently historical in the sense that they failed to address the longer-term structural forces underpinning the catastrophe—everything from deindustrialization and racial segregation to suburbanization and metropolitan fragmentation. Clark's compelling new book—part of a wave of scholarship and investigative reporting...

  PublisherDOI

• Metropolitan—A Historiographical Survey

  2018-05-18

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• The Neighborhood Unit: Schools, Segregation, and the Shaping of the Modern Metropolitan Landscape

  Teachers College Record The Voice of Scholarship in Education · 2018-03-01 · 10 citations

  articleSenior author

  Background/Context In the first half of the 20th century, American policy makers at all levels of government, alongside housing and real estate industry figures, crafted mechanisms of racial exclusion that helped to segregate metropolitan residential landscapes. Although educators and historians have recognized the long-term consequences of these policies for the making of educational segregation, they have not yet fully perceived how strongly ideas about public schools mattered in the shaping of these exclusionary practices. Purpose/Objective/Research Question/Focus of Study This historical study examines the “neighborhood unit” concept, its origins, and its influence, to illustrate the centrality of schooling in shaping mechanisms of racial segregation. The “neighborhood unit” concept, advocated during the 1920s by planner Clarence Perry before becoming central to local-level planning as well as federal-level housing policy, imagined self-contained communities within cities. Each of the units featured multi-purpose school-community facilities at their literal spatial as well as conceptual center. Perry and the influential cadre of planners who adopted the concept thought it would make metropolitan areas more livable, vibrant, and socially cohesive. But their neighborhood unit idea also encouraged racial segregation, in both schools and residential areas. Research Design Sources for this qualitative historical investigation include published and unpublished primary sources from individuals, organizations, and government entities involved in making and using the idea of the neighborhood unit as well as extant historical scholarship. Conclusions/Recommendations The history of the neighborhood unit shows that ideas about schools were central in the creation of the modern metropolitan landscape and enduring patterns of racial segregation. This evidence furthers the growing historical interpretation that housing segregation and school segregation operate not as separate terrain, but in deep connection with one another. By acknowledging and incorporating this historical perspective, educators and policy makers can reconceptualize segregation's roots, and perhaps its remedies.

  PublisherDOI

• The Fixers: Devolution, Development, and Civil Society in Newark, 1960–1990

  Journal of American History · 2017-12-04

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Fifty-one years ago, during the “long, hot summer” of 1967, civil disorders erupted in over 150 cities across the United States. One of the deadliest of the conflagrations occurred in Newark, New Jersey, where several days of rebellion and repression ensued after police officers beat an unarmed black taxi cab driver. The battle in Newark caused twenty-six deaths, nearly a thousand injuries, and millions of dollars in property damage. Ever since, scholars have grappled with the causes and consequences of America's “urban crisis,” a slow rolling structural calamity rooted in decades of job losses, disinvestment, depopulation, and racial inequality. In recent years, however, historians have begun to move beyond the familiar theme of decline by focusing on the persistence of urban dwellers. Julia Rabig's The Fixers fits squarely within this still-emerging tradition. Throughout, her focus is on “the fixers”—the city dwellers and suburbanites who fought for a brighter future for Newark before, during, and long after the urban uprisings of the 1960s. In Rabig's telling, the fixers were a diverse array of individuals and organizations, including the African American activists who worked to elect the city's first black mayor, Kenneth Allen Gibson, in 1970; the impoverished tenants who waged a lengthy rent strike to improve public housing; the workers who picketed construction sites in support of affirmative action; the black nationalists who envisioned new housing and community centers; and the dissident Catholic priests who labored alongside black women to provide affordable housing.

  PublisherDOI

• Rethinking Tiebout: The Contribution of Political Fragmentation and Racial/Economic Segregation to the Flint Water Crisis

  Environmental Justice · 2016-09-13 · 86 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  The water crisis that has embroiled Flint, Michigan, since 2014 is often explained via the proximate causes of government oversight and punitive emergency management. While these were critical elements in the decision to switch the city's water source, many other forces helped precipitate the crisis. One such force has been an enduring support for Charles Tiebout's model of interlocal competition, through which a region is presumed stronger when fragmented, independent municipalities compete for residents and investment. However, the Tiebout model fails to account for spillover effects, particularly regarding questions of social and regional equity. In this sense, the fragmentation of the Flint metropolitan region—supported through a variety of housing and land use policies over many decades—created the conditions through which suburbs were absolved of responsibility for Flint's decades-long economic crisis. Because of the Tiebout model's inability to address imbalances in population shifts arising from disparities in municipal services, Flint's more affluent suburbs continued to prosper, while Flint grew poorer and experienced infrastructure decline. Underlying this pattern of inequality has been a long history of racial segregation and massive deindustrialization, which concentrated the region's black population in the economically depressed central city. The Flint Water Crisis is thus a classic example of an environmental injustice, as policies were set in motion, which led to the creation of a politically separate and majority-black municipality with concentrated poverty, while nearby municipalities—most of them overwhelmingly white—accepted little responsibility for the legacy costs created by the region's starkly uneven patterns of metropolitan development.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• 6. “Our City Believes in Lily-White Neighborhoods”

  2015-01-01

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract Civil rights activists launched a prolonged campaign for open occupancy following World War II. Plans for urban renewal and freeway construction helped to galvanize the fair housing movement. In 1960, Flint officials announced plans to demolish homes and businesses in the African-American neighborhoods of Floral Park and St. John Street in order to make way for an industrial park and two freeways. Executives from General Motors, municipal officials, and others argued that "slum clearance" would boost the city's economy. Yet urban renewal was much more than a top-down campaign for growth. Many local activists also supported redevelopment, viewing it as an opportunity to secure new housing and desegregation. In 1967, as residents prepared to depart St. John and Floral Park, Flint activists forced reluctant city commissioners to pass a municipal fair housing law. A year later, city residents defended the law in a hotly contested referendum. In the wake of the referendum, city leaders cheered the accomplishment, arguing that the new law made Flint one of the most progressive cities in the United States. Despite such claims, however, the 1968 vote did little to undermine popular and policy-driven segregation and yielded a sharply divided city and region.

  PublisherDOI

• 9. The Battle over School Desegregation

  2015-01-01

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract By the late 1960s, activists in Flint had formally challenged the racial exclusions embedded within community education. However, civil rights groups articulated a critique of de facto segregation that proved to be exculpatory for the Charles Stewart Mott Foundation and the school board. Widespread belief in the myth of de facto segregation resulted in a delayed response to the board's long record of policy-driven segregation. Indeed, Flint activists waited until 1975 to file their first of two unsuccessful lawsuits against the Flint Board of Education. In the absence of judicial remedies, local activists pinned their hopes for school desegregation on open housing and federal enforcement of the 1964 Civil Right Act, which arrived in 1975. Shortly after the federal government ordered the desegregation of Flint's schools, the Mott Foundation withdrew its support for community education and shifted its financial resources toward the city's downtown renewal efforts. Nevertheless, the school board continued to champion the neighborhood schools policies that had kept pupils segregated. In the end, board members agreed only to a weak plan that relied upon magnet schools and other forms of voluntary desegregation. As was the case in other cities, Flint's voluntary desegregation program proved to be unsuccessful.

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Richard C. Sadler

  Michigan State University

  4 shared

• Ansley T. Erickson

  Columbia University

  3 shared

Education

• Ph.D., History

  University of Michigan

  2009

Awards & honors

• Winner, Best Dissertation Award, Urban History Association,…
• Winner, John Reps Prize, Best Doctoral Dissertation in Ameri…
• Finalist, Exemplary Dissertation Award, Spencer Foundation,…
• Winner, Walter Rodney Essay Contest, Center for Afroamerican…
• Inductee, Phi Kappa Phi National Honor Society, 1999