Temp Town: The world's most prosperous empty downtown (North Carolina)

Facing the deterioration of their furniture manufacturing industry, the leaders of High Point, North Carolina, USA have secured and maintained their downtown's service industry niche, the International Home Furnishings Market or the 'Market', in the face of global competition from larger, wealthier peers. They have done so by completely refashioning the downtown of this deindustrialized city to suit the interests of its very specific niche.; This city of 90,000, in competing with other cities around the nation and the world, has developed a downtown consisting almost entirely of furniture showrooms, making it the central node in the global furniture industry. The downtown's 30 blocks are fully operational only two nine day periods each year during Markets, which each bring as many as 90,000 professional furniture buyers, designers, manufacturers, and media from 150 countries to the area. This strategy has yielded an urban form that I term 'Temp Town.'; Outside of the Market periods the downtown is closed and stands, to most observers, a ghost town. However, the downtown is actually in complete flux during these times, being rearranged to accentuate the debuts of the next Market. Immediately following the biannual nine day Market, designers and tradespeople begin to prepare the downtown showrooms for the next Market. And to augment this total temporal alignment, city leaders spend the interim period fine tuning the downtown to meet the aesthetic and logistical demands of its furniture niche.; This dissertation explores the mechanisms by which High Point's leaders have executed this transformation. It examines the people, organizations, and politics that were responsible for the city's showroom space increasing from 600,000 square feet in 1963 to about 12 million square feet in 2003. In so doing, it utilizes the tools of the growth machine and urban agglomeration literatures to understand the methods that Temp Town leaders utilized to pursue niche growth in the context of global competition. Grounded in an understanding of the city as a node in global flows of capital accumulation, this dissertation examines how the actions of local leaders both determine and are determined by this context.