Abstract

"Beer-Oriented Development in the Post-Industrial City"

Ben Lisle, Colby College (bdlisle@colby.edu)

This paper will examine the relationship between the craft beer industry and city governments in the United States. It focuses particularly on the ways that breweries have figured into “Creative Class” style economic development over the last two decades, as a central feature of urban planning agendas—what one observer has called, “beer-oriented development.”

Craft breweries have increasingly become a strategy for growing a city’s tax base, reinvigorating “distressed” neighborhoods, attracting tourist dollars, and creating new jobs. Cities have cultivated brewery districts, both in industrial parks on the margins of cities and older deindustrialized areas closer to city centers. (This clustering spatial practice also reflects the cooperative ethos of craft brewing). Breweries and brewpubs have helped cities adaptively reuse older buildings and invigorate deindustrialized areas of center cities. The cooperative relationship between government and the industry is also articulated through public subsidies to attract large regional breweries to set up second production facilities; for example, Richmond (VA) provided Southern California’s Stone Brewing $33 million in incentives for the company to set up their East Coast production facility and “destination restaurant” there. Breweries and brewery districts have also played a key role—as place-making vehicles—in the inter-urban competition for tourist dollars. Some cities, like Wilmington (NC) and Louisville (KY) have set up beer-specific initiatives and working groups to facilitate the opening of new breweries.

This paper will consider the growth of “beer-oriented development,” the policy mechanisms for facilitating its growth (e.g. changes in zoning and legislation around distribution, production limits, and on-site tasting rooms), and the impacts of craft beer urbanism (which range from gentrification to brewers becoming actively involved in politics spheres—from lobbying to running for office themselves).