Showroom City: Real Estate and Resistance in the Furniture Capital of the World

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A unique and engaging account of local urban decision-making within the globalizing world

High Point, North Carolina, is known as the Furniture Capital of the World. Once a manufacturing stronghold, most of its furniture factories have closed over the past forty years, with production shipped off to low-wage countries. Yet as manufacturing left, the city tightened its hold on a biannual global exposition that serves as the worlds furniture fashion runway. At the High Point Market, visitors from more than one hundred nations traverse twelve million square feet of meticulous design. Downtown buildingsonce courthouses, movie theaters, post offices, and gas stationsare now chic showroom spaces, even as many sit empty between each exposition.

In Showroom City, John Joe Schlichtman applies an ethnographic lens to the global expositions relationship with High Point after it defeated rival Chicago in the 1960s and established itself as the worlds dominant furniture center. In recent decades, following trends in global finance, private equity firms were increasingly behind downtown High Points real estate transactions, coordinated by buyers far removed from the region. Then, in one massive transaction in 2011, a firm funded by Bain Capital purchased every major showroom building, and the majority of downtown real estate was under one owner.

Showroom City is a story of exclusionary growth and unchecked development, of a city flailing to fill the void left by its dwindling factories. But beyond that Schlichtman engages the general lessons behind both High Points deindustrialization and its stunning reinvention as a furniture fashion, merchandising, and design node. With great nuance, he delves deeply to reveal how power operates locally and how citizens may affirm, exploit, influence, and resist the takeover of their community.

Reviews

"Showroom City is an engaging and important analysis of how a small city like High Point, North Carolina, became an urban node of globalization with architectural gravitas and specialized flows of commerce, mediated by regional and racial complexities. Two competing global neoliberal logics of design shape High Point's transformation by generating new landscapes of power and conflict that bring nuance to our understanding of the spaces of flows/spaces of places framework."
Saskia Sassen, Columbia University

"Perhaps the most radical reconfiguration from High Point is the capacity to alter the meaning of time. . . . Here in High Point, there is showroom-time; it changes not only what goes on during Market weeks but also life tempo in preparing for those weeks, much of it backstage where materials are assembled and arrangements worked out. In the downtime the emptiness, as Schlichtman testifies, astonishes."
Harvey Molotch, New York University (from the Foreword)

"Showroom City is a fascinating study of the unique city of High Point and how the city came to be the Furniture Capital of the World. The author clearly spent considerable time and effort in understanding the city and its residentspast and presentfrom multiple viewpoints."
Kathleen Parrott, Family Consumer Sciences Research Journal

"Throughout the book, the descriptions of High Points showroom economy are rich, evidencing Schlichtmans 2 decades of ethnographic research."
Journal of Urban Affairs

"The claim to fame may be esoteric, but the story is, in a way, a timeless one."
Bloomberg CityLab

"Part local history, part personal journal, part urban planning analysis and critique, Showroom City for the most part is easy reading, filled with voices of High Point residents. It is a story with only a handful of identified good guysboth men and womenand many everyday people who see the downtown as in the grips of largely impersonal, international forces they dont understand."
High Point Enterprise

Author Bio

John Joe Schlichtman is associate professor of sociology at DePaul University. He is coauthor of Gentrifier.

Harvey Molotch is emeritus professor of social and cultural analysis and sociology at New York University