Rust Belt - Geography

Geography

Since the term described a set of economic and social conditions rather than denote a region of the United States per se, the Rust Belt has no precise boundaries. The extent to which a community within the northern United States may have been described as a Rust Belt city depends at least as much on how great a role industrial manufacturing has played in its local economy as it does on geography alone.

A patchwork of cities across the northern United States, because of their vibrant industrial economies, were referred to collectively as "the Foundry of the Nation". These are also referred to as the Manufacturing Belt or the Factory Belt. This includes most of the cities of the Midwest out to the Mississippi River, and many of those in the New England and Mid-Atlantic states, particularly those away from the Eastern Seaboard. After World War II, the cities in the area among the nation's 100 largest in the middle-20th century had population that had fallen most by the century's end. At the center lies an area stretching from northern Indiana and southern Michigan in the west to Upstate New York in the east, where local tax revenues still rely more heavily on manufacturing than on any other sector (by far the largest contiguous area of the U.S. where this is the case). At or near the periphery are nine of the nation's largest metropolitan areas—Buffalo, Pittsburgh, Cleveland, St Louis, Cincinnati, Detroit, Milwaukee, New York City, and Chicago— parts of which fall squarely within the Rust Belt while their core cities are not always considered as such.

In The Nine Nations of North America (1981), journalist and law professor Joel Garreau included both the industrial northern U.S. and southern Ontario in a region named "The Foundry".