During the second half of the twentieth century, as urban centers in America struggled to address population loss, aging infrastructure, blighted housing, and declining revenues, leaders in many cities turned to the construction of convention centers as a potential solution. In Convention Center Follies, Heywood T. Sanders seeks to understand why cities across the country opted to develop and expand convention centers and continue to do so, even though by all accounts they have failed to create the economic benefits promised by analysts, and in many cases have served to exacerbate the very problems they were supposed to help solve. This meticulously researched and exhaustively detailed book makes an important contribution to the scholarship on urban politics, policy, and governance by drawing attention to the key role that local business interests can play in driving the creation and implementation of public policies that can have substantial effects on American cities.

Sanders argues that local businesses within cities have been able to promote convention centers as vehicles for economic growth and urban revitalization by working together to develop specific plans that benefit myriad private interests but that can also be sold to both politicians and the public as economic boons, boosts to civic pride, and a means to increase the profile of the city. In this way, Sanders attempts to reconcile a debate among scholars about whether large-scale projects like convention centers are promoted by elected leaders, who see them as a way to benefit the commonweal by promoting growth in the city, or by local property owners and business leaders, who see convention centers as a way to advance self-interested goals like increasing property values or promoting retail spending and consumption. For the author, the answer is that the impetus does come from the private sector but is packaged in such a way as to allow public leaders to derive political benefits from adopting and supporting the initiative. Importantly, this has been possible because of new financing mechanisms that do not require voters to approve bonds to fund these projects. Instead, officials have come to rely on new tax revenue, such as hotel or restaurant taxes, new public authorities that can receive support from the state, or direct funding from the state as a way to finance convention center development.

Among the more interesting contributions of the book is the way in which the author contributes to our understanding of regime politics in cities. The common understanding of urban regime theory suggests a high degree of unity among business leaders influencing policy development, but Sanders suggests that in most cases there is very little unity among business leaders, at least initially. Rather, business leaders are often split into factions with very distinct, and often divergent, goals and ambitions. However, the author finds that they have been able to coalesce around revitalization and investment plans that involve multiple projects like convention centers, which have the potential to support future economic development, because this helps to ensure that each faction derives some satisfaction. There is the appearance of unity because by the time public officials are presented with a plan, business leaders have already come together to create an omnibus approach to urban development that serves many distinct private interests simultaneously. This process obscures the divisions with the business community; the public language emphasizing unity employed by the business community is quite different from the more narrowly focused concerns they express to one another behind closed doors.

Sanders finds that local business leaders were often the catalyst for the development of convention center projects. These leaders were able to convince public officials, and later the public, to get behind these projects by employing consultants and analysts to create reports designed to trumpet convention centers as a vehicle for urban revitalization and economic growth. A convention center could serve as an “anchor” to a revitalized urban center, addressing concerns that public officials had in the post-World War II era about deindustrialization, dilapidated and blighted areas, and suburban migration. The argument of these consultant reports were that a convention center could promote a short-term economic boost due to construction and development, followed by sustainable economic growth thanks to events held at the center. In city after city, consultant reports presented convention centers as a kind of magic bullet that could simultaneously address the concerns of public officials and also be seen as desirable by local citizens, with fantasies about economic growth tying everything together.

The logic of this argument rests on three pillars—that the size of events and conventions would continue to grow, that increased space would draw more attendees, and that the number of conventions and trade shows would continue to increase—all of which Sanders systematically tears down. By examining the “demand realities” and the analyst reports that cities used to make decisions about large-scale public investment in convention centers, he reveals that these reports consistently relied on bad models and questionable assumptions. Instead, somewhat depressingly but probably unsurprisingly, these “expert” analyses were commissioned and constructed with the explicit goal of convincing the public that an expansive convention center was a good idea. The purpose of these documents, Sanders argues, is less about the proper cost—benefit analysis of a large-scale project like a convention center and more about generating a public relations document that can articulate both the logic of growth and the logic of revitalization, using projections that forecast increased tourism, revenue, and general economic growth.

Sanders also explains why these projects continue to move forward in cities despite a preponderance of examples of projects that failed to live up to the promises made by consultants. The answer he finds is a cyclical (and cynical) logic that serves to perpetuate both the ideas of growth and of revitalization and ultimately continues to serve the business interests, namely, that failure to achieve forecasted economic benefits is evidence that the city needs to invest more money into the convention center to be more competitive in the convention and trade-show market. Failure to achieve success is simply proof that more investment is needed, and because the initial sunk costs are so great, public officials are loath to cut their losses and instead continue to hope that the next round of expansion will lead to a bright future.

What Sanders has given us with Convention Center Follies is a thorough account of how cities have used convention centers as a key tool in urban revitalization efforts, and he has done so in a way that has complicated and expanded our understanding of the role that local business interests play in urban politics and governance, as well as the narratives of urban growth and revitalization. In addition, he draws our attention to the role of public relations—the “selling” of these projects to both public officials and the public at large—in the development of convention centers. This book is a valuable contribution to our understanding of urban growth, revitalization, and governance in the postwar era, and points toward further work that might be done to explore how other large-scale public projects to reshape cities, like sports stadia, for instance, are undertaken. In addition, the author’s careful analysis of public investment in convention centers as a tool for economic growth and revitalization, and one that is not reliant on support from the public at the ballot box, makes this book an important read for understanding the future of urban growth and revitalization in America.