Showroom City

"John Joe Schlichtman’s Showroom City: Real Estate and Resistance in the Furniture Capital of the World is a fun book with a weird case...Can a place be gentrified if there are no gentrifiers present? Can a place be economically dynamic but socially ossified? Crummy fast food chains with cracked asphalt parking lots are not supposed to abut architecturally ambitious glass and steel office and exhibition buildings. And yet this is how life in High Point goes—its weirdness is on full display."
—Max Besbris, Contemporary Sociology

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

“A fresh understanding of how cities operate and, more importantly, how that can change."
—Harvey Molotch, New York University (from the Foreword)

"What the Market has done to downtown High Point is extraordinary….."
—Roger Goldman, Mountain Money

"The book was fascinating to read. The reviewer's copy is now full of underlining, exclamation points, circled phrases, and side notes.…The in-depth study of High Point, NC, makes the reader consider how communities are shaped, grow and evolve, and how a community chooses to relate to the outside world, both locally and at large."
—Kathleen Parrott, Family Consumer Sciences Research Journal

"Undoing the decades of racial, cultural and economic decisions that led to the current state of affairs in High Point will not be easy. But learning how it got to where it is now is the book’s value to anyone who makes their living buying, selling and creating furniture—or even sending it to the landfill."
—Warren Shoulberg, Business of Home Magazine
 
"High Point defies most urban assumptions, classifications, and labels. Throughout his book, John Joe Schlichtman intersperses insights from his many interviews…with insights from the scholarly literature."
—Katrin B. Anacker, Journal of Urban Affairs

"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 guys—both men and women—and many everyday people who see the downtown as in the grips of largely impersonal, international forces they don’t understand."
—High Point Enterprise
 
"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

"John Joe Schlichtman immersed himself in High Point, talking to market officials, vendors and other market stakeholders as well as High Pointers and city officials. His book, Showroom City, begins in the early 1960s and examines what High Point was, what it is and what it could be."
—Thomas Lester, Furniture Today