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Welcome to The Midwestern Connection - Iowa - Quad Cities
The Quad Cities are a group of cities which flank the Mississippi River in Iowa and Illinois in the midwestern
United States. The four largest cities are: Bettendorf, Iowa - Davenport, Iowa - Moline, Illinois - Rock Island, Illinois
As a patchwork of similarly located but politically different urban units situated at the edge of the Rust Belt, the Quad Cities area serves as an interesting case study on the effects of various economic, social, political, and environmental variables on the trajectory of municipalities seeking economic recovery. Seen as a single urban mass, the Quad Cities perfectly exemplifies the multiple nuclei model of urban arrangement. The Quad Cities area is one of the few places in the country where telephone companies cooperate with regional phone calls. Iowa and Illinois have different area codes (563 and 309 respectively), yet one can call into either area code, from anywhere in the metro area, by dialing just a 7-digit number. This helps the bi-state area promote itself as a single community, "joined by a river."
In the early 1980s, a nationwide farm crisis had a direct impact on the Quad Cities. Several agricultural manufactuers - which employed tens of thousands of blue-collar workers - announced plans to close their factories in the Quad Cities, including International Harvester in Rock Island and Case IH in Bettendorf. Moline-based John Deere, which to this day remains the region's top employer, cut its production by nearly 50 percent. Later in the 1980s, Caterpillar Inc. closed its factories at Mount Joy and Bettendorf.
Economic leaders called the effects devastating. Population growth immediately stopped, and for a number of years, declined as blue-collar workers were forced to look for work in more prosperous regions of the country. Land values and per capita incomes fell sharply. It wasn't until the mid-1990s when the Quad Cities - particularly, the Iowa side - began to recover. In 2003, voters approved a referendum allowing DavenportOne to provide matching funds for a Vision Iowa grant. The grant would pay for Davenport's River Renaissance, a downtown revitalization project that includes a River Music History Center, an ag-tech venture capital campus and the Figge Art Museum. Moline has also experienced a rebirth, with a new John Deere Commons facility and The MARK of the Quad Cities opening during the 1990s. Rock Island is home to "The District," a well-known bar and nightlife scene.
Source: Wikipedia