The Diversity of Rust Belt Cities: Challenging the Single Story of Urban Decline
Bio
Yeong-Hyun Kim, an Associate Professor of Geography in Ohio University. She is an urban economic geographer, and her research interest includes urban restructuring in the US Rust Belt, global city politics, diasporic communities, and labor migration in Asia.
Abstract
Much has been written about what large post-industrial cities in the Rust Belt region have lost and suffered since the mid-20th Century. While the narrative of hollowed-out industrial urban communities has continued to be reproduced in the Rust Belt shrinking cities literature, relatively little attention has been paid to what other and smaller cities in the region have undergone in recent years and even less to how they have contributed to the Rust Belt’s urban and economic restructuring. This research examines recent changes in the demographic and socioeconomic characteristics of Ohio’s 100 most populous cities and highlights the significant economic growth experienced by non-industrial cities and small exurban cities and the geographical shift of the state’s economic center toward Central Ohio that includes Columbus and its small suburban cities. Unlike the single story of Rust Belt cities experiencing widespread continuing population declines caused by deindustrialization, as many as 61 cities in the research have gained population over the past two decades. The different and diverging paths of economic development among cities in Ohio offer an insight into the complex and changing realities of the urban Rust Belt. There needs to be more research on individual Rust Belt cities’ adaptations to the ongoing restructuring in manufacturing, ex-urbanization, or other potential structural forces in the coming decades that would be varied and inconsistent from one place to another and from one time to another.
Keywords: Rust Belt, shrinking cities, diversity of Rust Belt cities, Central Ohio, suburban cities
Introduction
Rust Belt cities have often been portrayed with the images of abandoned manufacturing plants, urban decay with vacant lots and demolitions, water contamination, social disinvestment, and, in recent years, the left-behind white working class whose political views have become increasingly conservative. Although there is a great deal of truth to these stereotypes of “hollowed-out” industrial communities, they constitute a single story of the urban Rust Belt that is incomplete and full of gaps. As this simplistic, negative narrative of urban decline has been produced and reproduced in both academic and popular circles, so many details about “rusting,” “de-rusting,” or “non-rusting” communities across the upper Midwestern and Northeastern region, centered on the Great Lakes, are blurred and lost. I teach at a university that sits in the overlapping region of Appalachia and the Rust Belt, and the vast majority of its students come from urban and rural Rust Belt communities. Those in my Urban Geography class often engage in negative self-talk about the region, but at the same time, they will gladly share the stories of urban change in their hometown and other places they know firsthand, including rural tourist towns, rising high-tech hubs, and sprawling suburban cities, as well as large older industrial cities. As they are reminded in so many ways, their personal stories and observations illustrate the point that individual Rust Belt cities’ experiences of, and responses to, deindustrialization and other structural challenges have been a lot more diverse and complex than the single story of urban decline could ever convey.
There needs to be more academic attention given to changing and diverging urban fortunes in the Rust Belt region, where some cities have recently been reinvented with the growth of nonmanufacturing sectors like education, healthcare, and financial services, while some others have followed the nationwide transition to green and sustainable energy industries, and yet others continue their downtown revitalization effort (Neumann 2016; Tighe and Ryberg-Webster 2019; Winant 2021). It is not to argue that we should ignore all the negative talk about urban decline and adopt the boosterish vision of the former industrial heartland reviving as the nation’s brain belt, Silicon heartland, a hotspot of global innovation, or any other exaggerated, fleeting promises of economic turnaround (Fannin 2023; Van Agtmael and Bakker 2016). Rather, it is to recognize that, when confronted with shrinkage and decline, cities in the Rust Belt are not all in the same sinking and vanishing boat.
The term Rust Belt has been so long and so closely associated with “the headline-grabbing declines” of large cities like Cleveland and Detroit that it does not encompass the many new and important changes that small cities across this vast urban region undergo (Hollingsworth and Goebel 2017). More than two decades into the 21st century, the urban Rust Belt is ever more diverse, with a wide range of socioeconomic circumstances and challenges. A singular focus on its decline and, more recently, failed revitalization attempts does not reflect the far more nuanced, complex, and changing realities at the city, neighborhood, and community levels of the region. It is time to rethink Rust Belt urbanism and recenter its focus from what Rust Belt cities lack—compared to their old selves or booming cities in the Sunbelt and coastal regions—to what they actually are.
This article seeks to highlight the diversity and complexity of Rust Belt cities by examining the differing and diverging paths of urban change across Ohio, a state that served as a key area for the country’s heavy manufacturing and steelmaking industries. Boasting nearly 1.4 million manufacturing jobs in the mid-20th century, more than half of those have since been lost. Large industrial cities in Ohio, such as Akron, Cincinnati, Cleveland, Dayton, Toledo, and Youngstown, are lately called in urban studies “shrinking cities” and “legacy cities” for their rich industrial past and current struggles (Mallach 2012; Tighe and Ryberg-Webster 2019; Weaver et al. 2017). Yet, their declines and problems do not reflect what other cities across the state, including smaller or nonindustrial ones, have experienced in recent decades. Indeed, many small suburban cities across Ohio are flourishing and thriving with steady economic and population gains (Hartt 2019). Urban decline should not be the only story that is being told about Rust Belt Ohio. In order to get a fuller and more updated story of urban Ohio, which includes medium- and small-sized cities as well as large industrial cities, this article analyzes changes in the demographic and other socioeconomic characteristics of the state’s 100 most populous cities.
The following section briefly reviews what has been written and debated about the decline of Rust Belt cities and how the shrinking cities narrative has dominated portrayals of their transformation. After this, the third section attempts to look beyond a handful of large older industrial cities, the usual suspects in the study of the urban Rust Belt, by examining recent population changes in Ohio’s 100 largest cities. In the fourth section, the main features of Ohio’s fastest-growing cities and fastest-shrinking cities are assessed to explore both the differences and commonalities of urban transformation in today’s Rust Belt. The final section discusses a need to shift away from a simplistic negative perspective to tell better, fuller stories about Rust Belt cities.
The Single Story of the Rust Belt Decline
In her TED talk, “The Danger of a Single Story,” Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (2009) contends, “The single story creates stereotypes, and the problem with stereotypes is not that they are untrue, but that they are incomplete. They make one story become the only story.” Although this quote is referring to the world’s problematic view of Africa, it might as well apply to the academic and public discourse about Rust Belt cities. In the 1980s, the Rust Belt was portrayed in the national news media as looking like “bombed-out war zones” (Mouat 1984), “an eerie, almost post-nuclear wasteland” (Magnet 1988), and somewhere one would never want to go back again. These devastatingly negative and stigmatizing stereotypes, along with the many well-worn jokes, reflect the common view of the time that the forces of decline at work in former industrial cities must be self-reinforcing and virtually irreversible. According to a recent analysis of images and web content tagged to Detroit (Audirac 2018), despite its all-out development efforts including downtown revitalization, historic preservation, green infrastructure, and casino tourism, the city is still very much associated with image categories of destruction, decline, rundown, lost, dead, and decay. Simply put, Rust Belt cities are seen trapped in a so-called “urban doom loop.” The image of declining, long-suffering industrial cities remains so strong that it continues to trivialize any positive news reports about a Rust Belt revival, renaissance, or reinvention.
Table 1. Common signs and causes of urban decline identified in Rust Belt shrinking cities literature. Source: adapted from Berglund
Concerning what has triggered these symptoms of urban decline, many point to deindustrialization, caused by automation and globalization of manufacturing production, as the single factor most responsible for rusting and shrinking in the Rust Belt. The mass flight of middle-income households to the suburbs that has reflected, and further entrenched, racial and economic inequalities in large industrial cities is also identified as a direct cause of their decline (Hackworth 2019). In his research on the origins of the urban crisis in Detroit, Sugrue (2005) argues that, in addition to manufacturing decline, racial discrimination in labor markets, as well as in housing markets, has exacerbated poverty and worsened conditions in the city’s once vibrant core. Galster (2012) also stresses the extremes of suburban sprawl and racial and class segregation as sources of Detroit’s and its metropolitan area’s demise. As a matter of fact, according to the Brookings Institution’s Great Lakes Economic Initiative research (Austin 2017), seven of the nation’s ten major metro areas with the sharpest black-white racial divides are located in the Rust Belt region, and they include Milwaukee, Detroit, Cleveland, Buffalo, and Cincinnati—in addition, Dayton, Toledo, and Youngstown of Ohio are ranked within the top twenty most divided cities. Closely related to intense segregation by race and poverty, the political fragmentation of the metropolitan region and the weakening of social infrastructure have also been identified as both causes and symptoms of urban decline in the Rust Belt (Klinenberg 2018; Safford 2009).
Not surprisingly, extensive efforts to reverse urban decline have become another common attribute among Rust Belt cities. Berglund (2020) notes that a wealth of Rust Belt scholarship has focused on prescribing solutions to their economic and socio-spatial challenges, including implementing tax incentives and other business friendly measures to attract new businesses or retain and expand existing ones and to rehabilitate the downtown core. Running a national advertising campaign has also been seen as a good practice to let the outside world know how older industrial cities have transformed and what new economic opportunities they would offer, and many Rust Belt cities have done just that. For example, in the early 2010s, Detroit ran advertisements in business and tourism magazines, claiming that Detroit is America’s greatest comeback city. Cleveland had its own comeback city campaign followed by a series of rebranding efforts, including “Believe in Cleveland” and “This is Cleveland” (Souther 2017). A newly revitalized, vibrant downtown with restaurants, shops, cultural attractions, and green spaces was invariably featured in their advertisements. Indeed, almost every Rust Belt city has been and is currently undergoing multiple downtown revitalization projects in pursuit of making the city center more attractive to potential investors, young professionals, and tourists (Biles and Rose 2022; Carter 2016; Christensen 2020; Neumann 2016; Taft 2016; Wilson and Wouters 2003).
Much scholarly attention has also been devoted to examining why, despite those revitalization efforts, so many Rust Belt cities have failed to stop the decline. Whether it is a master plan to revitalize the downtown, a public-private partnership to attract businesses and stimulate investment and innovation, or a community-driven development initiative involving diverse stakeholders and anchor institutions, former industrial cities have made a variety of attempts to reverse decline and stimulate regrowth. More often than not, however, such measures to reinvent an old industrial city as a fun, safe, and green place have resulted in new injustices, or deepened existing ones, through mechanisms of gentrification and displacement, business-friendly economic programs, and austere urban planning (Schilling and Logan 2008; Silverman 2020). Cleveland’s revitalization efforts, for example, are often dismissed as a mere “techno-green fix” that has led to the rampant demolition of neighborhoods deemed blighted, vacant, and abandoned (Akers, Beal, and Rousseau 2020).
In recent years, terms like smart decline and rightsizing have gained traction in both political and academic accounts to signify a new planning trend in the urban Rust Belt where embracing, and even planning for, shrinkage, has become a good practice to follow (LaFrombois et al. 2023). For example, both Cleveland and Youngstown have lost more than 60 percent of their respective peak populations, and it is no longer realistic for the local planning authorities to pursue a return to what once was. Instead, they are advised to identify priority neighborhoods and streets for investment, while letting other areas decline, or die off, and turn those into green spaces and urban agriculture initiatives (Coppola 2019; Dewar and Thomas 2013; Rhodes 2019). The “shrinking to greatness” initiative could bring significant financial and environmental benefits to these cities, but it could also entail widespread demolition, which is another trademark of Rust Belt cities. There is much debate about whether smart shrinkage, smart greening, or other smart alternatives could actually solve any of the long-term issues of urban decline, and also about how rightsizing might be abused by local governments to legitimize their neoliberal and austere policy measures in the name of managing fiscal crises (Hackworth 2015; Sadler et al. 2021).
Without question, the Rust Belt shrinking cities literature has helped us better understand what has happened to the Rust Belt and why it happened, and, equally importantly, who has suffered or benefited most along the way, but the focus has been predominantly on the decline of large older industrial cities. As illustrated well in expressions like “a tale of two Rust Belts” (Austin 2017), however, some Rust Belt cities have done better than others in adapting to, and creating, economic change, refusing to be painted with a broad brush of urban decline. Building on the popular notion of making a transition from urban crisis to urban renaissance in the Rust Belt, considerable academic effort has been made to identify true comeback stories, success stories, successful adaptation and resilience strategies, and tales of good governance and effective pro-growth coalitions (Carter 2016; Cowell 2015). A variety of scoring and classification systems have been used to distinguish comeback cities from those still struggling (Hartt 2021; Hobor 2012). Although it is very debatable how a comeback should be measured and whether one city’s successful comeback can be benchmarked and repeated in other cities of the region, studies on diverging economic paths do shed light on the heterogeneity of urban decline experiences. While highlighting the existence of substantial diversity among Rust Belt cities, this newly emerging literature also acknowledges the prevalence of cities and communities in the region that have never really declined or shrunk. The next section examines cities in Ohio that are a microcosm of the Rust Belt—with declining older industrial cities, revitalizing and resilient cities, and small-sized prosperous cities all sitting next to one another.
Changes and Divergences in Rust Belt Ohio
The economic differences and divergences among cities in the Rust Belt can be clearly observed in their population change over time, particularly in recent decades when some cities have been able to stop population loss and reverse the decades-long downward trend. Although severe and sustained population decline has been considered an unmistakable common denominator among Rust Belt shrinking cities, several places in the region have not suffered such a fate; instead, their demographic trends have been mainly stable or increasing in the 21st century. In the case of Ohio, despite losing half of its manufacturing jobs since the early 1970s, the state’s total population has increased more than ten percent during the same period. This means that, for every declining manufacturing hub in the valleys of Cuyahoga, Mahoning, and Miami, there are other places that have gained jobs and population. This section discusses how cities in Ohio have taken various economic paths with various complexities and results.
Figure 1 shows population change in Ohio’s seven major cities—namely, Akron, Cincinnati, Cleveland, Columbus, Dayton, Toledo, and Youngstown—since 1900. Looking at the chart, a few things are immediately noticeable. First, Columbus, a city dubbed as “a stellar exception for the Rust Belt stereotype (Teaford 2024), has gained population throughout the years and is now among the fastest growing and booming cities in the nation. Considering that its population has increased more than 25 percent in the past two decades, Columbus is likely to reach the one million resident mark before the next census. Secondly, although Cincinnati’s current population of a little more than 300,000 residents represents an enormous decline when compared to its peak numbers in the mid-20th century, it has recently been able to reverse a six-decade losing trend and begun to grow again, albeit at a slow pace. Thirdly, the remaining five cities have continued to lose their populations. In addition to population loss, these cities have experienced most, if not all, of the symptoms of urban decline mentioned in the previous section (Floyd 2018; Millsap 2019; Ryberg-Webster 2023; Safford 2009; Warf and Holly 1997). According to the latest statistics from the American Community Survey, their median home values and median household incomes are about or below half the national average. Youngstown’s median home value, for example, stood at $54,900 in the 2018–2022 period while the national average was $281,900. It is not hard to imagine how much the local governments have suffered from a shrinking property tax base and resultant revenue losses.
Figure 1. Population change in seven major cities of Ohio, 1900–2020. Source: US Census Bureau.
Judging from these seven major cities’ population change over time, the notion of Rust Belt decline seems to reflect much of the reality of urban Ohio, with the notable exceptions of Columbus and Cincinnati. However, when the list is expanded from the top seven to the top 100 by including small- and medium-sized cities, we recognize a far more complex and nuanced reality than a regionwide population decline and economic collapse. Figure 2 shows Ohio’s 100 most populous places in 2020 and their population change in the 2000–2020 period. Unlike the familiar narrative of Rust Belt cities experiencing widespread continuing population declines associated with deindustrialization, only 39 of them appear in red, having shrunk and declined over the past twenty years. Yet as many as 61 cities have gained population, leading the state’s overall population growth. As a matter of fact, all of these growing cities of Ohio, save Columbus, are rather small—less than 65,000 residents. It appears that the economic center of the state has geographically shifted from large postindustrial cities to their smaller suburban counterparts, as well as from the Great Lakes area to central Ohio. The rapid growth of small cities in the suburbs and in the exurbs of large metro areas has certainly caused their respective central cities—and in recent years, also their inner-ring suburbs—to decline (Beaugard 2006; Hanlon 2010). But, along with this negative effect, these suburban cities might also be playing a substantial role in pulling the regional economy out of a prolonged decline. For example, problems of decline in Warren and Youngstown in eastern Ohio have not been limited to the urban core but spilled over and become regional issues, making the Mahoning Valley a shrinking legacy region (Van Leuven and Hill 2023). In contrast, despite the steep declines their central cities have suffered over the years, neither Greater Cincinnati nor Greater Cleveland has faced the same fate, thanks in part to their outer-suburban and exurban cities (Hartley 2013; Lee and Leigh 2007).
Figure 2. Ohio’s 100 largest cities in 2020 and their population change between 2000 and 2020. Source: US Census Bureau (2010 and 2023).
Figure 2 also shows that central Ohio is home to a cluster of dark green circles that represent cities experiencing high population growth rates, more than 50 percent since the turn of this century. Helped by Columbus’s strong economy and sprawling developments, both housing and commercial, such suburban satellite cities as Delaware, Dublin, Grove City, and Hilliard seem to have entered an “urban boom loop” with new residents and new investments. Columbus has never been a manufacturing center, so neither de-rusting nor comeback would apply to its long-term growth. In addition, with Intel’s new investment for microchip manufacturing plants in the city’s northeastern suburb of New Albany, Columbus is expected to grow even faster in the next decade, raising some concerns that the city, and central Ohio in general, might be luring investments and talents away from the ever-rusting parts of the state. Whether the rise of central Ohio will have negative implications for the state’s older industrial cities will always be debatable. Yet it should also be recognized that the economic resilience and dynamism of the booming cities in central Ohio may have saved Rust Belt Ohio from a widespread regional decline. To have a more complete understanding of the urban Rust Belt, we need to look beyond the handful of large older industrial cities and their failures and start examining the cities that are growing and how their success reshapes and restructures the region’s urban and economic landscape.
Ohio’s Fastest Growing and Shrinking Cities
As we have seen, some large cities of Ohio are losing population, while many others, particularly small cities with populations between 20,000 and 50,000, are gaining significant size, which surely challenges the single story of urban decline in the Rust Belt. Building on the findings of the previous section, this section takes a close look at Ohio’s cities with the greatest changes, both increases and decreases, in population from 2000 to 2020. By comparing the major socioeconomic features of the fast-growing cities to the shrinking ones, valuable insight can be gained about the similarities and differences among Rust Belt cities experiencing opposite development trajectories. Much is written about the symptoms and problems of the Rust Belt’s shrinking cities, yet little research exists on the region’s growing and booming cities and what characteristics they may have in common.
Table 2 lists seven of the fastest-growing and seven fastest-shrinking cities in Ohio—those in dark green or red circles in figure 2—and their socioeconomic characteristics based on the latest American Community Survey (2018–2022). As discussed in the previous section, apart from Columbus, all other fast-growing cities in the state are rather small. In contrast, the list of the fastest-shrinking cities that have lost more than 12 percent of their population over the past 20 years includes many of the state’s large industrial cities. Some of the differences between these two groups of cities are significant and obvious, while other differences are unclear and difficult to identify. Let me first review a few obvious differences between the fastest growing cities and their shrinking counterparts in Ohio and then discuss the not-so-obvious differences.
Table 2. Selected socioeconomic characteristics of the fastest growing and shrinking cities in Ohio. Source: US Census Bureau (2024).
The growing cities have much higher median incomes and housing prices than the shrinking ones where the socioeconomic status of the residents who stayed behind has been deeply negatively affected by population decline and resulting neighborhood blight. The stark contrast in poverty rates between the two city groups shows how the fast-shrinking cities have been impoverished over the years and, more practically, how much external help they would need to make a turnaround. Along with the concentration of poverty, a high share of African American residents is a common characteristic among the shrinking cities, while the growing cities post much lower numbers than the state’s average at 14.6 percent. Although some of the state’s well-known African American-majority cities, like Euclid, Forest Park, and Maple Heights, have not shrunk as much or have even gained population in the past two decades, the racial concentration of poverty, and affluence, in Ohio cities is unmistakable and growing (Brinegar and Leonard 2008).
Another notable difference between the cities that are gaining population and those losing it is that the former have much higher percentages of college-educated residents than the latter. Considering that educational attainment is strongly correlated with income in the current US labor market, the shrinking cities—with less than 25 percent of their residents over 25 years of age holding a bachelor’s degree—fare poorly at attracting new businesses in the high-tech and knowledge-intensive sectors. In contrast, cities like Avon, Dublin, and Mason boast more than 60 percent of their adult residents having graduated college, well above the national average of around 35 percent. Dublin, for example, is among the most educated cities in the nation and continues to attract skilled talent for its booming healthcare and tech industries. Along with an educated workforce, Dublin also touts other attributes a competitive and successful suburban city is said to have, such as new office parks and corporate campuses, green neighborhoods, and of course, excellent schools (City of Dublin 2024).
It is not unexpected at all to see that the fastest-growing cities have been able to attract skilled workers and new investments, while the fastest shrinking ones face a constant uphill battle when trying to rebound. Instead, it is interesting to learn about the commonalities between these two city groups. No cities, either growing or shrinking, listed in Table 2, except Dublin and Mason, which have large South Asian communities, have a sizable immigrant population, while multiculturalism is promoted as a key factor in the success of the so-called superstar cities in coastal areas (Florida 2005). In contrast, all the Ohio cities have a relatively strong presence of residents working in manufacturing. Cities like Avon, Mason, and Marysville have experienced rapid population growth, more than a 50 percent increase since 2000, but automotive and aerospace manufacturing industries still account for a major part of their local economies. In the case of Marysville in central Ohio, the city’s manufacturing base is closely linked to the Honda assembly plant and its component manufacturers. As an industrial city with not many high-paying jobs available for young professionals, Marysville may not be on any of the “America’s best places” lists. Nonetheless, the city continues to grow, both demographically and geographically, and remains popular among Rust Belt manufacturing workers. With new large investments in electric vehicle manufacturing and battery production, Marysville could become among the fastest-growing industrial cities in the whole Rust Belt.
It is important to note that some of the fastest-growing cities of Ohio, like Marysville, still have a strong manufacturing base. In addition, we learn that booming, growing cities in Rust Belt Ohio may not necessarily have the high median income or other socioeconomic characteristics that are closely associated with the high-growth, high-tech cities in the Sunbelt and coastal markets. In other words, the nature of urban success and competitiveness in the Rust Belt seems fairly different from, rather than less than, that in economically booming regions of the country. These characteristics and details make Rust Belt cities distinctive, and they certainly require more awareness and further research.
Conclusions: Learning from Rust Belt Cities
This article is an effort to rethink and refocus the way Rust Belt cities are examined in academic urban studies. Much has been written about what large postindustrial cities in the US Rust Belt region have lost and what they have suffered, both in comparison with their old selves and with the highly celebrated urban success stories of highly skilled workers, high-paying jobs, and cultural amenities observed in the Sunbelt and coastal regions. However, relatively little attention has been paid to what other and smaller cities in the region have undergone and even less to how they might contribute to the ongoing great restructuring of the Rust Belt economy and its urban networks. Urban studies, as well as Rust Belt studies, need to explore the more complex reality beyond the single story of urban decline, simply because urban fortunes in the Rust Belt are changing and shifting geographically. While the well-researched large industrial cities continue to shrink and their recovery success remains unknown, many small suburban cities across the region are growing fast. As shown in the diverse socioeconomic characteristics of Ohio’s fastest-growing cities, however, small booming cities in the Rust Belt do not seem to simply follow the urban economic development trajectory reflected in the experiences of cities in other parts of the country.
Rust Belt cities’ changing fortunes and prospects should not be reduced to another single story, whether it be a continued decline, revival, or growth. Judging from their responses to globalization, deindustrialization, and suburbanization of the 20th century, individual Rust Belt cities’ adaptations to technological innovation, ex-urbanization, or other potential structural forces in the coming decades will vary and be greatly uneven across the region. Accordingly, the outcomes of their adaptations would be varied and inconsistent from one place to another and from one time to another. At the same time, there will still be some common threads and issues that characterize Rust Belt cities. Conducting research on the diversity of Rust Belt cities is not to discover the islands of growing cities in a sea of shrinking industrial cities so much as to highlight and theorize the differences and commonalities among those growing, and shrinking, cities in the region. It is important to assess the details of their shared attributes, as well as their divergences and disparities, so that the places and people behind the single negative narrative of the urban Rust Belt can finally be brought forth and be better understood and taught in the field of urban studies, including my Urban Geography class. My students say one of the benefits they gain from conducting case studies on various cities, neighborhoods, and communities across the Rust Belt is the knowledge gained from the “actually existing” Rust Belt spaces and people on the ground, rather than from a simplistic narrative of the region’s shrinking and even vanishing cities.
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• The author would like to thank Madeline Gardner for her help in cartographic work and also appreciates the two anonymous reviewers for their valuable suggestions to improve the manuscript.