The incredible shrinking city!
"Decline in Flint is like gravity, a fact of life," said Dan Kildee, the Genesee County treasurer and chief spokesman for the movement to shrink Flint. "We need to control it instead of letting it control us...."
Mr. Kildee was born in Flint in 1958. The house he lived in as a child has just been foreclosed on by the county, so he stopped to look. It is a little blue house with white trim, sad and derelict. So are two houses across the street.
"If it's going to look abandoned, let it be clean and green," he said. "Create the new Flint forest — something people will choose to live near, rather than something that symbolizes failure."
The thinking on this front is spreading. There's even an Shrinking Cities Institute that looks at the making of hay out of decline and as an alternative to the endless-growth mentality that has seized the imagination of most urban planners:
This alternative model could include the demolition or dismantling of under-utilized housing and other building stock, the removal of redundant streets, and downsizing of municipal infrastructure to correspond to declining population. Once unneeded components of the built environment are removed, opportunities may arise for restoring native landscape ecologies and reconstituting a new kind of city, where pockets of development are surrounded and connected by natural areas. Planned shrinkage can identify opportunities to establish lively and attractive development clusters that take advantage of the best the region has to offer, while improving air and water quality, enhancing wildlife habitat, and establishing exciting new recreation opportunities.
What could be more metronatural?
Such strategies are hardly uncontroversial. Look at the race and class issues that have come up during the efforts to rebuild and repopulate New Orleans. Some have argued that it should have been treated as a shrinking city and downsized as an example of "smart decline," a new urbanist spin on "smart growth."
However, the shrinking city phenomenon ought to have our attention. Could efforts to slow or reverse growth have environmental and livability benefits? Must we wait for the depths of a bust before thinking about re-scaling Pugetopolis? Would it make better policy to resettle shrinking cities rather than cramming more people into newer ones or sprawling metro regions like ours? And what are the planning positives that could come out of an economic slowdown when we have a chance to pause, reflect, and catch our breath before the next growth spurt hits?
Surely cities like Flint and Youngstown (not to mention memories of the Boeing bust in the '70s) teach us too that there is gravity to growth, and that it can't be kept up forever by the hot air of boosters and speculators. We might not need it today, but some day we might want a strategy that instructs us how to do more with less instead of relying on ginning up another boom to keep us going.
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Comments:
Posted Mon, Apr 27, 8:28 a.m. inappropriate
At first skim, your article is flawed.
The biggest: Those "shrinking" US cities generally have not been shrinking, but sprawling. Inner areas have hollowed while the overall metro populations have in most cases grown.
Posted Mon, Apr 27, 9:15 a.m. inappropriate
"Karina Pallagst, program director at the Center for Global Metropolitan Studies at the University of California Berkeley, defines a shrinking city as "a densely populated urban area with a minimum population of 10,000 residents"
...so according to this standard, a city such as Anacortes qualifies as a densely populated urban center??
Posted Mon, Apr 27, 9:22 a.m. inappropriate
Correction: "Urban area." Regardless, their critieria for what constitutes a dense urban area seems a little broad. By this criteria once could observe a population decrease in a suburban/rural fringe area like Covington or Maple Valley and come to the conclusion that cities as a whole are shrinking or on the decline.
Posted Mon, Apr 27, 10:46 a.m. inappropriate
On the positive side, it's a great idea for a metro to grow by backfilling (and simply remaining in) its central areas. And, once decline has happened, it's a great idea to turn the farthest-gone neighborhoods into parks, farms, or wildlands, turning blight into assets while theoretically saving public dollars at least in the long run.
Posted Mon, Apr 27, 6:56 p.m. inappropriate
Here is something I'd copied 5/23/08 from a comment blog on a James Kunstler article in the Washington Post, saved, rediscovered and reread just yesterday. At the time it must have seemed extreme but with an ominous ring of truth worth filing away?
"I also believe that we very well could descend into several decades of "dark ages" since those in power not only have very little comprehension of our energy situation, but have been pursuing policies in other areas that if one felt they actually had a clue, one would conclude they are trying to destroy our society and economy as fast as it possibly can be destroyed. (e.g. pyramid-scheme economics: prop up the economy by digging an ever deeper hole of debt in order to perpetuate overconsumption, and "comprehensive" immigration reform: Flooding the country with the most massive program of population growth in the history of mankind, just as we are entering historically unprecedented economic depression and energy crisis."
Posted Tue, Apr 28, 12:14 p.m. inappropriate
Admit it Knute, this is just another example of putting a warm and fuzzy spin on a plan that really is all about getting rid of all those awful people who don't look, think or act a certain way, or don't belong to the same economic class. Most people can figure out that the world's major cities are becoming less affordable... just look at real estate listings!
Posted Thu, Apr 30, 10:54 a.m. inappropriate
When a person cannot afford their rent, food or other basic living expenses, I sincerely doubt if they care that a new "green" space or forest has been created in their neighborhood.