Shrinking Cities

This story keeps running so I finally have to comment.  It's the story that the Obama Administration is considering backing a plan to shrink deteriorating American cities by bulldozing entire neighborhoods and returning the land to nature. The idea, which originated in Flint, Mich. -- cratered by the auto industry implosion -- is to persuade disintegrating and depopulated cities to embrace their shrinkage, destroy abandoned infrastructure, save money and thereby stave off fiscal ruin, as columnist Gregory Rodriquez put it.

While he's right to be discomfited by the thought of massive clearance (Roberta Gratz condemned the idea in much stronger terms on Citiwire.), I think dismissing the idea out of hand is a mistake.

Dismissal ignores one big issue:  If the metro area has stalled out and its population is shrinking, then you ought to make the footprint smaller in order to make it more vibrant.  Otherwise you have too many people rambling around on too much land with too many houses to fill.

What happened in an earlier era with urban renewal was that population in the metro area was either growing or shifting around -- just not in the central city.

The key is not to enable a stagnant or shrinking population to shift around onto new greenfields while abandoning the older city.  That is expensive and devastating because it undermines the very urbanism needed to make innovation and other good things happen.

  

Randy Simes, June 21, 2009

This is an interesting discussion item. I understand and appreciate the perspective, but I don't like the idea of demolition. The preservation of structurally valuable and strategically located neighborhoods should be a priority over quick demolition of city neighborhoods.

Link: http://www.UrbanCincy.com/

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