Planning for contraction

The problem of center city decline is not new, especially if you are from the midwest of the United States, where deindustrialization and globalization has led to the decimation of so many communities. I have been interested in this for awhile, every since I first learned about the Youngstown 2010 project in 2001.

The Boston Globe has a nice piece in tomorrow's paper on the topic, "How to shrink a city:Not every great metropolis is going to make a comeback. Planners consider some radical ways to embrace decline."

My only problem with this discussion is that policymakers in the U.S. tend not to be very nuanced in their application of "big ideas."

Places like Detroit, which has lost 1/2 its population and the main industries are in decline, and is in the midwest, or communities like Flint, Michigan, have many fewer opportunities than cities on the east coast of the U.S. such as Philadelphia, Newark, or Baltimore. After all, is was not that long ago that Brooklyn and other parts of New York City were considered to be seriously declining.

Planning for contraction (a term my friend Drew Ronneberg, a resident and advocate--he is now an ANC commissioner in 6A) needs to be a robust process, based on the right frameworks and typologies of communities and both their reasons for decline and the opportunities that are present or can be realized.

-- Shrinking Cities project (Europe)
-- Dan Kildee's Center for Community Progress
-- Bringing Buildings Back by Mallach
-- National Vacant Properties Campaign
-- Reclaiming Vacant Properties Conference, Cleveland, 10/13-15/2010