Shrinkage, bad or good
Posted: Wed Jan 03, 2007 12:20 pm
One thread I keep seeing through a number of different topics online here is the decline of Lakewood's population, and the fear that it also means the decline of Lakewood, period. And while this is a plausible fear (because declining population often does mean overall decline in so many ways as active, vibrant citizens move out, and the ones left are too often the poor, the elderly, or ones who do not take an active role in preserving the city's prosperity and way of life), should we not have a debate about some of the positive aspects of shrinkage? Maybe having a smaller city could be an improvement in a way ...
There's a movement afoot about city shrinkage, as noted in the article below that appeared a few months ago in Newsweek. But after you read it, and the article following it about what Youngstown is doing to address this, perhaps we can start a new discussion about any potential positive aspects of shrinkage, and what Lakewood can do (governmentally, or by the action of its citizens) to make it a better place ... can we manage this ourselves? Can Lakewood pioneer a new form of urban development ... not for growth, but for redevelopment and transformation? Or are the costs too high (human as well as financial) or the will to do this not there? I'm not arguing mass demolition, like this article says, but perhaps there are things that can be done in Lakewood ... can apartment buildings be eventually removed to reduce rental properties available while more programs enacted to encourage home ownership? Can new greenspace be carved out? What can be done to turn a negative into perhaps a positive?
So read, and discuss amongst yourselves ... online, of course!
"The Shrinking Cities
Urban Blight: What Used to be a Regional Problem is Sweeping the World
By Stefan Theil
Newsweek International
Sept. 27 issue - In 1960s America there was "white flight" to the suburbs. In the '70s and '80s the death of heavy industry emptied once proud cities like Manchester and Glasgow. Social and economic change has been wreaking havoc with cities for a long time, but each instance is usually thought of as an isolated eventâ€â€or at least a regional disease. That's no longer true. As birthrates in more and more countries plummet, shrinking-city syndrome is becoming a worldwide crisis.
Aging countries are getting hit the worst. In Russia a combination of rock-bottom birthrates, decreased life expectancy and the collapse of communist-era industry is taking a toll. Seven major Russian cities were shrinking in 1990; by 2000 the number had soared to 93. In Japan, hundreds of small and midsize cities are thinning out. Even in China, the low birthrate means that coastal megacities like Shanghai are growing at the expense of dozens of less successful, now shrinking metropolises like Dalian, Chengdu and Nanchong. Today, while hundreds of millions of Asians and Africans are just starting to move to cities, one quarter of the world's urban centers are declining in populationâ€â€twice the number a decade ago.
Wouldn't less-crowded cities be a good thing? Definitely not, according to "Shrinking Cities," a new exhibit in Berlin that compares city shrinkage across the world. In places like Detroit and Liverpool, shuttered stores and abandoned houses have led to increased violence. A 50 percent drop in the birthrate has killed entire sectors of the economy in east German cities like Leipzig and Magdeburg.
Decline begets decline, as the young and educated move away while the old and unemployed tend to stay behind. "It's next to impossible to fight," says Reiner Klingholz, director of the Berlin Institute for Population and Development. If shrinkage is inevitable, can it be managed? Today's planners and politicians have not even begun to face the facts, argues the curator of "Shrinking Cities," architect Philipp Oswalt. "Urban planning is all still in terms of new growth and construction," he says. Inner-city wastelands are usually left to themselves, a unique subculture growing in the morbid remains.
In Detroit, goats and sheep share abandoned neighborhoods with the alternative-music scene that gave the world techno. Refuse blows through parts of Liverpool like tumbleweeds. What may be the world's first urban "shrinkage policy" is now being tested in eastern Germany, where the government is spending €2.7 billion to tear down thousands of suburban communist-era apartment blocks and let grass grow back.
Whether mass demolitions will help stabilize places like Leipzig is not clear. But these are the kinds of policies municipal governments will have to consider. The era of big cities may not be over, but that of smaller cities is coming.
May 2006 • Metropolis Observed
The Incredible Shrinking City
Facing steep population decline, Youngstown, Ohio, is repositioning itself.
By Belinda Lanks
Posted April 17, 2006
When the mills shut down in the 1970s and ’80s, the smokestacks and foundries that symbolized steel belt manufacturing cities gave way to factory shells and rust. First unemployed, workers then began to move away for good. Unlike former steel powerhouses, such as Pittsburgh and Allentown, that have tried to attract new industry and grow their way back to prosperity, Youngstown, Ohio, is hitching its future to a strategy of creative shrinkage.
Last year Youngstown 2010â€â€a partnership between the city’s planning department and Youngstown State Universityâ€â€unveiled a comprehensive plan to reduce nonessential infrastructure, attract new businesses, and rehab deteriorated and abandoned spaces. In fact Youngstown is the first city in the United States to adopt this disarming approach to the problems of population decline. “It’s politically and professionally uncomfortable to face the shrinkage of a city or region, even though it may be staring you in the face,†says Frank Popper, an urban-planning professor at Rutgers and Princeton universities. “I think it’s enormously brave and creative and innovative of Youngstown to be taking on this task.â€Â
Brave? Maybe. But Youngstown has little choice: once a city of more than 170,000, it counts roughly 80,000 residents today. The town had to recast itself as a smaller place. “You had all of this excess infrastructure and a declining tax base,†says Oliver Jerschow of Urban Strategies, which developed the basis for Youngstown 2010’s plan. “But on the positive side, Youngstown had these legacies that a typical city of eighty thousand would never have.†Those legacies include assorted cultural venues, a 140-acre university campus, and the five-mile-long Mill Creek Park.
The city’s willingness to downsize attracted Kent State University’s Cleveland Urban Design Collaborative (CUDC), whose Shrinking Cities Institute partnered with Youngstown for last year’s annual charrette. The institute focused on Oak Hill, a neighborhood that, with a staggering 60 percent vacancy rate, ranks among Youngstown’s most blighted. “We wanted to take the vacancy and turn it into an asset rather than the liability it is now,†CUDC senior planner Terry Schwarz says.
Over the course of a weekend last October, four teams of design students, Kent State faculty, and CUDC staff worked on new visions for the neighborhood that would eliminate redundant infrastructure and capture key parcels to create large open green spaces. Shrinkage is a new problem requiring new solutions, according to Schwarz, so in mapping out their designs the students had to depart from the New Urbanist strategy of replacing empty lots with infill developments. “In Youngstown there’s zero demand for new residential development and very little demand for retail uses,†she says. “So the things we usually doâ€â€mixed-use housing with green space and suchâ€â€didn’t have any relevance here because it simply would never happen.â€Â
But if Youngstown’s residents don’t need housing, people from neighboring regions do. Ultimately the city may have to surrender to its location and become a bedroom community for Cleveland and Pittsburgh, each about 70 miles away. So in the end growing smaller may transform Youngstown into something else, says Charles Waldheim, a University of Toronto architecture professor who participated in the most recent Shrinking Cities conference. “To the extent that northeastern Ohio has a market for housing,†he says, “it seems that Youngstown’s future is making itself available for the garden living of the suburb.â€Â
There's a movement afoot about city shrinkage, as noted in the article below that appeared a few months ago in Newsweek. But after you read it, and the article following it about what Youngstown is doing to address this, perhaps we can start a new discussion about any potential positive aspects of shrinkage, and what Lakewood can do (governmentally, or by the action of its citizens) to make it a better place ... can we manage this ourselves? Can Lakewood pioneer a new form of urban development ... not for growth, but for redevelopment and transformation? Or are the costs too high (human as well as financial) or the will to do this not there? I'm not arguing mass demolition, like this article says, but perhaps there are things that can be done in Lakewood ... can apartment buildings be eventually removed to reduce rental properties available while more programs enacted to encourage home ownership? Can new greenspace be carved out? What can be done to turn a negative into perhaps a positive?
So read, and discuss amongst yourselves ... online, of course!
"The Shrinking Cities
Urban Blight: What Used to be a Regional Problem is Sweeping the World
By Stefan Theil
Newsweek International
Sept. 27 issue - In 1960s America there was "white flight" to the suburbs. In the '70s and '80s the death of heavy industry emptied once proud cities like Manchester and Glasgow. Social and economic change has been wreaking havoc with cities for a long time, but each instance is usually thought of as an isolated eventâ€â€or at least a regional disease. That's no longer true. As birthrates in more and more countries plummet, shrinking-city syndrome is becoming a worldwide crisis.
Aging countries are getting hit the worst. In Russia a combination of rock-bottom birthrates, decreased life expectancy and the collapse of communist-era industry is taking a toll. Seven major Russian cities were shrinking in 1990; by 2000 the number had soared to 93. In Japan, hundreds of small and midsize cities are thinning out. Even in China, the low birthrate means that coastal megacities like Shanghai are growing at the expense of dozens of less successful, now shrinking metropolises like Dalian, Chengdu and Nanchong. Today, while hundreds of millions of Asians and Africans are just starting to move to cities, one quarter of the world's urban centers are declining in populationâ€â€twice the number a decade ago.
Wouldn't less-crowded cities be a good thing? Definitely not, according to "Shrinking Cities," a new exhibit in Berlin that compares city shrinkage across the world. In places like Detroit and Liverpool, shuttered stores and abandoned houses have led to increased violence. A 50 percent drop in the birthrate has killed entire sectors of the economy in east German cities like Leipzig and Magdeburg.
Decline begets decline, as the young and educated move away while the old and unemployed tend to stay behind. "It's next to impossible to fight," says Reiner Klingholz, director of the Berlin Institute for Population and Development. If shrinkage is inevitable, can it be managed? Today's planners and politicians have not even begun to face the facts, argues the curator of "Shrinking Cities," architect Philipp Oswalt. "Urban planning is all still in terms of new growth and construction," he says. Inner-city wastelands are usually left to themselves, a unique subculture growing in the morbid remains.
In Detroit, goats and sheep share abandoned neighborhoods with the alternative-music scene that gave the world techno. Refuse blows through parts of Liverpool like tumbleweeds. What may be the world's first urban "shrinkage policy" is now being tested in eastern Germany, where the government is spending €2.7 billion to tear down thousands of suburban communist-era apartment blocks and let grass grow back.
Whether mass demolitions will help stabilize places like Leipzig is not clear. But these are the kinds of policies municipal governments will have to consider. The era of big cities may not be over, but that of smaller cities is coming.
May 2006 • Metropolis Observed
The Incredible Shrinking City
Facing steep population decline, Youngstown, Ohio, is repositioning itself.
By Belinda Lanks
Posted April 17, 2006
When the mills shut down in the 1970s and ’80s, the smokestacks and foundries that symbolized steel belt manufacturing cities gave way to factory shells and rust. First unemployed, workers then began to move away for good. Unlike former steel powerhouses, such as Pittsburgh and Allentown, that have tried to attract new industry and grow their way back to prosperity, Youngstown, Ohio, is hitching its future to a strategy of creative shrinkage.
Last year Youngstown 2010â€â€a partnership between the city’s planning department and Youngstown State Universityâ€â€unveiled a comprehensive plan to reduce nonessential infrastructure, attract new businesses, and rehab deteriorated and abandoned spaces. In fact Youngstown is the first city in the United States to adopt this disarming approach to the problems of population decline. “It’s politically and professionally uncomfortable to face the shrinkage of a city or region, even though it may be staring you in the face,†says Frank Popper, an urban-planning professor at Rutgers and Princeton universities. “I think it’s enormously brave and creative and innovative of Youngstown to be taking on this task.â€Â
Brave? Maybe. But Youngstown has little choice: once a city of more than 170,000, it counts roughly 80,000 residents today. The town had to recast itself as a smaller place. “You had all of this excess infrastructure and a declining tax base,†says Oliver Jerschow of Urban Strategies, which developed the basis for Youngstown 2010’s plan. “But on the positive side, Youngstown had these legacies that a typical city of eighty thousand would never have.†Those legacies include assorted cultural venues, a 140-acre university campus, and the five-mile-long Mill Creek Park.
The city’s willingness to downsize attracted Kent State University’s Cleveland Urban Design Collaborative (CUDC), whose Shrinking Cities Institute partnered with Youngstown for last year’s annual charrette. The institute focused on Oak Hill, a neighborhood that, with a staggering 60 percent vacancy rate, ranks among Youngstown’s most blighted. “We wanted to take the vacancy and turn it into an asset rather than the liability it is now,†CUDC senior planner Terry Schwarz says.
Over the course of a weekend last October, four teams of design students, Kent State faculty, and CUDC staff worked on new visions for the neighborhood that would eliminate redundant infrastructure and capture key parcels to create large open green spaces. Shrinkage is a new problem requiring new solutions, according to Schwarz, so in mapping out their designs the students had to depart from the New Urbanist strategy of replacing empty lots with infill developments. “In Youngstown there’s zero demand for new residential development and very little demand for retail uses,†she says. “So the things we usually doâ€â€mixed-use housing with green space and suchâ€â€didn’t have any relevance here because it simply would never happen.â€Â
But if Youngstown’s residents don’t need housing, people from neighboring regions do. Ultimately the city may have to surrender to its location and become a bedroom community for Cleveland and Pittsburgh, each about 70 miles away. So in the end growing smaller may transform Youngstown into something else, says Charles Waldheim, a University of Toronto architecture professor who participated in the most recent Shrinking Cities conference. “To the extent that northeastern Ohio has a market for housing,†he says, “it seems that Youngstown’s future is making itself available for the garden living of the suburb.â€Â