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The incredible shrinking city
Abstract
Around three dozen US cities with populations of more than 100,000 in 1950 have lost at least 20% of their residents. Deborah and Frank Popper have argued that their Buffalo Commons concept, originally conceived as a means to revivify the depopulating Great Plains, can be adapted for use in these new urban prairies. When it was announced in 2002, Baltimore's anti-blight Project 5000 aimed to acquire 5,000 vacant and abandoned properties by aggressively pursuing tax sale foreclosures, quick-takes, and traditional acquisitions. The city asked local law firms, title companies, and related businesses to help clear titles, and by 2007 had acquired and cleared title of more than 6,000 properties. Michigan changed its tax foreclosure law in 1999 to give county governments greater authority in gaining control of abandoned property County or state tax foreclosures can be completed within two years and abandoned property can be transferred in only one.
... To mitigate these negative impacts, planning responses seek to "right-size" cities through "smart shrinkage" and management of physical infrastructure. Planners manage vacancies and abandonment of housing, land, and other infrastructure through some combination of sales or land banking; building rehabilitation, historic preservation, or demolition; and urban greening (Accordino & Johnson, 2000;Berkooz, 2010;Bonfiglio, 2009;Dewar, 2006;Gasser, 1979;Gillotti & Kildee, 2009;Hackworth, 2016;Hollander & Cahill, 2011;Hummel, 2015b;Krohe, 2011;Mallach, 2012b;Morckel, 2017;Morley, 2015;Ryberg-Webster & Kinahan, 2017;Schilling & Logan, 2008). Administrative changes may include the creation of property information and tracking systems, revisions to code enforcement tools, or the formation of land management authorities (Dick, 2007;Morley, 2015). ...
... Closures of deteriorated buildings are more likely in neighborhoods home to predominantly African American residents (Good, 2017;Weber, Farmer, & Donoghue, 2016. These disproportionate impacts mirror those of larger right-sizing plans in shrinking cities, where many neighborhoods targeted for planned shrinkage also have predominantly African American residents (Krohe, 2011). As Pedroni argues in the case of Detroit, "the closing of schools represented the opening salvo of the cleansing of racial histories" (2011, p. 211) of Black neighborhoods, which is necessary to "prepare the ground discursively and materially" (2011, p. 213) for new and different growth in the wake of shrinkage. ...
... What Pamela fails to recognize is that shrinkage and divestment through closures is not only due to actions at the school district or city but also is part of larger regional restructuring. In this racialized restructuring, suburbs and higher market areas generally benefit, and places with higher proportions of lower income residents and communities of color tend to be disproportionately burdened with restructuring's negative outcomes (Krohe, 2011). ...
This article situates school facilities management decisions—specifically school closures and building disposition—in the shrinking cities discourse as a first step toward better understanding and managing shrinkage as a multi-sectoral and multi-scalar phenomenon. I ask: how do school closure and disposition decisions respond to and perpetuate shrinkage? First, I present gaps and connections across prior empirical work on shrinkage and that of school closures. Second, I provide a case study analysis of Philadelphia’s school closures and disposition processes. I argue that school closure decisions are deeply tied to the discourse and dynamics of shrinkage in four ways: (1) as part of the feedback loop of catalysts and consequences that entrench shrinking cities, (2) by contributing to the material reality of aging physical infrastructure, (3) in the use of austerity logics and “right-sizing” approaches to managing a physical plant, and (4) by amplifying shrinkage’s disproportionate impacts on already marginalized communities of color. Examining formal closure processes and the lived experience of school closure in the context of shrinkage challenges planners to take seriously the multi-sector and multi-scalar nature of shrinkage, and raises questions about equitable access to public resources in shrinking cities.
... The goal is to maintain a high quality of life in shrinking cities so that current residents will not leave. It is assumed that if a right-sizing program is implemented in a timely fashion that municipal expenditures can be reduced, helping to improve the fiscal health of the city (Krohe Jr. 2011;Hollander 2011). It can also make the city more attractive to outsiders who might consider relocating there. ...
... Right-sizing aims to increase density through consolidation, decommissioning sections of vacant land or repurposing it, changing the administrative structure of the city and reengaging the population. It is assumed that by doing this the current population will remain, new residents will relocate there, tax burdens will decrease along with decreasing tax delinquency, costs will decrease, service quality will improve and civic involvement will increase (Rybczynski and Linneman 1999;Schilling and Logan 2008;Moss 2008;Wiechmann 2008;Billilteri 2010;Hollander 2010;Zakirova 2010;Hollander 2011, Krohe Jr. 2011Hollander and Németh 2011). ...
... This decline has not gone unnoticed by municipal administrators or elected officials and the city as of July 2011 announced its short-term plans for right-sizing the city called the Detroit Works Project. The project has both short-term and longterm plans in which it includes some level of consolidation through providing incentives to move by reducing services in distressed areas (Krohe Jr. 2011). ...
The right-sizing concept in planning practice is a relatively new concept in contrast to previous orientations of planned growth. Right-sizing recognizes that some shrinking cities will continue to shrink and it would be advantageous for these cities to plan for this shrinkage. One of the key indicators of success of a planned effort, such as rightsizing, is city fiscal health. This article includes a multiple case analysis of five cities which are shrinking and right-sizing. The purpose of the cases is to highlight the right-sizing conception of planning and any possible linkages right-sizing has with fiscal health.
... Construction of the proposed second and third terminals at Abbot Point have now been abandoned, while 'T1', owned by the Adani Group, is operating at less than 50% capacity [30]. Like the Wiggins Island Coal Terminal, the fourth stage of this project has been indefinitely delayed due to the collapse in coal export prices [143]. Until very recently, the Queensland Government also had plans to more than double the capacity of the Hay Point coal terminal to around 180 million tonnes, which included a massive greenfield project at Dudgeon Point, valued at $10–12 billion [30]. ...
... To put these projects in perspective, Australia exported 293 million tonnes of coal in 2010; expansion of Abbot Point alone would have enabled an increase in coal exports by 2020 of 25% more coal than was exported from all of Australia's coal terminals in 2010. As recently as late 2012, the Queensland Government was continuing to push ahead with its plans for more new coal terminals at Balaclava Island, Dudgeon Point, Raglan Creek, and Cape York [73], although the first and second projects have now been cancelled [49,30,143]. Much of the proposed expansion of coal production in Queensland centres on the development of the enormous coal resources in the Bowen, Galilee and Surat Basins. ...
... However, the background of social and economic transformation has changed the focus of scholars from focusing only on the agglomeration effect brought by population inflow into large cities to starting to explore the benefits of "downsizing" cities. From the perspective of urban development, urban shrinkage is only a stage in the process of urbanization, which does not necessarily bring about economic recession, but also may bring new development opportunities to the shrinking cities [2] . Leipzig and Liverpool are both classic cases from urban shrinkage to economic re-growth. ...
Public services provide convenient conditions for urban residents to study, work and live, and have important significance for improving the life quality of residents and improving the level of welfare. However, while China's spatial economic is heading towards agglomeration development, a large number of cities have shrunk, which has made unbalanced supply of public services between regions increasingly prominent. Based on the existing literature and the development reality, this paper analyzes the impact of urban shrinkage on the public service level from the public service supply mechanism, and discusses the heterogeneous effects of different labor shrinkage on public services. The results of the study show that urban shrinkage will inhibit the improvement of public service level, but inter-governmental competition makes the labor shrinkage of industry and service industry promote the improvement of public service level. In addition, this paper takes economic development level as a moderating variable to study the moderating effect of economic development level in the impact of urban shrinkage on public service levels. It is found that the reduction of economic development level will promote government competition and provide more public services.
... A park is conceived, designed and produced through labor, technology and institutions, but the meaning of the space, and the space itself, is adapted and transformed as it is perceived and lived by social actors and groups. 56 But this notion of space as lived is on its own not sufficient. Lefebvre's criticism of Heidegger is that he failed to understand the notion of production in sufficient detail. ...
... The concept of shrinking cities emerged in the popular lexicon and academic scholarship in the first decade of the 21st century (Rybczynski & Linneman, 1999;Popper & Popper, 2002;Hollander, Pallagst, Schwarz, & Popper, 2009;Krohe, 2011;Großmann, Beauregard, Dewar, & Haase, 2012). 2 There is no singular definition of shrinking cities (Olsen, 2013;Ganning & Tighe, 2015), although significant population and job loss in the latter half of the 20th century is a common thread (Rybczynski & Linneman, 1999;Hollander, 2010;Hollander, 2011;Hollander & Cahill, 2011;Hollander & Németh, 2011;Beauregard, 2012;Hill, Wolman, Kowalczyk, & St. Clair, 2012;Großmann et al., Cities 58 (2016) 10-25 E-mail address: s.ryberg@csuohio.edu. 1 For comparison, the City of Cleveland as a whole has lost 55% of its population since 1940. ACHP, 2014;Hummel, 2015;Ganning & Tighe, 2015). ...
Cleveland, Ohio's Slavic Village is a shrinking neighborhood within a shrinking city that, in recent years, garnered national attention as an epicenter of the foreclosure crisis. High vacancy rates, deferred maintenance, vandalism, and low market-values present challenges to neighborhood leaders and policymakers. While demolition has dominated policy discourses in shrinking cities, Slavic Village's built environment is the tangible manifestation of the community's rich working-class and immigrant heritage. Thus, this research asks: In an era of urban shrinkage, what role do heritage and historic preservation play in stabilizing or revitalizing shrinking neighborhoods? Drawing on a qualitative case study of Slavic Village, the findings show that neighborhood leaders value heritage, yet historic fabric is in peril as traditional preservation regulations and incentives are insufficient given the scale of devastation. For historic preservation to retain relevance in places like Slavic Village, the profession needs to consider new, creative, even radical approaches that respond to the challenges of urban shrinkage.
... Abandoned buildings are bulldozed and unnecessary roads are removed. Also people in sparsely populated areas are offered to move, so whole neighborhoods can be demolished (Christie 2008). ...
Current debates in urban development display a rising awareness that several cities in Europe and the US have to deal with challenges of long-term demographic and economic changes leading to urban shrinkage associated with housing vacancies, underused infrastructure and other negative impacts (Pallagst et al, 2013). In recent planning debates the term ‘shrinking city’ usually describes a densely populated urban area that has on the one hand faced a considerable population loss, and is, on the other hand, currently undergoing profound economic transformations, with some symptoms of a structural crisis (Pallagst, 2008). However, on an international scale it is still not clear if and how planning paradigms, planning systems, planning strategies and planning cultures are being adapted when faced with the dynamics of urban shrinkage (Pallagst et al, 2012).
This paper introduces evidence from an EU funded project, investigating German and US-American shrinking cities regarding both realms, planning cultures and shrinking cities. Based on an analytical frame, the US cases Youngstown/OH, and Flint/MI, and the German cases Kaiserslautern and Zwickau, all of them affected by vast structural changes, will be presented regarding their respective planning strategies and policy options for dealing with shrinkage. Particular focus lies on the question if and how the shrinking cities phenomenon has triggered changes in planning cultures over the years.
References
PALLAGST, K. (2008), Shrinking cities planning challenges from an international perspective’, Urban Infill, Themenheft -‘Cities Growing Smaller’,1, 6-16.
PALLAGST, K: ET AL (2012) Shrinking Cities and planning cultures – theoretical and methodological considerations for evidence-based research, presentation at the AESOP congress, Ankara, July 11, 2012.
PALLAGST, K. ET AL (2013), Shrinking cities: international perspectives and policy implications, London/ New York. Routledge.
... 1 This lack of political acknowledgement of decline is reminiscent of how many cities, including St. Louis, approached decline during the 1970s and1980s. 2 The literature to date proposes a range of solutions to be considered by cities and metropolitan areas facing decline-the most dominant being land banking and urban farming (Krohe, 2011). However, these approaches often take a triage-style planning approach, which often manifests as a holding pattern until vacant and abandoned property can be put to more "productive" uses. ...
In St. Louis, as in many other cities, decline and displacement occurred when key policies, prejudices, and plans interacted with broad economic restructuring to devastate poor and minority communities, while leaving White and middle-class communities largely intact. Amidst overall population loss and neighborhood decline are pockets of prosperity and gentrification within the central city. In this article, we analyze three significant planning interventions in St. Louis, Missouri, that spurred displacement of populations - urban renewal, triage, and the foreclosure crisis. We argue that the differential experiences of Black and White during each of these periods represent two faces of development: one in the north of the city that is largely Black, experiencing vacant land, high crime, and crumbling infrastructure; another in the south of the city that is largely White, enjoying pockets of vibrant commercial development, larger homes, and stable real estate markets. We analyze each period through a framework of uneven and unequal development and displacement, which we call the Divergent City Theory. Based on this theory, planners face an ethical obligation to plan for the future of their cities in a way that seeks to reconcile the structured race and class inequalities of the divergent city.
Shrinking cities have become almost ubiquitous during the long transition of post-industrial America. While many fear population losses to be a harbinger of economic decline, others have argued that the economic and demographic transition of a shrinking city need not be a death knell for those urban communities. In this study, we conduct an analysis of more than 10,000 U.S. census tracts experiencing population loss in order to better understand the variegated nature of population decline in the United States. Using high-dimensional cluster analysis, we classify tracts into seven distinct groups, and then assess group differences based on population characteristics and built environment indicators. Our findings show inter- and intraregional characteristics that are far from uniform. Our results imply that public policy responses cannot be developed as a one-size-fits-all strategy, nor should the outlook of urban shrinkage be understood as a nationally uniform crisis. Future work can build upon our typological definitions to offer additional insights valuable to local decision makers and leaders regarding the complex relationship between demographic change and associated socio-economic outcomes.
Political theorists have recently become interested in the role of nonhumans in politics, as evinced in the recent literature on “new materialism”. This literature raises questions such as: how do nonhumans participate in politics as more than mere objects, and what implications might this suggest for normative concepts like justice? I explore this question by theorizing and analyzing the concept of spatial justice. The central claim of spatial justice is that the organization of space – a set of material and ideological relations that act on, yet are formed by, social relations – influences the fair ordering of human relations. As such, it provides one window onto the question of nonhumans and politics. I argue that spatial justice is best understood as an analytic lens that illuminates the ways in which “space” - a term denoting the location of things relative to each other – participates in the formation of justice claims. Spatial justice is a concept already deployed in geography and urban planning, yet it is most frequently understood as a normative evaluation: that any particular space is just or unjust. I argue that such an understanding of spatial justice simply adds a not-particularly helpful adjective to some well-worn justice claims – in other words, calling an injustice spatial merely states that it happens “in space.” I argue that when spatial justice is better instead understood as an analytic framework, it illuminates the representative effects of the urban planning process: spatial representations frame justice debates by making certain constituencies – both human and nonhuman – present in the political process. To make this argument, I engage authors in critical geography, political theory, and science and technology studies. I argue that critical environmental scholars and political theorists have much to gain by incorporating spatial justice into their analyses. I examine the controversy around the policy document Detroit Future City (DFC), which literally maps a future for Detroit in which the city’s widespread vacancy is transformed into sustainable uses. Against both critics and boosters of the plan, I argue that DFC’s most important effect is to represent the city in its numerous maps, surveys, and data tables, all of which have already become the subject of debate in the city. DFC visualizes a Detroit where low density neighborhoods are part of a more just city, a marked departure from dominant approaches to urban planning that posit population increase as the solution to Detroit’s planning problems. I argue that although DFC is unlikely to directly guide Detroit’s master plan, development, and investment strategy, it has already influenced policy and activist debates with data and maps that inscribe vacancy into the city. I analyze DFC and its surrounding controversy to argue that only by understanding spatial justice as an analytic lens can DFC be appreciated in this productive light. My theory of spatial justice informs new materialism by emphasizing the capacity for nonhumans to participate in politics. I differentiate this participatory approach from a tendency among new materialists to emphasize the innate capacities of nonhumans to transform human behavior. Against this latter analysis, in which nonhumans are said to disrupt humans’ ethical and political commitments, I argue that nonhumans like spatial relations transform the political alliances that represent them. Thus spatial justice provides a language for analyzing nonhumans' emergent political power.
This article outlines the political economy critiques of the shrinking cities literature by answering the following: (1) how does the “shrinking cities” canon define a categorically distinct set of geographies with unique challenges and what solutions are proposed? and (2) how has the urban political economy literature engaged with and critiqued these ways of framing problems and solutions? This analysis finds that the “the shrinking city” is loosely defined and that debates exist around their exceptionalism. Urban political economy scholarship debates whether the solutions provided through shrinking cities literature are innovative alternatives to growth-oriented development or manifestations of austerity urbanism.
This paper shows that two related aspects of attention platforms are important for the sound economic analysis of public policy including antitrust: first, attention platforms generate valuable content. Even though people often don’t pay for content, we know from revealed preference that content is valuable because people spend a considerable amount of time—which has an opportunity cost—consuming it. Second, demand for advertising and the supply of content are interdependent. A decrease in the demand for advertising reduces the returns to supplying content and therefore the amount of content that is provided. Accounting for the value of content and these positive feedbacks cannot determine optimal interventions; but failing to do so can result in policies that reduce consumer—as well as advertiser—welfare. The paper then considers the implications of these considerations for public policy: particularly privacy regulation and antitrust enforcement. From the standpoint of promoting consumer welfare, the failure to account for the value of content and the ad-content interdependencies increases the chances that authorities do not intervene when they should and do intervene when they should not.
This article explores the right-sizing paradigm. Currently, in the growing literature on the right-sizing conception of planning there are not any clearly delineated strategies on what it means to right-size. Right-sizing strategies are clearly articulated in this article in an effort to understand this paradigm in a more comprehensive fashion. This is not being done among scholars in this field and is necessary to determine empirically if these strategies improve the quality of life in shrinking cities. The purpose of this article is to provide a source for researchers attempting to assess the various right-sizing efforts across the United States. The strategies in this article are not final; additional strategies could be included later under the right-sizing planning conception. At this stage in the literature, five major built environment strategies are the most cited: land banking, rehabilitation, demolition, consolidation, and “greening".
States and municipalities across the country are struggling to match revenues with expenditures. Sometimes these governments use traffic fines and fees to help balance the budget more so at the city level than at the state level. This article explores the rationale for the issuance of traffic tickets and provides a state-level analysis on the occurrence of tickets and its relation with budget or public safety factors. Utilizing a cross-sectional multiple regression with lags, it was found that public safety concerns as evident in fatal crashes data has a significant and larger negative effect on the issuance of traffic tickets than budget concerns as measured by state credit ratings, unemployment rates, and housing prices.
Drawing on empirical cases from Indonesia, this article offers a critical approach to the promise of social media activism by analysing the complexity and dynamics of the relationship between social media and its users. Rather than viewing social media activism as the harbinger of social change or dismissing it as mere “slacktivism,” the article provides a more nuanced argument by identifying the conditions under which participation in social media might lead to successful political activism. In social media, networks are vast, content is overly abundant, attention spans are short, and conversations are parsed into diminutive sentences. For social media activism to be translated into populist political activism, it needs to embrace the principles of the contemporary culture of consumption: light package, headline appetite and trailer vision. Social media activism is more likely to successfully mobilise mass support when its narratives are simple, associated with low risk actions and congruent with dominant meta-narratives, such as nationalism and religiosity. Success is less likely when the narrative is contested by dominant competing narratives generated in mainstream media.
Four editing variables were tracked through a content analysis of U.S. commercial network editing that spanned a 36-year period. The analysis revealed that synthetic-montage increased and continuity-realism decreased from 1969 through 1997. Network news editors also embraced faster pacing, shorter soundbites, and more special effects between 1969 and 2005. When taken together, the results suggest that U.S. network television journalism has evolved from more “camera of record” and realistic news techniques in favor of a variety of synthetic editing strategies that convey complex audio-visual arguments.
The purpose of this study was to examine changes in women's directed attention, the ability to focus or concentrate, during the last trimester of pregnancy and during 1st week postpartum.
Pregnant women were tested at enrollment (during the 3rd trimester), at 37 weeks gestation, and during the 1st postpartum week for this descriptive, repeated measures study.
Women were recruited from childbirth education classes in southwestern Michigan.
Fifty-seven women in their 3rd trimester of pregnancy.
Directed attention was measured objectively by the Digits Span Forward and Backward, Trailmaking A and B, and Category Matching tests. Subjective measures were the Attentional Function Index and Mental Effort in Tasks tests.
Participant means on the objective measures were within the normal range at all three time points. Some individuals, however, showed limitations in the capacity to direct their attention. Ability to use directed attention was lowest at enrollment and improved during the study, with statistically significant changes from Times 1 to 2 on several measures. Subjectively, the participants felt that they had moderately low competence on tasks that required directed attention throughout the study.
Women had the greatest difficulty focusing during the 3rd trimester. Some individuals had problems with tasks requiring directed attention at all three time points. Many participants perceived that their ability to pay attention was lower than normal. Some women may benefit from nursing interventions to reduce attentional demands during the 3rd trimester and early postpartum period.
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