Shrinking cities

Lot's of discussion about this around the blogsphere.  I've avoided commenting up until now. That is until I saw USA Today's cover story yesterday while traveling from Detroit back to DC. The story is by Haya Al Nassar one of the best reporters covering urban issues around, and covers efforts in Richmond, St. Louis, Detroit, and Youngstown to focus services and improve quality of life while shrinking in population size.

"Slowly, old American cities that have been in a downward population spiral for a half-century or more are reinventing themselves as, well, smaller cities. They're starting to adopt ... tenets of the burgeoning, European-born "Shrinking Cities" movement. The idea: If cities can grow in a smart way, they can also shrink smartly ... It's a startling admission in a nation that has always equated growth with success. Cities are downsizing by returning abandoned neighborhoods to nature and pulling the plug on expensive services to unpopulated areas. Some have stopped pumping water, running sewer lines and repaving roads in depopulated neighborhoods. They're turning decimated areas into parks, wildlife refuges or bike trails. They're tearing down homes no one is living in and concentrating development where people want to move."

Let me try to put this whole thing in some perspective.  For one, most cities are shrinking. As urban experts have known for years the only thing holding population up in most cities is immigration.  But the real issue is that the focus on "population" as a measure of growth is misleading and misses the point.   My good friend, Carol Coletta, head of CEOs for Cities,  hits the nail on the head, being quoted in the article as saying: "Cities that measure success by population growth have an outdated view of what success is all about."

But there is a bigger issue here. Both our demography and urban and metropolitan structure are undergoing profound transformation.  Cities of a century ago were densely packed with large families, commercial centers and factory complexes.   Of course, since the '50s our population has decentralized. But in the past 20 years our household structure has changed dramatically as a consequence of the second demographic transformation and related trends we have discussed here. Households are smaller; people are postponing marriage; fewer families have children and more of us are single.  At the same time, rising affluence combined with assorted real estate development trends have enabled households to consume much, much more space not just in the suburbs but in the cities as well.

What irks me about the "shrinking cities" moniker is that it mixes up very different sorts of places.   The issues that face, say,  "shrinking DC" or "shrinking San Francisco", which are substituting smaller higher income households for large, lower income ones, are quite different than those that face, say, "shrinking Detroit," or  St. Louis or Youngstown, which continue to lose higher income households not just to surrounding suburbs but to other metros. 

It's not really "shrinking" that's the issue.  Much more fundamental economic and demographic forces are creating different types of cities.  Some shrink, as they gain new higher end economic functions.  Others shrink as their economies falter and they bleed talent.

The real issue is how to we begin to come to grips with these two very different urban futures.   As I wrote in "The Creative Compact" we need a new urban policy that explicitly recognizes these trends.