Design After Decline: How America Rebuilds Shrinking Cities

Preface

Preface In the summer of 1993, on break from architecture school, I paid a visit to friends in the city of Detroit. I knew of Detroit’s fearsome reputation, and the city’s vacant lots, burned-out homes, and bleak, empty skyscrapers con- firmed Detroit as the paradigm of urban blight. The sense of emptiness was overpowering; I was shocked to see that even the city’s train station, designed by Warren and Wetmore at the same time as their Grand Central Terminal, had been left open to the winds of fate. Entering the station’s burned-out, rubble-strewn great hall early one morning, I felt as if I was walking into the ruin of America. To me, Detroit was a half-dead declaration that the decades-long attempt to rebuild what were then known as ‘‘declining’’ American cities had utterly failed. What place was there for optimism in such a landscape? As I researched cities further, I discovered that optimism did exist in Detroit and other Rust Belt cities such as Philadelphia and Cleveland: new housing was being constructed in small quantities, some commercial areas were thriving, and downtowns still attracted visitors for sports, conventions, and tourism. But my overall sense of disappointment was scarcely allayed by the scattered new neighborhood developments that I saw in declining cities. Many of them seemed to imitate suburban developments, complete with iconic culs-de-sac. In the late 1990s public housing towers began to disappear , replaced by townhouse communities allegedly modeled on the historic city but to me more reminiscent of suburban condominiums. The overall effect of these ‘‘revitalization’’ efforts struck me as not only formally unadventurous but sadly underscaled against the evident abandonment of declining cities. Was no one else noticing North Philadelphia and Detroit, I wondered? Why weren’t we doing anything about these places? I was well aware that older American cities had gone through a substantial rebuilding process only a few decades earlier, during the heyday of Modern architecture. My hometown of New Haven, Connecticut, was x Preface littered with the concrete and steel remnants of such efforts—an unfinished highway, a gargantuan arena, and lots and lots of empty land marked the results of the last time urban planners had tried to ‘‘save’’ the city. New Haven showed that the death of these so-called ‘‘urban renewal’’ policies had not been such a bad thing for the city—the brutal clearance of city neighborhoods ended, as did the construction of alienating buildings such as Roche and Dinkeloo’s Knights of Columbus tower. At least the federal government was no longer subsidizing the dislocation of urban residents, and cities were no longer celebrating their own ‘‘sacking,’’ as Jane Jacobs (1961, 4) had trenchantly put it. Architects were mostly building their largescale work in the suburbs or on other continents, and many urban-renewalera Modernists like Paul Rudolph had finished out their careers overseas in tremendous style. As I learned more about urban planning I saw that planners too had abandoned the notion of utopia; rather than projecting new visions, they sought to patch, support, and assist the modest but sincere visions espoused by city dwellers. In places like Boston, with a robust economy and substantial historical urban fabric, this postrenewal approach seemed to be working well. But what about shrinking cities like Detroit? As far as I could see, not much at all was happening to help the Motor City, or the depressed areas of a half-dozen other large declining cities that I came to know well: Cleveland , Buffalo, Philadelphia, Baltimore, St. Louis, and Chicago’s south and west sides. The overwhelming modesty of these cities’ 1990s rebuilding lacked Modernism’s arrogance, but these projects also seemed to say that the future of shrinking cities was now the single-family detached home, perhaps constructed by a small nonprofit organization and housing a fortunate low-income family. Social planners celebrated this ‘‘communitybased ’’ rebuilding, but the tools and scope of this rebuilding, as far as I could see, were limited to the generic models provided by the suburban building industry and to the feeble funding still being provided by the federal government. If this constituted a victory over urban renewal, it seemed a pretty hollow one, for most shrinking-city neighborhoods were being abandoned, not reconstructed. Unlike Jane Jacobs’s ‘‘attack on current city planning and rebuilding’’ (1961, 3) in the Death and Life of Great American Cities, I found it hard to blame an obvious...