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1 Shrinking Cities People who live in Detroit and Buffalo and Youngstown share a common understanding of what it means to inhabit a shrinking city. They’ve come to define shrinkage as a post–World War II problem centered on the Great Lakes industrial region. In that time and place, they have seen once-great cities depopulated rapidly as auto factories and steel mills shut down and new bedroom communities lured away residents. From their perspective, shrinkage stems from a witch’s brew of American industrial decline, white flight, and suburban sprawl. But in fact such an image, so familiar to an American audience, shows us only one face of city shrinkage. Cities far from the American heartland are also losing people, and for all sorts of reasons. Globalization and economic decline play a part, but so do war, famine, natural disaster, political upheaval, low birth rates, and many other events and trends. Even in the United States, shrinkage is not just a Rust Belt phenomenon. New Orleans lost about half its population after Hurricane Katrina. San Jose, capital of Silicon Valley, saw an out-migration after the tech bubble burst in 1999 (considerably easing traffic jams, by the way. Who says there are no benefits to shrinkage?). Even the area around Orlando, in Central Florida, an area that for decades bloomed like a hothouse flower, lost 9,700 residents in the twelve months between April 2008 and April 2009. Demographers blamed the loss on the disappearance of jobs during the recession. Orange County Mayor Rich Crotty told the Orlando Sentinel, “We’ve gone from feast to famine in a pretty fast time, and these population numbers are a symptom of that. In the future, it’s how do we adapt to declining growth?”1 Europeans show a better intuitive grasp of the complex nature of shrinkage than Americans. From the collapse of the Roman Empire to the effects of plagues 01 Ch 1_5.indd 5 7/16/10 1:50 PM Chapter 1 | 6 and famines, over many centuries Europeans have come to understand that cities lose population now and then as part of a cycle of growing and shrinking. Today, shrinkage is a phenomenon found in both urban and rural Germany, Italy, Finland, Sweden, Spain, Hungary, and Latvia, among other nations. In the former East Germany, out-migration to the more prosperous former West Germany followed the fall of Communism. Then, too, Germany and Italy are touched by low birth rates. Causes of shrinkage overlap in many places. Some German cities saw out-migration to more economically advantaged regions at the same time they were experiencing low birth rates.2 Dresden, located in the southern part of the former East Germany, is a good example of the complex nature of shrinkage.3 Buoyed by optimism after the fall of Communism in 1989 and 1990, Dresden was developing as part of the emerging microelectronics industry in what became known as the “Silicon Saxony.” The city embarked on an ambitious building program, creating new retail, hospitality, and housing construction. But the population of Dresden did not keep pace. Suburbanization, out-migration to the former West Germany, and other trends saw Dresden’s population slide from around 525,000 in 1990 to about 475,000 just ten years later. Dresden’s civic leaders at first ignored this trend, planning for greater growth, and then reversed course and began to plan for a shrinking city. Surprisingly, the opposite happened. The state of Saxony allowed Dresden to do what Sunbelt cities in the United States were doing at the same time—annexing nearby suburbs—so that Dresden’s population began to rebound around 2000. By mid-decade the population had reached close to 500,000. That was still well below the city’s pre–World War II peak of 650,000 in the 1930s. But Dresden’s experience shows that shrinkage is by no means a simple, one-way story of urban decline in America’s industrial Midwest. The ebb and flow of population over time has given Europeans a more relaxed view of shrinkage. In America, with its shorter history, population loss induces a sort of civic panic and unleashes everything from government aid programs to thoughtful studies by academics and foundations. While by no means making light of urban decline, a little more perspective seems in order. Dan Kildee, an innovative civic leader from Flint, Michigan, has studied shrinkage in depth. “In Europe, because of their longer history, they don’t...

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