Revolution Detroit: Strategies for Urban Reinvention

6. Learning from Europe

Learning from Europe 6 Lessons from Britain and Germany In late 2010, just before I flew to Europe to study shrinking cities there, I was telling my editor at the Detroit Free Press about my hopes for the trip. European cities had gained a lead on US cities; they were rebuilding post-industrial cities like Leipzig, Germany, and Manchester, England, far more quickly than we Americans had done facing similar ills in Detroit and Flint and Youngstown. My editor gave me a skeptical look. “It’s easy for them to make progress,” he said. “They’re socialist.” He meant, of course, that Euro-zone communities accustomed to high taxes and regulatory oversight would more readily accept massive government intervention—that a few central planners could impose their will far more easily than in America. By the time I returned to the newsroom following my trip, I could report that the cities I had visited had progressed not through central government planning, but by embracing a spirit of innovation and entrepreneurship. And indeed the most interesting projects that I saw, and the ones with the most to offer American cities hungry for ideas, were the ones where government had played a minor role at best, usually by facilitating work and then getting out of the way. It’s an open question whether US and European cities can actually learn from each other; perhaps our very real cultural differences mean that progress made in, say, Turin, Italy, or Germany’s Ruhr Valley, both devastated industrial areas remaking themselves in new and creative ways, would be difficult if not impossible to emulate in America. But the European model is worth our attention, if only to see real-life examples of cities overcoming some of the very same challenges that the Detroits of the world face. Chapter 6 | 164 Manchester, England If any city can claim to be the home and epicenter of the Industrial Revolution, that city is Manchester. Today the third-largest city in England, Manchester was a provincial center in the early 1800s when entrepreneurs began building cotton mills in and around the city, connected by a network of canals and the world’s first railway, the Manchester-Liverpool line, built in 1830. Wealth and work drew in more people; the city’s population doubled and doubled again by the mid-nineteenth century. Already the cotton capital of the world, Manchester added more industry through the decades—chemicals and mining and steel, the workers crammed into tenements in the shadows of the giant factories, their plight the inspiration for Friedrich Engels’s “The Condition of the Working Class in England” as early as the 1840s. Industrial decline set in as early as World War I, as fighting restricted cotton shipments. Aging factories, rising costs, and foreign competition—all familiar to Detroiters a few decades later—bit into Manchester’s leadership role. By the 1960s, the losses of jobs and industry became a free fall. Aerial photographs of a district known as East Manchester, not far from the central downtown, show dense concentrations of factories in the 1940s but a moonscape of empty fields a few decades later. The city’s population dwindled from around 750,000 in 1930 to barely 400,000 in the 1990s. Adding insult to injury, the Irish Republican Army set off a bomb in downtown Manchester in June 1996. One of the IRA’s biggest bombings ever, it destroyed whole blocks of the downtown, although no one died thanks to the IRA’s practice of giving prior warning to evacuate people. The bomb could have finished the city off, much as Katrina all but destroyed New Orleans. Instead those demolished blocks of the downtown provided opportunities for renewal, the explosion a catalyst for the city to think anew and act anew. The change in attitude had already begun. As times worsened and unemployment soared in the 1970s and ’80s, Mancunians (as residents are known) had demanded that the central government in London shower them with government aid. But the weakness of Britain’s Labour Party during the Thatcherite years led to a revision of thinking, and the IRA bombing merely accelerated that change. Sir Richard Leese, the long-term leader of the Manchester governing council (the equivalent of mayor), explained to my group Learning from Europe | 165 of visiting Americans in late 2010 that by the early ’90s city leaders turned away from civic socialism...