The City After Abandonment

Chapter 12. Rightsizing Shrinking Cities: The Urban Design Dimension

CHAPTER 12 Rightsizing Shrinking Cities: The Urban Design Dimension Brent D. Ryan Recently urban policy makers have begun to ma ke “rightsizing” a w atchword for the perceived mismatch between shrinking city populations, physical and infrastructural plants, and budgets. Built for a population in some cases over twice that currently within the city limits, shrinking cities now have an unmanageably large array of streets, utilities, public buildings, parks, and housing. “Rightsizing” refers to t he yet-unproved process of bringing cities down to a “ right” size, meaning a si ze proportionate to c ity government ’s ability to pay for itself. Rightsizing has thus far come to little in shrinking cities. In the United States, decades of optimistic master plans had little or no effect in reducing rates of population loss in deindustrializing cities such as Cleveland, Baltimore, or Philadelphia, all of which lost 25 to 57 percent of their populations between 1950 and 2010. Even in New Orleans, a city that had g ood reasons to ma ke deliberate decisions about where residents and others should not rebuild after Hurricane Katrina, political fears and widespread citizen opposition stymied rightsizing decisions. Just as suburban developers resent planners’ proclaiming t hat t hey may not develop a parcel of farmland, residents of New Orleans resented that planners might transform their property or even their neighborhood into swampland. On the surface, then, rightsizing appears difficult if not impossible for shrinking cities in the United States. The term also remains vague, as neither scholars nor practitioners have defined it exactly. What physical form and size should the city take after abandonment? What decisions should city officials make concerning which aspects of the city should survive and who Rightsizing Shrinking Cities 269 should live where? How much would rightsizing cost, and who would pay? Does an ultimate vision of the city guide rightsizing, or will policy makers follow immediate imperatives? This chapter argues that scholars and policy makers should develop an urban design-based vision, centered on a projection of the city’s future built environment, to guide rightsizing. Though many shrinking cities began as industrial centers designed with monotonous speculative grids, population decline and housing loss today present designers and planners with an opportunity to shape a better physical environment in concert with these cities ’ economic and social needs. Given that many view the visual landscape of shrinking cities as their most striking and disturbing feature, urban design seems an obvious means by which planners and designers might reshape t hese cities after decline and explore new forms of t he ideal urban neighborhood and the ideal city. As aba ndonment of buildings a nd properties cha racterizes sh rinking cities, an urban-design strategy for these places must contend with abandonment before all else. Abandonment in shrinking cities is problematic at the scale of a single building or property, the city block, neighborhood, and city as a whole, causing different problems at different scales. Th is section considers t hese problems before describing city a nd neighborhood urban design strategies that might help resolve the problems of abandonment. The Physical Consequences of Abandonment In a sh rinking city, abandoned structures and lots are problems, and confronting t he abandonment of individual structures often demands a sub stantial amount of policy maker attention. In the first decade of the 2000s, citywide demolition programs such as Philadelphia’s Neighborhood Transformation I nitiative a nd Bu ffalo’s “5 i n 5” program (5,000 housing u nits demolished in five years) act to c lear derelict structures but use only individual dwelling criteria (structure condition) as a means of action. In the absence of spatial planning for shrinking neighborhoods and cities, city officials may assess abandonment at a la rger scale only when a de velopment proposal is imminent. Abandonment i n sh rinking c ities i s j ust a s de structive a s t he p olicydirected neighborhood demolition of the 1950s excoriated by Jacobs and other critics of urban renewal, but it is harder for policy makers to influence 270 Brent D. Ryan because i t o ccurs o n a n u ndirected, p iecemeal ba sis a s o wners de cide whether to w alk away from their property. Understanding abandonment’s piecemeal na ture p rovides t he ba sis f or u nderstanding t he u rban de sign problems these places face...