[LINK] "How to Tell if Your City is Dying"

[rfmcdonald]

Charlie Jane Anders' io9 essay

Detroit just took another huge step towards the abyss, with its proposal to turn off street lights across half the city. This is the nightmare scenario for anybody who loves a particular city: that one day, it'll fail. Chances are, if you live in (or near) a city, you already worry over every little sign that your town is getting less cool, less vibrant, or just crappier.

But how can you tell if you're city is actually in a death spiral, or in danger of going into one? We asked around, and collected half a dozen key signs of urban death to watch out for.

Cities grow, or they die. We've all seen the spectre of urban centers hollowing out from the inside. And "ruin porn" has become a whole category of photography, with a huge fanbase. There have been multiple books of photos of Detroit's dilapidated theaters, railway stations and other formerly grand buildings. There's just something insanely compelling about looking into a formerly vibrant city gone dead — and part of it is the fear that this could happen to your town, as well.

Shrinking populations, declining average income and rising average age of resident populations, homeowners having problems financing repair, and a lack of demand not only for buildings but--critically--empty land are all signs.

The actual death of a city is much more unlikely than you might think — even though cities can decline and fall apart, that doesn't necessarily mean they're dead. Says Robert A. Beauregard, Professor of Urban Planning at Columbia University, "Try not to think that the city is like a human being who is born, lives, and dies. Cities are socio-technical systems, precariously integral, and capable of becoming smaller and fragmented and still functioning well." When cities do disappear outright, they're usually smaller and more temporary, like the Gold Rush towns in California in the 19th Century.

And cities do come back — in the early 1990s, Los Angeles was going to Hell, even before the L.A. riots. San Francisco's population dropped steadily, losing about 150,000 people until about thirty years ago. And then SF started gaining population again — and now SF's population is the biggest it's ever been, says Ryan. Meanwhile, Chicago started gaining population again after a long period of loss, "and now it's started losing them again. Maybe Chicago's actually dying, and we can't tell."

Ryan says he first got interested in this topic when he visited Detroit in 1993. His friend, a local reporter, told him to check out the local train station before he left town. "Basically, the train station was like a Grand Central Station in New York, except it was abandoned and open. And it basically remains abandoned to this day," says Ryan. "All of a sudden, we were in this 'neutron bomb' sort of atmosphere, where you walk down the streets and nobody's there. We went in the doors and all of a sudden it was like we were in the Baths of Caracalla, except it was after the apocalypse. It was like Rome in 419 A.D."

[. . .]

When Ryan started writing about these topics a decade ago, everybody kept insisting that Detroit and other cities were mounting a comeback — but it was obvious if you looked at the facts, that it wasn't true. If you look back at newspapers, every year since 1960 there's been at least one article saying that Detroit is finally on an upswing. The crash of 2007 and the ensuing economic disasters have highlighted the already-existing troubles of America's cities, and that's when things like "ruin porn" have become so popular. "It's very visceral," says Ryan. "It really gets you."

And actually, ruin porn is deceptive — in a lot of neighborhoods of dying cities, the wilderness has already reclaimed the city, because the wooden houses have collapsed completely and greenery has taken over. It's actually green and tranquil, not gothic and horrifying — and in Detroit, there are beavers now. "These are cities that were built fast and cheap and built by speculators, to make quick money," says Ryan. "It turns out the whole fabric of the American city is quite ephemeral."