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At Acts of Minor Treason some days ago, Andrew Barton took on the idea that cities are bound to decline as improvements in communications technology--telecommuting particularly and telepresence, in one form or another, generally--make it less necessary for people to gather together. He's mostly skeptical of the idea. Mostly.
This is going on around the world. At its most disorganized, this is manifested in the form of the urban prairie overtaking some benighted areas of some cities in the United States. At its most organized, it's manifested in the the former East Germany, where rapid population decline is forcing a planned drawdown of East Germany cities.
I suspect that East Germany's experiences--hopefully not Flint's, or Detroit's, or Buffalo's, or even, as James Bow documented, a neglected Toronto neighbourhood--will be studied throughout the world, at least in areas where populations are declining non-traumatically for one reason or another (out-migration, negative natural increase, both).
These territorial contractions of particular cities still don't mean the defeat of urbanism. City culture hasn't lost its dominance; if anything, its influence is continuing to grow. In a rural sociology course that I took towards my Anthropology major at the University of Prince Edward Island, I was introduced to the concept of "cultural urbanization", the idea that cultural and economic influences radiating outwards from cities into their non-urban hinterlands will transform the rural societies which have somehow managed to persist. Prince Edward Island's history is testimony to this. When my parents were born in the 1950s, they began their life in a province that was still overwhelmingly rural, remittances from migrant labour helping to sustain an economy based on the extraction of primary resources. When I was born, I began my life in a suburb of Charlottetown--a farmer's field was just one house away, true, but it was still a suburb--at a time when rural and urban populations were roughly equal in size and the Canadian welfare state and the growing tourism industry had transformed the province's economy. Now, Prince Edward Island is basically another modern society, lagging behind most of the rest of Canada, true, but not wildly dissimilar from central or western Canada, and red foxes displaced by suburban construction are overtaking the further suburbs.
In the space of one century, Prince Edward Island's population stopped being comparatively traditional and somewhat insulated from the cultures of cities by geographical and cultural distance, and instead adopted--with some local variations, true, but only some--the norms of mass consumption and mass production epitomized by cities and urbanites; more, adopting the values without necessarily the means to attain these values, the incomes or the neighbours or the sheer density. That's where migration to points elsewhere and urbanization at home come in. And this sort of process is going on all around the world. So what if some neighbourhoods, or cities, or regions fail? There's still plenty more that will have to succeed somehow, more than enough to keep the city going. I think, at least.
Personally I can't take the idea of "the death of the city" too seriously. The city has been the foundation of human civilization ever since one brick was stacked on top of another at Jericho, and I don't believe that a transportation revolution or sophisticated communications technologies will make the abandonment of the metropolis feasible. To me it's a relic of twentieth-century modes of thought that still refuse to take externalities into account. The environmental cost of the cities emptying, of people dispersing through the countryside but still demanding the same amenities available in an urban area, would be disastrous.
Nevertheless, cities will empty, by degrees. As it happens, it's not necessarily a negative thing.
Flint, Michigan is far from ground zero of the recession. As Michael Moore spared no detail to demonstrate in Roger & Me, Flint was already screwed a full twenty years before the markets went south; the crisis of the last year has only been kicking the city with steel-toed boots until it coughs up blood. Flint's crisis is one of overextension, and the City that General Motors Built now may as well have been founded on quicksand. On Tuesday, the New York Times' David Streitfeld reported on the newest idea to save Flint from collapse: decivilization.
"The population would be condensed into a few viable areas," Streitfeld writes, with the remainder of the city being demolished rather than left to rot. "A city built to manufacture cars would be returned in large measure to the forest primeval."
This is an excellent idea, and I wholeheartedly support the concept. Partially that's just my surprise that people in positions of authority are recognizing reality; that sometimes there's no going back to the way things were. Flint overextended itself back when times were good, and a consolidation of the city around a functional core may be the only real way to save it from collapse. Furthermore, the rationalization of cities into smaller, more compact forms not only enhance livability through a reduced necessity to rely on cars, but have environmental bonuses via land returned to nature.
This is going on around the world. At its most disorganized, this is manifested in the form of the urban prairie overtaking some benighted areas of some cities in the United States. At its most organized, it's manifested in the the former East Germany, where rapid population decline is forcing a planned drawdown of East Germany cities.
Saxony-Anhalt, cradle of the Reformation and of East Germany's chemical industry, lost a fifth of its 2.9 million people in the 16 years after Germany's unification in 1990. By 2025 it expects to lose nearly half a million more.
In Köthen, where Johann Sebastian Bach composed the Brandenburg Concertos, so many young workers have left that "the population pyramid has become a mushroom," says Ina Rauer of the town's building department.
The cities of the east no longer imagine they can avoid demographic decline. Instead they seek to manage its consequences, and a few are inventing ways to shrink gracefully.
Saxony-Anhalt, which suffered an acute shortage of apartments in communist times, has now destroyed some 45,000 homes, with federal help.
The infrastructure that served now-defunct factories and empty apartment buildings must be ripped up, too.
"Streets cost an unbelievable amount of money," not to mention water pipes and electric cabling, says Klaus Bekierz, who works for the building department of Dessau, a half-hour's drive from Köthen. Since the early '90s, its population has shrunk by a fifth to 76,000. "We can't pay for infrastructure for 100,000 people," he says.
Urban attrition is frightening those left behind, bringing the threat of blight and crime. Eastern cities are courting industry, but capital is footloose, and productive new factories employ hundreds rather than the thousands who once manned East Germany's behemoths.
"It's not clear what the recipe for success is," says Hans-Joachim Bürkner of Potsdam University.
That may account for the spirit of zany experimentalism that prevails in cities such as Dessau and Köthen. Under the motto "city islands," Dessau is nudging life and commerce towards "core areas," which means making a verdant city – which is already three-quarters parkland – even greener.
Traces of Dessau's busier past – a disused tower for smoking sausages or a dairy's chimney now occupied by storks – are being preserved.
Parts of the void are being parcelled into "claims" of 400 square metres, which citizens can use free of charge for projects such as growing biomass for fuel.
I suspect that East Germany's experiences--hopefully not Flint's, or Detroit's, or Buffalo's, or even, as James Bow documented, a neglected Toronto neighbourhood--will be studied throughout the world, at least in areas where populations are declining non-traumatically for one reason or another (out-migration, negative natural increase, both).
These territorial contractions of particular cities still don't mean the defeat of urbanism. City culture hasn't lost its dominance; if anything, its influence is continuing to grow. In a rural sociology course that I took towards my Anthropology major at the University of Prince Edward Island, I was introduced to the concept of "cultural urbanization", the idea that cultural and economic influences radiating outwards from cities into their non-urban hinterlands will transform the rural societies which have somehow managed to persist. Prince Edward Island's history is testimony to this. When my parents were born in the 1950s, they began their life in a province that was still overwhelmingly rural, remittances from migrant labour helping to sustain an economy based on the extraction of primary resources. When I was born, I began my life in a suburb of Charlottetown--a farmer's field was just one house away, true, but it was still a suburb--at a time when rural and urban populations were roughly equal in size and the Canadian welfare state and the growing tourism industry had transformed the province's economy. Now, Prince Edward Island is basically another modern society, lagging behind most of the rest of Canada, true, but not wildly dissimilar from central or western Canada, and red foxes displaced by suburban construction are overtaking the further suburbs.
In the space of one century, Prince Edward Island's population stopped being comparatively traditional and somewhat insulated from the cultures of cities by geographical and cultural distance, and instead adopted--with some local variations, true, but only some--the norms of mass consumption and mass production epitomized by cities and urbanites; more, adopting the values without necessarily the means to attain these values, the incomes or the neighbours or the sheer density. That's where migration to points elsewhere and urbanization at home come in. And this sort of process is going on all around the world. So what if some neighbourhoods, or cities, or regions fail? There's still plenty more that will have to succeed somehow, more than enough to keep the city going. I think, at least.
