November 25, 2023: Shrinking Cities
Good afternoon. Urban planning, as practiced in most cities throughout the world, centers around accommodating growth. Cities try to figure out which areas are best to accommodate new development through upzoning, or whether and how the city should expand spatially. But the profession is not very well equipped to deal with a loss of population, and cities have shown very limited success on this front. This post does not attempt to give a neat answer to the question, “how should cities handle decline?”, but rather to be the first of what will hopefully be several attempts to explore the subject.
The phenomenon goes back to ancient times, but the term “shrinking cities” was popularized in the 2000s by architect Philipp Oswalt to describe the phenomenon of population decline in formerly industrial cities of post-communist nations. Americans are familiar with the term “Rust Belt” to describe cities in the Midwest that have gone into serious decline.
URBACT, an EU project to deal with the the phenomenon of shrinking cities, concludes (via ArchDaily),
Cities must learn to conceive of sustainable urban development as an ongoing cyclical process of change, rather than pretend that socio-economic development is a linear and predictable progression from the status quo to a better future.
This sounds like degrowth, and perhaps it captures why shrinking cities is a difficult phenomenon for the political system to deal with. Most people want—and for good reason—to believe in a future of growth and improved standards of living, rather than in a future of decline, and so planning for shrinkage might be seen as a kind of defeatism. I see it more as an acknowledgement of reality. Most middle and upper income countries today are either in a state of population decline or will be in the foreseeable future. And even when the country as a whole is growing, individual cities within that country will see their fortunes vary. For example, Detroit saw its first decline from one U.S. Census to another between 1950 and 1960, right in the middle of the Baby Boom.
Most economic models find that a declining population will slow, and perhaps end completely, economic growth. This paper, though it takes an anti-natalist stance, forecasts that population decline will have mixed impacts on the Sustainable Development Goals. On the city level, and specifically in the context of post-COVID urban downtowns, there is the “urban doom loop”: a reduction of workers downtown leads to businesses closing, which leads to a decline of tax revenue, which leads to a reduction of services, which causes the quality of life downtown to decline, which further deters workers. A similar story can be crafted for a cycle of decline that exists of many different levels of a city. A study in China finds that urban shrinkage corresponds to a loss of vitality.
This article gives only general prescriptions on dealing with shrinkage, and specifically of the Compact City approach. This strategy entails converting low-density housing tracts on the urban fringe into green space and concentrating development in the urban core. This strategy is meant also to address the twin phenomenon of population aging: in a society with low birth rates and a city with limited employment opportunities, a large share of the population will be elderly, who will be more limited in their mobility. The observed trend has mostly been the opposite. This paper observed the co-occurrence of increased land use and decreased population in Central and Eastern European cities. This paper makes a similar observation in Kazakhstan. A Brookings report finds that in the United States, urban cores have generally lost population over the last few decades, inner suburbs have held steady, and outer suburbs have gained population. The report also notes that in the last year, Manhattan and San Francisco have been exceptions to these trends. Those who were hoping that COVID-induced remote work would be a solution to the extreme housing scarcity that plagues these cities will be disappointed.
The ArchDaily article posits a strategy of rightsizing. In the corporate world, “rightsizing” is a euphemism for downsizing, which is a euphemism for layoffs, and it is not an attractive word for urban planning, but OK. In the context of urban planning, rightsizing entails demolishing abandoned buildings and cutting off services to nearly vacant neighborhoods, thereby forcing the people remaining there to leave. A less coercive approach, known as co-production, was used in Altena, Germany and focuses creative reappropriation of properties that have become vacant. Leipzig, Germany, which has less than half the population forecast in the early 20th century, developed a system of subsidies for renters in exchange for upkeeping buildings.
Now let’s take a closer look at Detroit. Once the fourth largest city in the United States, Detroit has declined from a peak Census figure of 1.8 million people in 1950 to a third of that today, with an unbroken streak of decade over decade declines since 1950. See the Beaumont Enterprise for a photogallery of abandoned structures, one of which is shown below.
“What went wrong?” is not as straightforward a story as you might think. The most common canned answer revolves around large, socioeconomic forces, such as “capitalism”, as claims an article from The Guardian, or deindustrialization, or globalization. But as Scott Beyer explains, these answers are, at the very least, incomplete. The idea that the entire Midwest is a decrepit, post-industrial region is inaccurate; Ann Arbor for instance, only an hour’s drive from Detroit, is thriving with a high tech economy. Beyer argues that to really understand the problem, we should look to factors specific to Detroit itself. He identifies a combination of high taxes, excessive regulation (worse than most other cities), poor services, and corruption.
Another red herring, according to Beyer, is a combination of segregation and automobile-dependent development. “White flight”—the tendency for wealthier White residents to decamp for the suburbs and leave the city proper to lower-income Black residents, may have been particularly bad in Detroit, but many other cities, including cities that are doing just fine, have seen the same pattern.
Several initiatives over the years have attempted to turn the situation around, or at least manage the decline gracefully. The Greenways Coalition, for instance, is taking advantage of the large amount of vacant land to build bike and pedestrian pathways. The University of Michigan runs an Innovation District to attract large investments into the city. The Live6 Alliance is a small business coalition, also working to attract investment at a more grassroots level. At the risk of stating the obvious, there is no evidence that any of these initiatives have fundamentally turned life around for the city, though they have shown limited success.
Another city that is experiencing the same pattern is Youngstown, Ohio. Youngstown, like Detroit, has lost about two thirds of its population since the peak Census year of 1930. Youngstown have found success in revitalizing its downtown and attracting investment through the Youngstown Business Incubator.
In 2005, Youngstown produced the Youngstown 2010 City Plan to implement what is described as “smart shrinkage”. As explained by this synopsis from the American Planning Association, there is a big gap between what the plan envisioned and what actually happened. The plan called for a 30% reduction in residential land; the 2013 rezoning code rezoned only 2.6%. Conversion of land to open space fell short of the plan’s target as well.
The problems should have been foreseeable. The city can’t simply rezone residential land, kicking out people who still live there, without just compensation, which is difficult for a cash-strapped, shrinking city to muster. Anyone who has been involved with a citywide comprehensive plan should not be too surprised. These documents seldom have a significant impact after they roll off the printer, and evidently plans for shrinkage do no better than plans for growth. I’ve gravitated to a “less is more” philosophy of planning. The idea of compactifying a city, in particular, has always been much less popular among the general public than among professional planners, and attempting it in the context of urban shrinkage does not fundamentally alter the dynamic.
One more example for today, though obviously there are many more. Manchester exploded at the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, has been described as the first industrial city, and occupies a role in the history of industrialization that is not dissimilar from that of Silicon Valley in the Information Age. In the 20th Century, Manchester went into a process of decline that mirrors that of the Rust Belt in the United States, but it has found rejuvenation with new industries in the 21st Century. However, despite that and a rebound in population, revitalization in Manchester has been mostly focused on downtown, with less tangible benefit for the rest of the city.
I take a few things away from all this. First, there doesn’t seem to be such a thing as a playbook for urban shrinkage. What there is, instead, is a few piecemeal strategies that various cities have adopted, with some being more successful than others. Second, most of what has at least partially worked has been in the form of finding a new path to revitalize a declining city, rather than gracefully managing decline. This strategy will become more difficult in a society where there is population decline overall, as more cities will be competing for a smaller pool of investment. I don’t know if there is any plausible positive outcome. Much of discussion around urban shrinkage looks like degrowthism, and much looks like cope, attempting to put a happy face on what will inevitably be a painful process. But if we want a least bad outcome, this is an important issue that cities need to grapple with, including cities that are today growing healthily and for which decline is not on the radar.
Quick Hits
This past week’s drama at OpenAI is, I suspect, one where there is less than meets the eye. Rumor has it that the board was afraid that a recent breakthrough called Q*, together with Sam Altman’s push for commercialization above safety concerns, and so they fired Altman. Most of OpenAI’s staff led a countercoup and got Altman reinstated after a few days, representing a triumph for corporate greed over the safety of the entire human race. I have no idea what the actual story is, but I doubt it has any resemblance to what I just wrote.
Richard Coffin (The Plain Bagel) has another useful explainer about what happened at Binance and their CEO, Chanpeng Zhao (CZ). In short, CZ was busted for insider trading and promoting money laundering through their platform, charges for which he pled guilty. The charges are not terribly surprising, but what I did find surprising is the apparent leniency of the plea bargain. Binance will pay $4.3 billion, and CZ will step down as CEO, take a vacation that he is looking forward to, and will serve no more than 18 months in prison and perhaps none at all. Binance will continue to operate. Not bad for a service that knowingly facilitated transactions from terrorists, Russian oligarchs, and other shady characters. By contrast, Sam Bankman-Fried might spend the rest of his life in prison. There must surely be more about this that is not known to the public.