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Planning as a distinct discipline was created largely to “shap[e] and guid[e]…

the physical growth and arrangement of towns in harmony with their social and economic needs” (Adams, 1935, p. 21), to manage both expected and unruly growth, and to control its impacts. These diverse motivations are reflected in most of the standard planning activities, including land-use planning, zoning, and environmental actions (Popper & Popper, 2002). Despite contemporary occurrences of shrinking coinciding temporally, if not geographically, with growth across many metropolitan areas of the U.S., “the current discourse in urban and regional planning in the United States still shows a high affinity toward growth” (Pallagst K. , 2008, p. 10).

The result of using tools and practices solely oriented to growth, in non-growing cities, has been an inability to produce desired changes, leading planners to search out and develop alternative approaches to planning and forms of planning tools. If this issue was temporary, or localized, federal or state governments could institute short-term, targeted economic aid policies to stricken cities and wait for them to revive, taking the responsibility of developing tools and policies to address this problem out of the hands of planners. However, the problems that have caused shrinkage within many of our older Midwestern cities, as well as those causing problems in areas far from the Great Lakes region, are not transient: “urban population loss should not be perceived as an anomaly in the context of ubiquitous growth (a concept that is still prevalent today)” (Rieniets, 2009, p. 233).

1.3.1 THE GROWTH MACHINE

The city arose in human history as both the means and ends of economic growth. Peterson’s claim that “policies and programs can be said to be in the interest of cities whenever the policies maintain or enhance the economic position, social prestige, or political power of the city, taken as a whole” goes a long way towards explaining the intransigence of existing power groups within the city to accept

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decentralizing technological and social shifts of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries (1998, p. 11).

While technological advances in the United States have resulted in the situation that jobs and employers are no longer as location-based as they once were, cities are still rooted to the ground upon which they were founded. The construction of infrastructure and the making of other improvements over tens—and in some cases hundreds—of years, as well as the interests of certain placed-based groups, continue to yoke cities to Molotch’s infamous “growth machine” (Molotch, 1976, p. 310). Molotch explains the impetus behind the operation of any given locality as a growth machine as he describes:

A city and, more generally, any locality, is conceived as the areal expression of the interests of some land-based elite. Such an elite is seen to profit through the increasing intensification of the land use of the area in which its members hold a common interest. An elite competes with other land-based elites in an effort to have growth-inducing resources invested within its own area as opposed to that of another. (1976, pp. 309-310)

This view of the city assumes an overarching consensus on the primacy of growth amongst local elite groups who benefit from the “machine’s” ability to

“increase aggregate rents and trap related wealth for those in the right position to benefit” (Logan & Molotch, 1987, p. 50). As public employees whose futures are “tied to growth of the metropolis as a whole,” city planners are part of local governments who “have the most to gain or lose in land-use decisions” thus doubly enforcing the growth imperative as a limitation upon action (Molotch, 1976, p. 314). This understanding of the role of growth in local politics has translated into a focus on growth in planning practice and education.

Molotch identified this inability to think or operate outside a framework singularly focused on growth when he noted that “this growth imperative is the most important constraint upon available options for local initiatives in social and economic reform” (1976, p. 310). He went on to hypothesize that with the destruction of the

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growth machine in U.S. cities, “new options for taxation, creative land-use programs, and new forms of urban services may thus emerge as city government comes to resemble an agency which asks what it can do for its people rather than what it can do to attract more people” (Molotch, 1976, p. 328, emphasis added).

The growth imperative continues to influence local economic development in the U.S., as “urban boosterism and the desire to present cities in a positive light have become integral elements of… contemporary politics” (Jonas & Wilson, 1999, p. 4). It is only through the efforts of shrinking cities like Youngstown, who have begun to actively plan outside the constraints of the growth machine, accepting that growth as an intensification of uses may not be in its future, accepting its diminished size, and focusing on quality of life, that a model for disconnecting planning from the growth machine will be established (Finnerty, 2003).

1.3.2 GROWTH-FOCUSED PLANNING EDUCATION

Oswalt notes in his groundbreaking two-part book on the subject, Shrinking Cities, that the inability of “previous attempts to shape the process of shrinkage…have often failed because the conventional tools of city planning and development… are not able to tackle the problem” (2005, p. 15). This is largely because urban planning challenges associated with population decline and the related shrinking of cities appear to be vastly different from those associated with growth. Using a medical metaphor, Rybczynski and Linneman note that “just as aging is not merely adolescence in reverse, urban planning for shrinkage is fundamentally different than planning for growth”

(1999, p. 40).

It has been claimed that “pragmatically, the traditional tools of planning – land use, zoning and urban design – are effective only in growth situations,” which leads to governments in shrinking cities being confronted with questions and issues for which they are not prepared and practitioners with problems for which they have not been adequately educated (Conway, 1976, p. 16). Because “few publications and little professional training exist to guide… planners as they try to intervene in the process of

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persistent decline,” planners and other urban design professionals have been left to simply react when shrinkage occurs, not plan proactively for it (Morrison & Dewar, 2012, p. 121).

Planners’ current abilities to address a “widespread First World occurrence for which planners have little background, experience or recourse” (Hollander J. B., Pallagst, Schwarz, & Popper, 2009, p. 223) are limited. Morrison and Dewar warn that

Because of the considerable shift in perspective, planners working in these settings need more resources and opportunities to learn how to manage a city’s adjustment after decline. Without these, planners continue to work on development, or they struggle on their own to invent new ways of thinking, when, instead, they could learn from one another. The prospect of reinventing the practice of planning in America’s legacy cities and historically industrial communities provides an important challenge for planning professionals and educators for the years to come (Morrison & Dewar, 2012, p. 141).

Karina Pallagst also demonstrates the need for changes to be made in the education of planners, noting that “it is still not clear whether, or in which way, planning paradigms, planning systems, planning strategies and planning cultures are being adapted when faced with the dynamics of urban shrinkage” (2010, p. i). Frank J.

Popper and Deborah Epstein Popper, noted theorists and proponents of several adaptations for shrinking cities and regions such as the Buffalo Commons, have created an agenda for alternative tools and policies, clarifying that “explicitly, purposefully, planning for less – fewer people, fewer buildings, fewer land uses – demands its own distinct approach” (2002, p. 23).

In the realm of academia, several U.S. universities have taken up the challenge, recognizing that “shrinkage is as much in need of systematic planning as is growth”

(Mallach A. , 2011, p. 1867) and are offering studios or courses that focus on “realities of population and economic decline” (Luescher & Shetty, 2013, p. 2; Morrison &

Dewar, 2012). Departments throughout the U.S. Midwest and Northeast as varied as the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Tufts University, Cleveland State University, the University of Toledo, and the University of Michigan have been

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offering planning and/or design courses and studios centered around shrinking cities (Luescher & Shetty, 2013).

1.3.3 THE CHALLENGES OF PLANNING FOR SHRINKAGE

Planning for shrinking cities may not call for a wholesale dismissal of existing growing-cities oriented planning tools and policies. While planning for shrinking cities is significantly different from planning for growing cities, there is at least one important overlap between the two. Planners in both growing and shrinking cities are responsible for managing change, tasked with providing services for unknown future populations (Morrison & Dewar, 2012). These unknowns include: How many residents will be in a region, How many will be in a neighborhood, What are the demographics of these populations, What level of services are required or fiscally possible? This commonality establishes the possibility that planning for shrinking cities may require the modification of existing tools and policies.

Despite the recognition of the conceptual parallels and important differences between planning needs in these two types of cities, the tools and skills that have developed over years of research and practice continue to be solely oriented around making these decisions within the conventional growth paradigm. For example, the lack of an active private real estate market stymies most conventional urban development, as “not only does the planner of greenfield development confront a relatively clean slate, but growth, whether at the urban fringe or through redevelopment of an urban downtown, is driven by the headwinds of market demand and private sector investment,” two driving forces missing from most shrinking cities (Mallach A. , 2011, p. 1870).

Gans’ call in 1975 for “cutback planning” as an alternative to planning for growth is still, largely, looking for a practitioner who “will have to learn how to plan for reduced and declining capital and operating expenditures, and to figure out how to develop a viable and functioning city under conditions of decline” (1975, p. 307).

Relevant to the research undertaken here, Gans identified that “the prime difficulty of

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cutback planning for the planner is to adapt to the new questions about the city that have to be answered, questions to which the growth-oriented answers of past planning practice will be irrelevant” (1975, p. 307).