As noted earlier, a number of books and theses have been written recently on the topic of shrinking cities. These have primarily used one city or compared two cities to examine current situations, explore the application of new tools and policies, or hypothesize about future conditions as shrinking processes evolve.
The single-city case studies include theses and a book that use the cities of Altoona PA, Youngstown OH, Indianapolis IN, and Detroit MI to explore Smart Growth and Right Sizing planning applications, consider the implications of a housing deconstruction policy, and hypothesize about the smaller Detroit of the future.
The first of these, Reese’s 2011 master’s thesis in Landscape Architecture at Pennsylvania State University Altoona PA: Researching Smart Growth Principles in a Shrinking City focused on the application of Smart Growth planning principles to a shrinking city to determine which of these principles are viable in this type of city and which are not. Reese concluded that while “Smart Growth planning does have a role in shrinking cities today… this role may be limited due to a lack of demographic diversity” (Reese, 2011, p. iii). His conclusions speak largely to the lack of industrial, economic, and resulting demographic diversity that have arisen in Altoona after the collapse of the local rail engine maintenance and construction industry (Reese, 2011).
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Pyl’s 2009 master’s report in Planning at the University of Toronto Right Sizing a Shrinking City: Land Use Strategies from Youngstown, OH similarly investigated the use of one particular set of planning tools, those associated with Right Sizing, on an individual shrinking city. (See section 3.5.3.1 for further discussion of Right Sizing.) Pyl examined how existing land-use tools, those designed for growing cities, are being applied in a shrinking city like Youngstown, Ohio. While his research resulted in a “list of land use strategies that can be applied, to varying extents, to any city with an urban fabric too big for its population,” he also discovered that “shrinking cities are not creating new tools; rather, they are simply using the same tools planners have always used, but in new ways” (Pyl, 2009, p. 2).
Bell’s 2011 “One Nail at a Time: Building Deconstruction Law as a Tool to Demolish Abandoned Housing Problems,” written for the Indiana Law Review, uses the city of Indianapolis to investigate the question “how can cities most efficiently remove existing levels of abandoned houses while deterring abandonment in the future?
(Bell, 2011, pp. 550-551). Bell’s answer, as developed in this article, is the creation of economic incentives for housing deconstruction, removing existing abandoned properties in a value-creating manner while also preventing future abandonment through incentivizing owners to deconstruct houses at the end of their usefulness (Bell, 2011).
In the final single-city case study, Gallagher, a journalist for the Detroit Free Press, wrote Reimagining Detroit: Opportunities for Redefining an American City as an exploration of the future of Detroit and similarly situated shrinking cities. Much of the book is predicated on the need for the city to accept that Detroit of the future will be a much smaller city than it had been. By accepting this reality, and embracing it, Gallagher suggests that
As the nation struggles to cope with rising global temperatures and soaring fuel prices, Detroit may emerge as the city that figured it out first – how to use its open lands to foster a local food economy, how to create a network of greenways that permits its residents to park their vehicles, how to help
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community-based entrepreneurs create a financial safety margin for a city once yoked to global economic swings. This future city may be home to no more than five hundred thousand residents, but it can function as a world-class city all the same… (Gallagher, 2010, pp. 150-151).
Two of the theses, a doctoral inquiry into “good planning” principles, and an examination of Creative Shrinkage, compare two cities; both chose Youngstown as the exemplar city against which to judge more typical planning processes. Schatz’ 2010 doctoral thesis in Planning at the University of Waterloo What Helps or Hinders the Adoption of ‘Good Planning’ Principles in Shrinking Cities? A Comparison of Recent Planning Exercises in Sudbury, Ontario and Youngstown, Ohio investigated factors helping or hindering the adoption of an established set of principles for “good planning”
in shrinking cities. Comparing recent planning exercises in decline-accepting Youngstown with growth-focused Sudbury, Schatz found that the
principles of ‘good planning’ for shrinking cities are in practice difficult to achieve, even where a city has actively begun to move away from the traditional focus on attracting new population growth. Whether or not planners in shrinking cities will decide to adopt these principles is influenced by a number of factors, including the presence or absence of young, innovative leadership, levels of devolution and autonomy, current fiscal structures, local economic structure, and political dynamics (Schatz L. K., 2010, p. iii).
Alligood’s 2008 master’s thesis in Community Planning at the University of Cincinnati Creative Shrinkage: In Search of a Strategy to Manage Decline compared Pittsburgh’s more conventional approach to Youngstown’s “Creative Shrinkage”
response to urban decline. Her goal was to investigate “whether Creative Shrinkage is a primarily academic movement that describes a set of urban conditions, or a shrinkage strategy that can be utilized by aging post-industrial cities” (Alligood, 2008, p. 64).
Alligood discovered that while the movement does indeed enjoy academic support, it also provides a multifaceted strategy to decrease costs, improve quality of life, provide information to citizens and potential investors about the city’s future trajectory, and provide a range of housing environments (2008).
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2.8 Discussion
Shrinking cities have only recently been identified in the United States as a cohesive set of cities with a similar set of characteristics. Research into these cities began overseas with attention first drawn to the effects of shrinkage in the context of German reunification after 1990. As depopulation became problematized, it became more easily identified globally, eventually coming to the notice of researchers in the United States. It has been extensively theorized and researched since then in the academy with the development of a research network and the creation of subsets of shrinking cities, such as the Legacy Cities studied in this thesis.
There is consensus around the types of causes and effects that can be attributed to population decline leading to shrinking. These include a number of economic, demographic, and policy-related factors that have contributed, exacerbated, and resulted from this wholesale urban transmogrification. There have been explanatory models put forward to explain these relationships and hypothesize about the impact of job and population loss upon the physical environment of a city.
Previous researchers have attempted to use selected shrinking cities as individual case studies for investigating the use of a single tool or policy. As cities losing population and jobs, these shrinking cities are operating in an unusual or unexpected manner. These earlier researchers have used these cities’ unusual contexts as opportunities to test the value of similarly unusual planning tools like Smart Growth, Right Sizing, and Housing Deconstruction. As the most well-known example of a proactive shrinking city in the United States, researchers have chosen to compare the planning approaches of other shrinking cities to that of Youngstown. These previous studies have taken the approach of investigating the shrinking city itself. By focusing on one, or two, individual cities, these researchers have delved deep into how a tool or policy works in one city or compared it amongst two.
This thesis, in contrast, takes the environment of the shrinking city as a settled matter, an established type of city that now exists in the United States. The goal here is
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not to tell the entire story of one city, but to draw lessons from planners working in a number of these cities and make statements about how these shrinking cities, in general, work. Shrinking cities are no longer a small subset of cities in the United States. Their residents account for a significant portion of the U.S. population. Legacy Cities constitute a significant portion of U.S. shrinking cities; they and their metropolitan regions provided homes to 45 million people in 2000, then fifteen percent of the national population (Mallach A. , 2012, p. vi).
Earlier studies tended to keep a professional distance from those at work in these cities. In this thesis, the story of planners working in shrinking cities is largely told in their own words through survey and interview methods. This research has looked directly to the planners who daily make decisions about planning for vacant and abandoned lots in shrinking cities in the United States. It has asked for their input on the causes and effects of population decline and vacancy. It has requested information about intervention methods being tried, those being used, and those discarded. The intention is to reveal the way that planners (and affiliated design professionals) are making daily decisions about vacant lots, to expose systemic constraints, political considerations, and operational limitations. By disclosing the way that these decisions are made in a systematic way, a more complete knowledge can be used to inform future decision-making, streamline processes, and reduce institutional blockages to making effective, economic, and equitable changes in these cities.
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CHAPTER 3: LITERATURE REVIEW ON VACANT LAND 3.0 Vacancy in the U.S. Built Environment: Introduction
This chapter reviews the multiple ways that “vacant” and “vacancy” are interpreted with reference to our built environment. Definitions, terminology, and varying concepts built into the word “vacant” are introduced as they relate to the built environment in the United States. It continues with an investigation into policy approaches towards vacancy, including historical research that provides an understanding of how vacant lots have been investigated and conceptualized over the past eighty years. After covering the current state of knowledge on the quantity of vacant land in U.S. cities as well as the costs of these properties to municipalities, it moves on to current policy issues related to vacant land. The chapter concludes with an overview of design approaches towards vacancy, exploring how vacant lands affect the coherence and integrity of our cities, as well as how designers and theorists have used design approaches to address vacancy in shrinking cities.
It is has been suggested that “many view the visual landscape of shrinking cities as their most striking and disturbing feature” (Ryan, 2013, p. 269). These vacant parcels that often dominate the appearance of shrinking cities can be defined and interpreted in several ways. They can be seen as detrimental to a community, gaps in the urban fabric, locations for crime and antisocial behavior, or also not contributing to the financial stability of a city through property taxes. They can be seen as opportunities for economic development, their value lying in the potential to add physical structures, tax revenues, or even new members to a community (Molotch, 1967; Molotch, 1976).
These pieces of land can also be all these things at the same time, making them neither an unqualified “bad” nor “good” for a community. Bowman and Pagano illustrate this view of vacant land as they note that it is “both ubiquitous and diverse and both a problem and a resource for city governments” (2004, p. 1).
Research has been scarce and has often dealt with vacant lots in a purely objective, quantifiable manner. Beyond the physical attributes of vacant lots, however,
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there are emotional aspects to the term “vacant.” It usually has a negative connotation.
As a recent American Society of Landscape Architects (ASLA.org) article reminds us,
“the sight of them [vacant lots] can evoke feelings of despair and avoidance. They are the markers of ruined hopes and economic failure” (Currey, 2010). The emotions that they provoke may have influenced the lack of research that has occurred on vacant lots in the United States in the past century.
From both policy and design standpoints, vacancy is a scale-relative term, in that the experience of one vacant lot on a block is a different situation than one vacant lot in a neighborhood. Similarly, three on a block is quite a different dilemma than three in a neighborhood (Ryan, 2013). The time scale of the vacancy can also influence how a vacant lot is experienced and approached. Temporarily vacant lots in growing areas of town are viewed very differently than permanently vacant lots in areas with very little growth. Issues of scale, passage of time, resulting problems and concerns are all relative in cases of abandonment, as are the tools and policies used to address them.