To understand the contribution which this research is poised to make, it is useful to place it within the context of a greater conversation happening in the academic planning literature. In a set of two 2009 articles in the journal Progress in Planning, emerging research agendas in urban design and planning were reviewed. The first,
“Hot, congested, crowded and diverse” reviews the areas of building capacity for adaptation in the light of climate change, planning around multiple modes of non-motorized travel, and how to create socially inclusive and compact communities (Blanco, et al., 2009). In the second, the editors referred to the various sub-fields adjectively as “Shaken, shrinking, hot, impoverished and informal”; more descriptively, they included planning for disaster recovery, first-world urban shrinkage, climate change, and the rapid urbanization of informal and impoverished cities in the global south. The editors presented these eight areas as novel areas of research and important shifts in direction, calling on planning schools to “reflect critically on these changes and develop long-term research agendas that can better position our field in society and academia” (Blanco, et al., 2009, p. 196). While not written as a literal response to Blanco et al.’s call for the development of long-term research agendas in these areas, the contemporary development of this research project and publication of these essays illustrates the timeliness of the study.
Hollander et al. put forth two challenges to the academic urban planning community with regards to the emerging shrinking cities agenda. The first was in response to the growth paradigm which is still so prevalent in planning education and practice. They noted that “little is known about how existing planning tools used in growing communities can be adapted to be used in a shrinking environment”. The
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second was about the actual practice of planning in these shrinking cities, suggesting that
planning researchers should study how planners, policy makers, citizens, businesses, and others operate within a shrinking city, how they conceptualize population loss, how they manage the physical changes that result from shrinkage, and what can they do to better plan for shrinkage (Hollander J. B., Pallagst, Schwarz, & Popper, 2009, p. 2).
Existing knowledge of the day-to-day operations of planners in shrinking cities is largely anecdotal, hypothesized in the popular press, or based on single-city case studies. Gallagher (2010) has published a book hypothesizing opportunities now available to the city of Detroit, while student researchers such as Alligood (2008), Bell (2011), Pyl (2009), Reese (2011), and Schatz (2010) have written doctoral and masters theses investigating single case studies or comparing two cities’ approaches to shrinking. What sets the research in this thesis apart is that it studies planners and affiliated professionals in a number of shrinking cities in the Midwestern United States at the same time, investigating and comparing the decision-making frameworks they use.
As noted, the focus areas in which planners in shrinking cities in the United States work to make decisions regarding opportunities and challenges which result from shrinking are diverse, ranging from economic development and transportation planning to housing and diversity. To constrain the scope of this research, to draw upon my own background in the field of urban design, and to focus on one of the most readily visible symptoms of shrinking, I have chosen to focus on one particular facet of shrinking cities: the use and reuse of vacant and abandoned spaces. While there are a multitude of ways in which lots become vacated (buildings burning down or being demolished, post-industrial brownfield holding patterns) the research in this thesis is interested primarily in what happens after vacancy and abandonment occur; it focuses on the individual decision-making frameworks that planners use to respond to the issue of vacant and abandoned lots.
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The research undertaken in this thesis is envisioned as contributing to the greater discussion of shrinking cities by focusing on one particular type: post-industrial cities with rich histories and socio-cultural assets in the U.S. Midwest, also known as
“Legacy Cities.” While other cities, such as Manchester and Liverpool in the United Kingdom have experienced similar histories of economic change and de-population, differences between the social and governmental milieu of the United States and United Kingdom set these cities apart. Similarly, cities in the United States that might have similarly structured single-industry economic histories like Birmingham, are inherently different from rust-belt cities purely as a result of their location outside of the Midwest, with all of the labor, economic, ethnic, and racial differences that that discrepancy entails. Finally, there have been a number of cities in the United States which have shrunken for other reasons, like New Orleans’ post-Hurricane Katrina population loss, the movement of residents out of sunbelt states during the recent recession (see Hollander J., 2011 for more detail), and any number of mining, farming, and ranching communities which have seen population decline in the face of industry transformations and climate change. It would be impossible to draw conclusions about conditions in these varying types of “shrinking cities,” so one single type has been chosen for study.
This study investigates the question: How do planners in shrinking cities in the United States frame their decision-making processes, particularly in regards to vacant and abandoned lots? In order to approach answers in a way that acknowledges both the policy and urban design issues associated with these indeterminate spaces, it is necessary to utilize a framework that speaks to both policy-makers and designers.
When investigating a topic as conceptually hard-to-grasp as a mental framework used in decision-making, it becomes vital to be able to “ground” findings, organize answers in a predictable fashion, and disentangle results in a comprehensible, coherent manner.
By utilizing a single conceptual and theoretical framework to organize, prioritize, and
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center the multiple types of primary and secondary research in this study, findings will be intercomparable across the internal models associated with the framework.
For this operational need, I have adopted Carl Steinitz’ Framework for Theory (Steinitz, 1990; Steinitz, 1993; Steinitz, 2002; Steinitz, 2012). It has been used to organize and conceptualize many research and design practice problems in the fields of landscape architecture (Stiles, 1994; Gazvoda, 2002), ecological planning (Poiani, et al., 1998; MacEwan, 2008), scenario analysis and alternative futures (Musacchio &
Coulson, 2001; Nassauer, Corry, & Cruse, 2002), brownfields redevelopment (Kirkwood, 2001); urban design (Steinitz, Figueroa, & Castorena, 2010) and interdisciplinary research (Musacchio, Ozdenerol, Bryant, & Evans, 2005; Lenz &
Peters, 2006). The framework is being used in this urban planning research for its ability to systematically investigate and make transparent the multiple distinct steps taken in regular municipal decision-making processes.