The Atlantic Cities: 

“Defending Youngstown: One City’s Struggle to Shrink and Flourish

Daniel Denvir. Jan 31, 2013.

Progress is measured by the bulldozer’s pace in Youngstown. The hobbled Ohio steel giant has lost more than 100,000 residents since the 1950s and has been racing to tear down the now dilapidated homes jobless workers left behind.

The city has demolished at least 2,566 structures since January 2006 and is constantly seeking new funds—from the stimulus, from the multi-billion dollar state attorneys general settlement with misbehaving mortgage servicers, and now, perhaps, from leasing the city’s land for natural gas drilling, or fracking—to knock down more. Many homes, however, fall to arson first. It is a way to cash in on insurance, or for scrappers to steal copper wiring and plumbing. Or, sometimes, it’s just the pyromaniac ennui born of unemployment and nihilism.

“We have guys,” says local activist Phil Kidd, my guide through the city’s pockmarked streets, “who are caught and say, ‘I like watching houses burn; I like the lawlessness of it. I wanted to see how long I could get away with it.”

Firefighters have even suggested that neighbors might set some ablaze, eager to see a long-decaying vacant structure prioritized for demolition. Arsonists torched 158 houses in 2005 alone.

Transforming this decaying tableau was at the heart of an ambitious plan called Youngstown 2010, implemented in 2005, set to retrofit a city built for more than 200,000 for the much smaller city of today. In a sober inversion of traditional civic boosterism, city leaders and community organizers set their sights on small.

Kidd imagines a more ecologically in-tune metropolis, a “rurban” post-industrial city interspersing large-scale urban farms and forest amid neighborhoods targeted for density. Knocking down the blight must come first.”

Photo: Sean Posey

Design Observer:

The Unreal Estate Guide to Detroit

 ANDREW HERSCHER Nov 17, 2012

Unreal Estate: An Introduction 
unreal, adjective. 1. not corresponding to acknowledged facts or criteria; 2. being or seeming fanciful or imaginary; 3. lacking material form or substance; 4. contrived by art rather than nature; 5. Slang: so remarkable as to elicit disbelief. 

Detroit: a city seemingly so deep in decline that, to some, it is scarcely recognizable as a city at all. 

And so, to most observers, and more than a few residents, what’s there in Detroit is what’s no longer there. Theirs is a city characterized by loss: of population, property values, jobs, infrastructure, investment, security, urbanity itself. What results is vacancy, absence, emptiness, catastrophe and ruin. These are conditions of the “shrinking city,” a city that by now seems so apparent in Detroit as to prompt not verification but measurement, not questions but responses, not doubts but solutions. [1] 

Built into the framing of Detroit as a shrinking city, though, are a host of problematic assumptions about what a city is and should be. On the basis of these assumptions, changeis understood as loss, difference is understood as decline, and the unprecedented is understood as the undesirable. These understandings presume the city as a site of development and progress, a site defined by the capitalist economy that drives and profits from urban growth. The contraction of such a site, therefore, provokes corrective urbanisms that are designed to fix, solve or improve a city in decline. 

What corrective responses to shrinkage reciprocally preempt, however, are the possibilities and potentials that decline brings — the ways in which the shrinking city is also anincredible city, saturated with urban opportunities that are precluded or even unthinkable in cities that function according to plan. Taking advantage of these opportunities requires us to consider the shrinking city not so much as a problem to solve but rather as a prompt to new understandings of the city’s spatial and cultural possibilities.”

Photos: Andrew Herscher

“Detroit plans to darken street lights to tighten up city

Chris Christoff. Bloomberg News. May 25, 2012

LANSING, MICH.—Detroit, whose 360 square kilometres contain 60 per cent fewer residents than in 1950, will try to nudge them into a smaller living space by eliminating nearly half of its street lights.

As it is, 40 per cent of the 88,000 street lights are broken and the city, whose finances are to be overseen by an appointed board, can’t afford to fix them.

Detroit Mayor Dave Bing’s plan would create an authority to borrow $160 million (U.S.) to upgrade and reduce the number of street lights to 46,000. Maintenance would be contracted out, saving the city $10 million a year.

Other U.S. cities have gone partially dark to save money, among them Colorado Springs; Santa Rosa, Calif.; and Rockford, Ill. Detroit’s plan goes further: It would leave sparsely populated swaths unlit in a community of 713,000 that covers more area than Boston, Buffalo and San Francisco combined. Vacant property and parks account for 96 square kilometres, according to city planners.

“You have to identify those neighbourhoods where you want to concentrate your population,” said Chris Brown, Detroit’s chief operating officer. “We’re not going to light distressed areas like we light other areas.”

Detroit’s dwindling income and property-tax revenue have required residents to endure unreliable buses and strained police services throughout the city. Because street lights are basic to urban life, deciding what areas to illuminate will reshape the city, said Kirk Cheyfitz, co-founder of a project called Detroit143 — named for the 139 square miles (360 square kms) of land, plus water — that publicizes neighbourhood issues.

“It touches kids going to school in the dark,” said Cheyfitz, chief executive of Story Worldwide, a New York marketing company. “It touches midnight Mass at a church. It touches businesses that want to stay open past 9 p.m.”

Bing in 2010 began an independent project called Detroit Works to sort ideas on how to reconfigure the city for residences, businesses, green space and even agriculture, a plan due in August.

Meantime, Brown said, the city will fix broken street lights in certain places even as it discontinues such services as street and sidewalk repairs in “distressed” areas — those with a high degree of blight and little or no commercial activity.

Bing’s plan requires state legislation to create the lighting authority. Gov. Rick Snyder supports the plan, said his senior policy adviser, Valerie Brader.

There’s already experience snuffing out street lights within Detroit’s borders. Highland Park, a city encircled by its larger neighbour, removed 1,100 of 1,600 street lights last year, after piling up a $4 million debt to DTE Energy. The move saves $45,000 a month, company spokesman Alejandro Bodipo-Memba said.

Only major streets and intersections remain lit in the city of 12,000, once home to Chrysler’s namesake car manufacturer and Henry Ford’s first moving assembly line. Highland Park Mayor DeAndre Windom, 45, said residents at first complained, though few do now. He’s considering grants and private funding to relight darkened streets.

Colorado Springs pulled the plug on 9,000 of its 25,600 lights in 2010 to save $1.3 million, said David Krauth, a city traffic engineer. Some were relit as revenue improved, though 3,500 remain dark, saving about $500,000 a year, he said.”

Via: Toronto Star

Photo: SPENCER PLATT/GETTY IMAGES FILE PHOTO