After Growth

In this winter’s film Children of Men, starring Julianne Moore and Clive Owens, London in the year 2027 appears as a city at its end. City and world are doomed because humans have lost the ability to procreate. The city, all bombed-out and in shadowy light, is set to disappear. The movie may speak to timely fears about human survival in light of environmental devastation or first-world infertility epidemics. But this doomsday scenario also satisfies a very human pleasure in viewing the decline of civilization and urban decay. We seem to enjoy basking in the sublimity of ruins and devastation, despite ourselves.

This unseemly delight peaked most recently in the wake of September 11, 2001, which caused many writers and thinkers to weigh in with tomes on cities and trauma, revisiting London’s Great Fire or the bombings of Dresden and Hiroshima. The Shrinking Cities project, which began in 2002, might appear to be a belated expression of this morbid fascination, turning a very large magnifying glass onto cities in decline in all their postindustrial glory. 

Germany’s Federal Cultural Foundation, a national institution with an enormous budget, assembled a team of academics, journalists, artists, and architects to explore the phenomenon of shrinking cities and to propose new solutions to their problems. The fruits of their three years of exhaustive investigation have now been translated into two separate books and an atlas. The editors see shrinking cities as a recent and critical global phenomenon, the unfortunate result of deindustrialization, suburbanization, postsocialist transformation, and demographic aging. They selected Detroit, England’s Manchester and Liverpool, Russia’s Ivanovo, Germany’s Halle and Leipzig, and the entire country of Japan (chosen, unconvincingly, for its aging population) as case studies. These decimated urban areas are marked by shuttered factories, vacant lots, empty housing projects, and an isolated older generation - conditions that are both pressing urban problems and popular aesthetic tropes. The project poses an important question: What happens after growth? This is relevant not only to cities themselves, but also to the practices of architecture and planning, ill-equipped to deal with conditions of atrophy. Where there is no incentive to construct, there is instead a tendency to embrace demolition, and to expand the barren, hostile landscapes of places that seem to have outlived their usefulness.

The first volume in the series, dedicated to “research,” seeks to catalogue these horrors, with the requisite photographs of Detroit’s abandoned train station and Michigan Theater. More informative is a battery of statistics, histories, and analysis of the five areas’ decline, rounded out by contributions from artists, architects, journalists and scholars. The approach is encyclopedic, and the more than 700 pages cover topics from representations of the ghetto on album covers to the reurbanization of Manchester. Interventions proposed by architects and planners to address the deterioration (many solicited through an international competition) are reserved for the second, equally massive volume. But an especially compelling section on “everyday survival” in the first volume chronicles solutions from the shrinking cities’ inhabitants themselves, self-organized attempts to survive hostile conditions in the face of poverty and massive state retrenchment. From “DIY city services” in Detroit, where private individuals agree to leave their porch lights on at night to compensate for a neglected public lighting system, to scavenger-recyclers in the dumps outside Liverpool, to the humble recycling of “homemade utility objects” by the people of Ivanovo (who engineer TV antennas out of household scraps), individual solutions to urban problems prove more effective than large-scale plans and initiatives. The practicalities of adjusting to diminished conditions provide a realistic counterpoint to grandiose visions of “redevelopment.”

In the second volume, U.S. readers are unlikely to find much that is innovative about urban gardens revitalizing empty lots and other examples of adaptive reuse. Many of these practices and precedents emerged more than twenty years ago, and today, development pressures in American cities are crowding them out. The urban crisis that decimated so many American cities in the 1970s and 1980s, after all, has passed, and so the focus on Detroit seems a bit belated. Many of the interventions in the second volume, from 1970s art projects to 1990s factory-loft conversions, hardly seem revelatory. The ultimate impression is more a historical catalogue than a handbook for future action.

This may be because the books’ concerns are narrower than their scope appears to be. Although the project is international, the concerns explored are ultimately quite specific to Eastern Germany and cities in the post-socialist world. The historical frame of reference here is not the postwar era or 2001, but 1989. Since then, East Germany has lost 1.5 million inhabitants (nine percent of its population) and reached an unemployment rate of 18.5 percent. A “survival handbook” with tales of Germans selling used bicycle parts, drugs, or homemade sausages to a diminished clientele in Wolfen-Nord or Leipzig, makes clear the poignancy and pressing nature of addressing cities left behind. Though many of the proposed solutions seem too tired, hypothetical, or playful to have much real impact, the small scale of the interventions, their focus on individual needs and the realities of existing conditions, provides a model for realism in planning. Filling in vacant lots with crops or arts programs makes more sense than trying to lure industry with office parks and other incentives. The books seem to prove the wisdom of adaptation, rather than a relentless push for growth. Recognizing that traditional approaches - subsidies, construction, demolition - have failed to turn the tide of shrinking is an important one.

Equally important for the future, but given little attention in the books, is the re-conceptualization of the city in terms of its metropolitan area. Several proposals in the second volume, Interventions, seek to redefine cities as expanding regions, showing an understanding of the complexity of urban change. Movement complicates the oppositions we perceive between growth and decline, too often framed as city versus suburb - a distinction that is becoming obsolete. In cities like St. Louis and Detroit, where the metropolitan areas have expanded while the cities have shrunk, the processes of growth and shrinkage are often less about population change than about spatial distribution or diffusion. The project does well in its concern for cities left behind, but by ignoring the places where the money, jobs, and people have moved on to, it is only looking at half of the picture.

There are lessons to be learned from Shrinking Cities, but the editors’ claim that “the epoch of growth has come to an end” is a form of projection - and wishful thinking on their part. The search for the universal aspects of East German conditions is unsuccessful, as the maps of shrinkage in their own Atlas make clear. While shrinking cities are concentrated in the American Rust Belt and in Europe (Western and Eastern, most of which is unfortunately lost in the page creases of the otherwise visually compelling Atlas), the overall tale of cities today points to growth and urbanization. In all of what we now call the Global South, cities continue to grow dramatically. This fact, though clearly visible in the Atlas, might as well be cropped from the project’s intellectual map. A more accurate global urban picture might show Detroit’s forlorn Renaissance Center along with Shanghai’s exploding skyline, and the abandoned factories in Dessau beside new ones in Ho Chi Minh City. Without minimizing the plight of downtrodden American cities like Camden, New Jersey, or Flint, Michigan, the exploding population in Las Vegas and Phoenix may ultimately pose greater challenges. Alongside our concern with urban losers, there is the pressing need to manage growth elsewhere. Still, Shrinking Cities reminds us that growth, inexorable as it may appear, does not go on forever, and that we might ultimately benefit from keeping this in mind.

Mariana Mogilevich is The Next American City’s architecture and reviews editor. She is working towards her Ph.D. in the History of Architecture and Urbanism at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design.