Shrinking Cities, On Purpose
Flint, Michigan is another ailing city that is considering demolishing entire neighborhoods and returning them to nature as a way to save the rest of the city from blight.
Planned shrinkage became a workable concept in Michigan a few years ago, when the state changed its laws regarding properties foreclosed for delinquent taxes. Before, these buildings and land tended to become mired in legal limbo, contributing to blight. Now they quickly become the domain of county land banks, giving communities a powerful tool for change.
Indianapolis and Little Rock, Ark., have recently set up land banks, and other cities are in the process of doing so. 'Shrinkage is moving from an idea to a fact,' said Karina Pallagst, director of the Shrinking Cities in a Global Perspective Program at the University of California, Berkeley. 'There’s finally the insight that some cities just don’t have a choice.'
While the shrinkage debate has been simmering in Flint for several years, it suddenly gained prominence last month with a blunt comment by the acting mayor, Michael K. Brown, who talked at a Rotary Club lunch about 'shutting down quadrants of the city.'"
http://www.planetizen.com/node/38458Shrinking City Planning
Detroit's population is rapidly declining, but the answer to revitalizing the city may lie in part in urban farming.
"With enough abandoned lots to fill the city of San Francisco, Motown is 138 square miles divided between expanses of decay and emptiness and tracts of still-functioning communities and commercial areas. Six barren acres of an estimated 17,000 have already been turned into 'mini-farms,' demonstrating the lengths to which planners will go to make land productive."
"The city has more than 500 gardens and 'we plan to triple that every year,' said Michael Travis, deputy director of Urban Farming, a Detroit-based nonprofit corporation that helps clear land and provides topsoil and fertilizer.
The farms may also raise home values. In many neighborhoods, nearby gardens could add as much as $5,000 to selling prices, said real estate broker Russ Ravary, who works in the city and surrounding suburbs. The average price of a home dropped 55 percent, to $18,578, in the first nine months of the year, according to the Detroit Board of Realtors."
http://www.planetizen.com/node/36534Detroit Could Become Countryside, Planners Say
team of visiting planners suggested that Detroit could evolve into a series of urban villages connected by countryside.
"The idea may sound improbable, but Alan Mallach, a New Jersey-based planner who led the visiting team, said Detroit is evolving in that direction anyway, with large chunks of the city now largely abandoned.
"In a way, think of it as a 21st-Century version of a traditional country pattern," Mallach said. "You have high-density development on one side of the street and cows on the other, quite literally."
The team's recommendations, contained in a draft report by a committee of the American Institute of Architects, are the latest in a flurry of ideas for dealing with Detroit's growing vacancy.
Detroit's population is less than half of its 1950s peak, and an estimated 40 square miles of the 139-square-mile city are empty."
http://www.planetizen.com/node/39004
