Shrinking Smart: A New Planning Paradigm?

Smaller industrial cities, located mostly in the Northeast and around the Great Lakes, are finding it almost impossible to recover from the decline of their manufacturing employment base. San Francisco, Boston and Chicago can prosper in the 21st century as cultural and entertainment enters with concentrated office and retail activity and strong downtown residential growth. Elmira, Flint and Youngstown can’t realistically nurture any such hopes.

The problem of shrinking industrial cities is attracting fresh interest in academic circles and new attention abroad. Since the Berlin Wall came down, factory towns in eastern Germany and the former Soviet Union have been emptying out, forcing governments there to grapple with industrial and residential decay. Closer to home, a shrinking cities exhibit currently on tour in Europe is set to arrive in New York next month and in Detroit in February. Also in February, the Institute of Urban and Regional Development at the University of California, Berkeley, is hosting a symposium on the topic.

The urban planning profession is not well equipped to handle shrinkage, either. Planning literature is fundamentally oriented toward growth and how to manage it.