Wednesday, April 22, 2009
"Planned Shrinkage" in Flint
No, not that kind of shrinkage, but this story in yesterday's NYT does seem to have a Seinfeldian element. Seems like a domestic variation on the old "we had to destroy the village in order to save it" theme from the Vietnam era.
I teach Communication Studies (First Amendment, Classical Rhetoric, Civic Engagement, Rhetoric of Rock Music) at UW Oshkosh. Served two terms on Oshkosh City Council. Originally from Brooklyn, NY.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
4 comments:
Tony,
You don't have to look back to many weeks in the James Howard Kunstler blog (whose podcast you feature on T2T) to see the phrase "managed contraction." I found the piece on Shrinkage in Flint MI from the Fox Politics News and read it with the hope for more discussion on this topic from towns here in the Valley.
You may see this as wrecking neighborhoods because houses are knocked down. But the land is reclaimed for Flint's equivalent of a land trust. Services are thus brought closer into the core of town. Police and Fire in a community with managed contraction would provide better services and less cost.
Recently I went to the transportation planning sessions done by East Central Regional Planning and Valley Transit. During one of those, the manager of Valley Transit gave the example of people moving into a way-out suburb and then asking "Where's my bus service?" -- this probably when gas prices spiked. In a Better Not Bigger view of community improvement (rather than so-called growth) services and accessibility to services like emergency response or even garbage pickup improves and cost savings follow.
Here in the Valley we may not be showing the decline of Flint Michigan. But the reversal of sprawl means shrinking the size of community boundaries. Once the notion that "growth" cannot proceed indefinitely is nderstood, then ways to make our towns better rather than bigger will take shape of necessity.
Lastly Kunstler gives the example of growth in the individual: when a child reaches 18 he doesn't continue to get bigger but begins the process of maturation. If this weren't the case we would have people as big as the Michelin Tire man in the First Ghost Busters movie. If this seems like a foolish analogy-- try to walk from the center of Oshkosh out to the farthest suburb.
Cities today need to grow inward, not outward. Lon is correct in this - and the movement toward walkable communities takes the same stance.
The places to address these issues are in cities' comprehensive plan documents, "smart growth" docs, and sustainability plans. The time to review these docs is always going to be "now" because by the time the city is ready to update them it will be almost too late to influence the framework and the language.
Thanks to Lon and Ron for pointing out the anti-sprawl element of the Flint proposal. I guess I've now been on the city council too long, because the essay to me seemed to be highlighting a terrible problem in urban (re)development. To wit, "experiments" in things like "shrinkage" seem always to happen disproportionately in neighborhoods where there is little political or economic clout. Kunstler, who Lon mentioned, is an open advocate of gentrification in certain circumstances--at least he is honest about it.
Anyway, thanks for the insights. --Tony
The main part of my comment has to do with Better Not Bigger. I got most of that from a book that every city official should read by Ebben Fodor. It's cheap. You can get it at half.com. The circulating copy is from the Oshkosh library. What Fodor does is deconstruct how the "growth" people think and provides all the arguments as to why cities and towns always lose in the so-called cost benefit analysis scam.
Kunstler has taught me a lot but I do not stop with what he envisions. The truth is that real planners have been doing what he talks about on paper for decades. And the movements imported from Europe on sustainability can be found by American practitioners like David Morris at the Institute For Local Self Reliance in Minnesota (with offices in Washington DC.
There is no need to reinvent the wheel on a lot of this stuff. It's just common sense.
Post a Comment