Shrinking Cities, Dead Space and Green Space

Before we leave the topic of place and public space behind, I thought I would share one of my favorite topics/initiatives. I think I briefly talked about the Shrinking Cities Project last quarter. It is an attempt by academics and industrial professionals world wide to consider the causes, ramifications and opportunities created by the shrinking of nearly one fourth of the planet's major urban settings. Since 2006, they have released three free standing case studies on different regions of the world. From Detroit, Manchester, Liverpool, Leipzig and Halle to Tokyo and Osaka, cities are losing population. In the the first section of their third case study, Philipp Oswalt writes, 

"...even though urban growth will continue to dominate in coming decades. An end is in sight, around 2070-2100, the world population will reach its zenith and the process of urbanization will largely come to an end. Then processes of growth and shrinkage will reach a balance and urban shrinkage will be a process as common as it was before industrialization began."₁

To a large extent they blame four processes for contemporary shrinkage. The first is suburbanization. This is a largely American phenomena, perhaps tied to residual westward expansionist mindsets, where large chunks of the urban population continually move outward.

The second is deindustrialization, which is exemplified by Detroit and Manchester. This process occurs when an industry dies and the former laborers are forced to move elsewhere for work.  The third is demographic shrinkage. Population loss on this level occurs when entire demographics have aged with low rates of reproduction and high rates of brain drain/deindustrialization. The result is a massive swathe of the population simply disappearing. The final process is post socialist change. This process is evident in Russia and many Eastern European countries.  It occurs when the shift of regime creates an economic, technological and cultural vacuum within a country. ₂ The result is once again massive exodus. 

These changes certainly do not affect all urban centers around the world, but this trend has been going on for long enough to grant serious consideration. The simple fact is that around the world there are former urban locations, which are now empty. Imagine entire blocks of vacant housing projects, homes, stores, factories and warehouses. The real question that I find interesting is not whether this phenomena is threatening or what its far reaching socio-economic implications are, but what populations around the world will do with this empty space. Furthermore, I am curious what possibilities these vacant places will grant for artists, critical thinkers and practitioners of digital media. Also, I wonder what this will mean for public space, the public sphere and urban green space.

One project has already responded to the writings of the Shrinking Cities group, with Fiber Cities Tokyo 2050. This project hails from some of the very brightest interdisciplinary minds Japan. They have a four fold plan to convert the empty/dead spaces of the city into public green spaces. They include "green finger", which converts locations further than walking distance of public transportation into a green belt, "green web", a strategy that turns redundant sections of highway into green space, "green partition", a design strategy that uses green space to ameliorate natural disasters (i.e. in earthquake prone regions) and "urban wrinkle", a plan to develop and upkeep linear regions of city.

The question I have is how this could be applied to most any American setting and how these once dead, newly greened spaces will thrive in the ubiquitously connected contemporary city.

Notes

1. "Complete Works 3: Case Study: Japan" (2008) shrinkingcities.com (accessed January 11, 2009).

2. Ibid.

3."Four Strategies" fibercity2050.com (accessed January 11, 2009).