This article from Rueters highlights innovations from across the nation to address the problem of significantly declined populations in older industrial cities and the resulting blight and infrastructure. The article begins by praising the Genesee County Land Bank for it’s innovative approach to urban revitalization through vacant lot reclamation and demolition. The Land Bank has successfully demolished 1,000 homes in five years. The concept of deliberately shrinking a city usually raises some eyebrows. After all, shrinking implies smaller, and smaller isn’t exactly an American ideal. But it’s necessary. As Dan …

Last month the Cleveland+Youngstown+Pittsburgh Regional Network hosted a conference that was [coincidentally?] entitled “Rebuilding the Cities that Built America.” The conference featured a briefing on The Community Regeneration, Sustainability, and Innovation Act of 2009, a keynote address from Dan Kildee, former Genesee County Treasurer and current President of The Center for Community Progress, and a lunchtime plenary that explored the new Sustainable Communities Initiative. The aim of the conference was to exchange best practices and policies that can benefit older industrial cities and build relationships across the three cities.
The following …

The Next American City published a two part story on “…how the federal government provides roadblocks to enacting ‘rightsizing’ policies in older industrial cities, and what can be done to change this.”
The second article especially highlights the inadequacies of the federal government to enact effective policies to help these cities rebuild and precisely articulates all of the nuances and difficulties. For instance, “…small population leads to a small tax base, which in turn leads to a smaller city government, which leads to a rejected application for Neighborhood Stabilization funds. It …

In Richard Florida’s new book The Great Reset: How New Ways of Living and Working Drive Post-Crash Prosperity, he dedicates Chapter 12 to “The Death and Life of Great Industrial Cities.” An excerpt from this chapter was recently published on a blog called the Urbanphile.
In this chapter, Florida explores the notion of “shrinking cities” and considers what kinds of policy need to be implemented to address this phenomenon. Essentially, he boils it down to the following question:
Should public policy toward hard-pressed, economically strapped cities focus on people, not just by …

South Euclid, OH has passed a new law to fight blight caused by vacant and abandoned properties. The law implements two new measures:
one identifies owners or others who control the property; the other creates a system to ensure that violations get fixed and aren’t handed off from one owner to another.
In addition, owners of vacant properties will be forced to pay a $200 fee.
Although there are people who oppose the law, supporters of the new law say it will deter people from “flipping properties” and emphasize the fact that vacant …

Toni Griffin will become Detroit’s new Planner. Heralded by Time as “a star urban planner” the article says that she will “help lead what might be the most ambitious urban makeover in American history–the downsizing of Detroit, a city built to accommodate a population more than twice its currents size.” This effort underscores the key concept behind the Community Regeneration, Sustainability and Innovation Act of 2009 (CRSI): older industrial cities will not be able to recreate the vast manufacturing bases they once had, nor will their population peak be regained. …

The concept of deliberately shrinking a city is relatively new and counter-cultural. After all, this is America, and usually we focus more on making things bigger, not on making things smaller. However, when discussing the older industrial cities that the Community Regeneration, Sustainability, and Innovation Act is designed to benefit, it is imperative to understand that these cities are not going to regain their past splendor as quickly as they lost it. Thus, it is important to be realistic and imaginative as to how these cities can be redesigned and …

Urban agriculture is no longer the revolutionary concept it once was. Small farms have sprung up in most urban areas with almost 900 such gardens already in Detroit. But the “large-scale, for-profit agricultural enterprise, wholly contained within the city limits of Detroit” that businessman John Hantz has envisioned, is something that has yet to be attempted. Hantz is going to invest $30 million in the effort as a means of creating a niche for Detroit in the post-industrial economy.
At one time, Detroit was the fourth most populous city in the …

In Cleveland, Ohio, Vicky Poole, the marketing and events director at the city’s Galleria Mall, has plans to grow fresh fruits and vegetables inside the mall. The produce will be “…vine grown in bags and troughs hanging from steel stair banisters and ceiling beams in the shopping center…” Since the mall’s merchandising sales have declined, Poole sees the greenhouse as a way to compensate for this loss in revenue. The project has received a $30,000 grant from Civic Innovation Lab, which will allow them to start the project. One of …

Although this is yet another article about Detroit, it offers a more optimistic vision of what the city could turn into. The article is an interview with Detroit native and former CNN correspondent Miles O’Brien. O’Brien is now anchoring a documentary about America’s crumbling infrastructure and in one installment about Detroit, offers the vision of the city leading the country’s transportation industry once again. However, this time O’Brien thinks rail systems will be the vital contributor to this revival, not automobiles. O’Brien’s vision for Detroit is vital for reclaiming the …