Smart decline
USA Today recently featured a story about cities reinventing themselves, part of a “shrinking cities movement.”
“Everybody’s talking about smart growth, but nobody is talking about smart decline,” says Terry Schwarz, senior planner at Kent State University’s Urban Design Center of Northeast Ohio. The center runs the Shrinking Cities Institute in Cleveland, a city that has lost more than half its population since 1950. “There’s nothing that says that a city that has fewer people in it has to be a bad place.”
The article highlights Youngstown 2010, the comprehensive planning process that put public involvement front and center, discussed in detail in Chapter 3 of Designing Public Consensus. Youngstown sets an example as a city that has “fully embraced its shrinkage.” The Youngstown 2010 planning process received the American Planning Association’s 2007 National Planning Excellence Award for Public Outreach.
You can follow Youngstown’s progress at the Youngstown 2010 website.