Sunburnt Cities

by Justin B. Hollander

In recent years there has been a growing focus on urban and environmental studies, and the skills and techniques needed to address the wider challenges of how to create sustainable communities. Central to that demand is the increasing urgency of addressing the issue of urban decline, and the response has almost always been to pursue growth policies to attempt to reverse that decline. The track record of growth policies has been mixed at best. Until the first decade of the twenty-first century decline was assumed to be an issue only for former industrial cities – the so-called Rust Belt. But the sudden reversal in growth in the major cities of the American Sunbelt has shown that urban decline can be a much wider issue. Justin Hollander’s research into urban decline in both the Sun and Rust Belts draws lessons planners and policy makers that can be applied universally. Hollander addresses the reasons and statistics behind these "shrinking cities" with a positive outlook, arguing that growth for growth’s sake is not beneficial for communities, suggesting instead that urban development could be achieved through shrinkage. Case studies on Phoenix, Flint, Orlando and Fresno support the argument, and Hollander delves into the numbers, literature and individual lives affected and how they have changed in response to the declining regions. Written for urban scholars and to suit a wide range of courses focused on contemporary urban studies, this text forms a base for all study on shrinking cities for professionals, academics and students in urban design, planning, public administration and sociology.

192 pages, Paperback

First published January 18, 2011

About the author

Justin B. Hollander is Professor of Urban and Environmental Policy and Planning at Tufts University.

Reviews

[Deniz · Rating 4 out of 5]

Justin Hollander promotes planning for residents that have remained in declining cities with former production backgrounds. He creates a dichotomy which has proven shaky for the case of Flint, MI: Smart Decline or "right-sizing" neighborhoods for maintaining service quality at a scale to accommodate a smaller population v. leaving neighborhoods as they are and attempting the same quality of service.

The Smart Decline planning intervention promotes reducing housing stock and vacancies to the point of encouraging demolishing sound structures and "blotting" - adding a vacant lot next door to an occupied lot. The reduced housing stock will increase prices but this should not encourage developers to create new planned communities since the intervention would not have happened if the city in question was thriving.

I am writing this review with the hindsight of the Flint Water Crisis while this book was written following the etiquette of strong academic literature supported by earnest field work in 2011. The idealism of reducing neighborhood proportions to accommodate a reduced population is not translated into the dire implications of reduced city services given a smaller tax base. Given infrastructure investments (sunk costs) have been made to accommodate the existing housing stock of a city, expecting the maintenance of these investments when there are less people to pay for them is naive. In fact, Smart Decline justifies the abhorrent behavior of the city of Flint choosing the conflagrant Flint River over the expensive Detroit water system since the city only needs to provide water for the smaller population.

Nevertheless, I enjoyed reading about how terribly Fresno, CA was built without consideration for ancestral irrigation systems and how other cities in Michigan (Carriage Town, Grand Traverse) with engaged civil societies stopped their decline through planning tools.

[Diane]

Very interesting study based on the depopulation of cities. Examination of both rust belt and sun belt cities.