When Growth Doesn't Work

Usually, when we talk about sustainability, we think of how we can keep doing things without hurting future generations. That's kinda its definition. It implies moving forward, smarter growth, doing more with less or with greener products, doesn't it? But sometimes it means just plain doing less. Do I need another pair of shoes, new car, bigger house (insert your next new thing here)? And sometimes it can mean doing less on a city wide scale.

I bring this up because I've been reading about the challenges for cities like Cleveland and Buffalo that have seen dramatic losses of population. What do you do when you're heyday was 100 years ago? How do you attract people to a city that has huge sections of neighborhoods vacant? What do you do when your city is shrinking? Some, like Buffalo, continue to hope that somehow people will start coming back if you just keep moving forward. Others, like Rochester (my hometown) have started to move people out of sparsely populated neighborhoods into areas with more people (and services) and convert the empty areas into parks, greenways and gardens.

The city right now that's getting the most attention, due to the great Superbowl commercial by Chrysler among other reasons, is Detroit. They've embarked on a massive program to clear out whole sections of the city no longer viable due to so few inhabitants and convert the land back to community gardens and farms, something the land was very good at before it was converted to urban use. Many critics argue that for-profits will benefit from these projects but nothing they've tried yet has been able to deal with that much land laying waste.

Will this and other experiments by cities turn the tide of urban decay in our Northeast? Only time will tell, but remember this, those old, dying cities up north, the steel and manufacturing towns like Gary, Buffalo and Detroit, are sitting on the only abundant source of fresh water in the entire country and when people in the south and southwest start to get thirsty in fifty years, those rust belt cities will start to look pretty attractive!