Abstract
Design after Decline: How America Rebuilds Shrinking Cities delivers insights into the processes that shape urban development in shrinking cities in the United States, with references to urban developments in the United Kingdom, France, and Colombia between 1990 and 2010. Ryan starts with a historic analysis of the urban renewal programs of the 1960s and 1970s to discuss the development efforts of shrinking cities after the beginning of decline in the 1970s. He believes that in addition to the economical and societal changes causing shrinkage in the first place, other factors influencing urban development in shrinking cities coincided. For instance, centralized, well-coordinated, and well-financed programs for urban redevelopment ended while economic decline began.
Federal housing programs ended when they were much needed partly because of negative experiences with urban renewal projects, which led to reluctance toward new approaches to improve cities. While Ryan sees innovative urban design and architecture to be of vital importance in distressed cities and neighborhoods, the postmodern developments that he describes try to establish suburban-style, low-quality housing with low density and often without any connection to the surrounding city. Ryan illustrates this argument by a large number of well-researched examples, many from Detroit and Philadelphia. Developments such as Victoria Park or Jefferson Village in Detroit and the Poplar Nehemiah, Ludlow Village, and Cecil B. Moore Homes in Philadelphia display signs of incrementalism and lack vision or comprehensiveness in terms of design and use. In the first chapter (“‘The Burden Has Passed’: Urban Design after Urban Renewal”), Ryan illustrates the aims and principles of urban renewal with various examples how the development policy changed and planning paradigm shifted by the end of the 1970s. Ryan gives a detailed presentation of Charlotte Gardens, a small neighborhood development in South Bronx, New York, illustrating the beginning of a new approach, placing suburban-style housing in an urban context. After the end of urban renewal, this new approach would influence urban development policies for the next decades all over the United States. Despite its modest design, this development was very successful, as in 2009 the market value for one unit had increased about 900 percent to $459,000, with a price of $52,000 back in 1983. According to Ryan, this increase shows of how little importance the quality of design is in a market faced with growth pressures like New York City. However, in a weak or even failing market like in a shrinking city, design becomes more important, which Ryan tries to demonstrate in the case studies.
By the end of the first chapter, Ryan stresses that he disagrees with the often-drawn conclusion that urban renewal led to urban decline. Nevertheless, he acknowledges that urban renewal in most cities was executed insensitively without regard to the existing urban fabric, not to mention the local community. The renewal left “more problems than solutions in American cities” (8). However, he argues that the centralized modernist planning of that time was not all bad (e.g., New York), especially compared to the decentralized, postmodern planning that followed after the 1970s (e.g., Detroit).
In the second chapter (“Shrinkage or Renewal? The Fate of Older Cities, 1950-90”), Ryan discusses his argument that urban renewal had less impact on shrinking cities than often claimed. Supported by US Census data, he shows that population decline as a phenomenon had occurred before urban renewal policies were enacted and that decline continued even after the policy was stopped. Obviously urban decline in the United States is caused by a number of social and economic trends including racial segregation, changing lifestyles, and fundamental changes in the economy leading to suburbanization and the emergence of new centers of employment. Additionally, the author points out that those cities with the highest losses in population—Philadelphia, Detroit, Cleveland, Baltimore, St. Louis, and Washington, DC—persistently differed in the extent of housing unit losses, depending on the prevalent urban structure of each particular city. Cities such as Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Washington, DC, with more attached housing and higher densities lost fewer houses, while Detroit, Cleveland, and St. Louis, where detached single-family housing and low densities were prevalent, lost between 20 and 30 percent of their housing stock between 1950 and 2000. In the next chapters, Ryan sheds light on these two different types of cities by examining two typical cases of each category, Philadelphia and Detroit, in a historic comparison of urban development projects.
The third and fourth chapters (“‘People Want These Houses’: The Suburbanization of Detroit” and “‘Another Tradition in Planning’: The Suburbanization of North Philadelphia”) present a description of the development that has led to the current situation. In these chapters, Ryan presents the various development strategies in Detroit and Philadelphia and shows the outcomes of these strategies, focusing on urban design. On the basis of several neighborhood developments like Jefferson Chalmers, Victoria Park, Clairpointe, and Jefferson Village, Ryan demonstrates, sometimes in extreme detail, the strategies and policies in Detroit that he characterizes as marked by “insider deals, nepotism, monopolistic development, forced relocations, and lack of planning” (119). In conclusion, Ryan characterizes the postrenewal development in Detroit as dedensification in a shrinking city by unplanned and uncoordinated low-quality urban design developments, concentrated in strong market areas of the city.
In the case of Philadelphia (chapter 4), the author describes the development of North Philadelphia, a distressed neighborhood, from the 1930s until 2010. In this area, public housing in the form of row houses had been built for decades with decreasing densities and an increase in suburban design elements over time. The examples Ryan presents in detail are Poplar Nehemiah, Moore, and Ludlow Homes, developed between 1999 and 2009. Moreover, Ryan describes the social housing project Yorktown, built in the 1960s. The newer developments since 1999 were based on new policy guidelines, developed in a scientific manner rather than motivated by politics as in Detroit. Ryan stresses the success of these developments by pointing out the increase in property values in these neighborhoods, although other neighborhoods adjacent to the city center are going through similar developments. This phenomenon might just be the effect of a new trend toward urbanism and downtown revitalization, which favors high-density development, such as row houses in Philadelphia. At the beginning of chapter 4 the author admits that Detroit and Philadelphia had different starting points: Philadelphia was part of the Northeast Megalopolis with major cities such as New York and Washington, DC, close by, while Detroit was located far from other, healthier cities. Indeed, Ryan attributes the successful redevelopment of North Philadelphia also to a large extent to the city’s development policies. Because of these internal and external factors, Philadelphia’s redevelopment projects were more successful in terms of the local real estate market compared to those in Detroit. But it remains unclear which of these factors are the main drivers for this redevelopment or how they influence each other. The question remains if Philadelphia’s policy approach would have also worked in Detroit with its specific local conditions.
In his last chapter, chapter 5 (“Toward Social Urbanism for Shrinking Cities”), Ryan outlines the main aspects of urban (re)development paths in Detroit and Philadelphia and explains why small-scale developments or demolition strategies had limited success. Ryan starts his concluding thoughts by presenting an unusual example of urban redevelopment in Medellín, Colombia, framed by the term “social urbanism.” Here, Ryan links the introductory discussion about modernism and its innovative design solutions to urban development trends in shrinking cities, which he marks as part of an era of “non-experimentation” after urban renewal. He pleads for a new form of modernism that aligns the aspirations for high-quality design with the need for self-determination and empowerment of citizens to alleviate the negative changes in shrinking cities. This new design principle builds on incremental development and comprehensive planning in order to achieve a better quality of life for a fragmented urban fabric. Despite the insight into urban development histories, this approach presents a contribution to the knowledge of urban development in shrinking cities.
Design after Decline describes the interplay (or lack thereof) of federal policies, cities’ ambitions in shaping their footprints, and the roles of individual urban developers or architects. Ultimately, it is difficult to determine if the different redevelopment outcomes in Detroit and Philadelphia are caused by their general preexisting urban structures, by their locations within the metropolitan context, or by their development approaches. Overall, the book is a motivation for planners, architects, and policymakers not to abandon shrinking cities, but to learn from the past failures in shaping a shrinking city’s future.