From Brutal to Beautiful: Why Shrinking Cities is a Big Deal

We have been trained, and trained remarkably well. When opportunity strikes, we seek the larger prize, the extra foot, the additional territory – boundaries are plastic and in flux, because they must be pushed and expanded. Programmed. Conditioned. Call it what you may. Life, liberty, and the pursuit of real estate. Growth is the only item on the agenda for the traditional urban leader or thinker. New housing construction. New development deals. The definition of obsolescence is now just the conjuration of men and women acutely afraid they’ll regurgitate the wrong opinion, or that they’ll stray from their talking points. New is better. Growth is good.

This prevailing attitude of progress has only served us well as cosmetics applied to our urban and regional portrait – if you look beneath a couple of layers, the ugliness abounds. If the rhetoric of growth has gotten us to this unenviable place, then why continue to assert it as doctrine? What good has it done us? Beyond giving us a booming vinyl siding industry, it has fueled the greatest wasting of resources this planet has ever seen (thanks, Kunstler). The same mythology of growth has been used to initiate unsustainable development throughout urban cores, it would seem our critique of the suburbs is inconsistent with our actions in cities. Having already shrunk (or just beginning), it is time for cities and regions to be more deliberate about managing the outcomes and possibilities of shrinking.