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Shrinking Cities: Space Pioneers and Urbanism's New Frontier
For the first time in world history, more than 50% of Earth's population lives in cities. This much-ballyhooed statistic justified "the city" as the guiding theme of the 2006 Venice Architecture Biennale, held last fall. It was a uniformly triumphalist exhibition. The national pavilions were bedecked with elaborate displays on striking aspects of the given nation's metropolis. While more than just tourist brochures-Israel's, for example, focused on the unique role monuments to the dead play in Israeli urban space-they were consistently celebratory. The trend continued in the Arsenal, the Biennale's main exhibition space, which runs for nearly a kilometer through vaulted stone archways that once held Venetian armaments. Although the cannons have long been removed, there was plenty of visual firepower in the striking 3D visual displays that depicted the demographics and infrastructures of a dozen cities deemed emblematic of global trends. Special challenges addressed in the exhibition such as environmental degradation and transportation failures focused exclusively on problems of growth. Urban explosion was the unifying thread across the photography, architectural renderings, and planning schemes on display in the smaller exhibition space of Giardini, the garden that housed the national pavilions. But in one small room, there was a dissenting note. The map painted onto the floor said it all: Cities are shrinking. While the world focuses on incredible stories in the global south like São Paulo, a Brazilian backwater of 25,000 inhabitants at the end of the 19 th century (now the planet's seventh largest metropolitan area with 20 million), it has forgotten the plight of Detroit, the only city in the United States to have crested and then dipped back below the one million mark. Shrinking Cities stood apart from the rest of the exhibits at the Biennial in its attention to such collapses. "The epoch of growth has come to an end," writes project organizer Philipp Oswalt in the introduction to the Shrinking Cities printed anthology, an ongoing series that has so far published two volumes, "International Research" and "Interventions", as well as an Atlas of Shrinking Cities , under the auspices of the Kulturstiftung des Bundes (German Federal Cultural Foundation). Oswalt refers largely to the developed world, where birth rates at or below the pace needed to replenish the population are spelling demographic shrinkage. But public officials refuse to acknowledge the truth. "A common joke among Japanese city planning professionals," explains urban planner Yasuyuki Fujii in a special inset on Japan , "is that the total sum of the population projections of the 3,400 municipalities nationwide comes to an enormous figure far larger than Japan 's actual population of 127 million." Beset by a massively graying population-the oldest in the world with the longest life expectancy-Japan has demographic woes to worry about as a diminishing crop of young people will have to choose between forging a new life in the city and fulfilling cultural edicts that they care for their elderly parents. However, they are far from the worst off. Four agglomerations highlighted in Shrinking Cities epitomize the trend: Detroit, Liverpool and Manchester, Halle and Leipzig of the former East Germany, and the Ivanovo region northeast of Moscow. All sufferers of the late 20 th century transition to a post-industrial economy, these four locales are shrinking cities at their worst. Detroit, formerly a world model of industrial urbanism, was a victim of its own success. Henry Ford's belief that every worker should be able to own the very car he helped produce literally created a mobile society that, abetted by post-war federal housing loans and the interstate highway system, immediately vacated Detroit proper for sprawling suburbs as the auto factories followed suit. Racism, meanwhile, exacerbated the motor city's woes by turning the inner city into a classic American ghetto, populated almost exclusively by blacks and neglected by city services. Liverpool , Britain 's multicultural gateway port to its vast empire, sank in importance as the United Kingdom lost its colonies. Neighboring Manchester, birthplace of the English industrial revolution, stood by helplessly as textile production fled overseas. Halle and Leipzig, meanwhile, had little say in the dictates of the communist GDR, only to have its industrial base suffer from an economic and demographic drain following German reunification. Ivanovo, an early industrial hub dating to the days of the czars, was prosperous by Soviet standards, then gutted during the chaos of early capitalist Russia. "We're not just going back to 1917, we're going back to feudalism!" seethed a newly impoverished Russian farmer. Shrinking Cities employs a wealth of specialists, mostly of academic pedigree, to explain the finer points of the demographic, economic, political, and sociological machinations that have resulted in North America and Europe's shrinking cities. At times, the lengthy volumes, each over 700 pages, suffer from dry prose only made dryer by translation from German and Russian. Boxes highlighted bright yellow smack of a textbook aesthetic, especially when contemplative quotes on urban space by contemporary writers like Haruki Murakimi and W.G. Sebald give way to simple factoids on population statistics. While at first the blue-toned insets on thick stock paper seem to magnify this effect, they prove to be useful anchors to the text, focusing as they do on the phenomenon's chief examples (minus the early inset on Japan). Indeed, Shrinking Cities: International Research contains far more than the profiles of the featured four, astutely organizing chapters thematically around concepts like "Global Processes of Shrinkage" or "Panic City/The Psychogeography of Fear." Mitch Cope, a Detroit native, details how his city employs "fortification architecture" to "obstruct and impede pedestrian traffic" because "someone 'walking in off the street' is seen as a threat." This kind of attitude sanctifies car ownership, a dividing line betweens suburban haves and inner-city have-nots as the ticket to full access to the city,. A Liverpudlian entry under "Dying Cities" catalogues the destructive behavior that befell a housing estate on which only 120 of a total of 1,000 homes are occupied. The spatial and psychological vacuum was filled by vagrants and bored youths who squatted in abandoned houses, used them as drug dens, and even set small fires simply out of ennui. An essay on The Factory of the 8 th of March illustrates the process of "Moving Cities" in the account of Olga Filatova, a lecturer at the State University of Ivanovo, and Sergei Sitar, an architect based in Moscow. They describe how it went from "the most technologically advanced textile manufacturer in Ivanovo and in the entire textile branch of the Soviet Union" to the home of an American-style shopping mall that gained national notoriety in 2003 as the result of a massive burglary. The architects of Shrinking Cities are hardly the first to remark upon urban decay in the wake of post-industrial economies. But they set themselves apart from typical woe-is-us depictions by investigating further into the culture of shrinking cities. Many of the media representations of shrinking cities are bleak, as Jerry Herron, professor of American Studies at Wayne State University in Detroit , makes clear in his insider's essay "I'm So Bad, I Party in Detroit ." He bitterly laments the influence that a seemingly harmless piece of Hollywood fluff like the RoboCop movie series had on cementing an image in the public consciousness of Detroit as a battle-hardened, post-apocalyptic crime zone. Antje Ehmann makes a similar argument in "Cinema of Shrinkage", outlining the significance of representations of cities from sources as diverse as Italian film greats Michelangelo Antonioni and Pier Paolo Pasolini to a recent music video by rapper Ja Rule. But the t-shirt slogan that gives Herron's essay its title hints at a deeper truth. For all of the city's massive vacancies, derelict neighborhoods, systemic segregation, and failed attempts at downtown revitalization, there's still something happening . Music is a natural place to start, as birthplace of the eponymous Motown and incubator of hard-edged rock acts like MC5 and Iggy Pop, the latter of whom made "the city's ripped backside" part of the refrain in his hit song "The Passenger." Diedrich Diederichsen seizes on this metaphor in his contribution, "Music of the Wastelands", segueing from Pop to Detroit techno, the electronic music style born in the '80s as a response to "the ghostly, abandoned inner city." A similar dynamic was at work in Manchester, well known for the abrasive, angular sounds of punk and post-punk popularized by Joy Division, New Order, The Smiths, and The Fall that reverberated across the empty mills and flats full of the unemployed. As the 1980s progressed, Manchester morphed into Madchester, an early hotbed of British acid house culture centered on record label Factory and its legendary club the Hacienda, immortalized in the 2002 film 24 Hour Party People . Cities across the former East Germany, East Berlin chief among them, have become hotbeds for a club culture centered on the future sounds of house and techno, the soundtrack that seems to resonate strongest across the hollowed out cores of shrinking cities. Surprisingly, no mention is made of the wave of gentrification brought on by the artistic exploitation of East Berlin, as prices rise and high-end fashion moves in to once-derelict neighborhood like Mitte across from where the Berlin Wall once stood. However, Robert Strachan and Sara Cohen are careful to mitigate the inventive adaptations of music in "Music Producing Space" by concluding that "gentrification, commodification, and the exclusion of artists and musicians from the spaces that they had taken over" are the inevitable of result of, say, a DIY punk squat or an illegal techno party in an abandoned warehouse. Even the mighty Hacienda fell, as Dave Haslam, a one-time DJ at the club, chronicles in his requiem to the Mancunian haunt. Closed in 1997, it was soon after demolished and replaced by a luxury apartment complex called "Hacienda", the developers seemingly unaware of the irony in appropriating a name originally culled from a Situationist tract. Despite the long-term trend of population loss, some regrowth is already taking place. While the Hacienda case invokes nostalgia, Deborah Mulhearn, a journalist based in Liverpool, is a little kinder, sympathetically profiling real estate magnate Tom Bloxham, whose Urban Splash imprint has converted many industrial spaces into apartments, offices, and retail across the Liverpool-Manchester axis. The curators and anthologists of Shrinking Cities are taking a big tent approach when they lump both the Factory Records clubgoers and local real estate developers into the category "space pioneers," or those who create an "avant-garde of shrinking," as they title the chapter in which the above essays appear. Nonetheless, there's a clear sentiment that individual action and creative use is the order of the day, appropriate given the conclusion of volume one under the heading "The Myth of Planning." Some of the most intriguing examples of individual creativity come from Friedrich von Borries' "Extreme/City/Sport," which highlights the city as an "adventure space" by the likes of paintball and laser tag players; enthusiasts of "turbo" or "x-golf", where one aims for abandoned buildings instead of a freshly manicured green; practitioners of base jumping, or skydiving from tall buildings; and the French sport of parkour , a meditative approach to scaling obstacles in the urban environment. Shrinking Cities Volume Two : Interventions , picks up where von Borries left off, interviewing the organizers of Sportification, an urban sports league popular in East German cities like Halle, Berlin, and Dessau, featuring high-rise Frisbee and a downstairs competition on mountain bikes. These space pioneers, the organizers of Shrinking Cities argue, are pioneers by virtue of exploring the newest frontier in a world that has left no stone unturned. While in the American context journalist Joel Garreau has popularized the notion of "edge cities"-suburbs that boast their own business, commercial, and entertainment resources in competition with the central metropolis-the global outlook of Shrinking Cities still holds hope for traditional urban spaces, especially the longest-suffering ones. Interventions , far from being a policy handbook with prescriptions for inquisitive city leaders, emphasizes the "Do-It-Yourself City", as a chapter is called, from the inventive recycling projects of Chicago artist Dan Peterman to the transformative effect of bringing a herd of cows to graze in an impoverished neighborhood of Liverpool. Stephen Vogel's "DIY City Services" explains that Detroiters have discovered there's no point in waiting around for ineffective government, so they make up for broken streetlamps by organizing a neighborhood schedule to keep porch lights on at night. It's a small gesture, but one that fosters a sense of neighborhood camaraderie and community, a civic sentiment perhaps less prevalent among residents of a bustling Manhattan high rise. The flip side to the DIY, however, is the leaner notion of "Everyday Survival," another International Research chapter that includes Scott Hocking's profile of Detroit metal scrappers, vagrants who live off what they can strip from abandoned buildings, but in recent years appear to have about scrapped the city clean. Darker tales of inner city woe aside, Shrinking Cities is more than just a diagnosis of urban ills. Editor Philipp Oswalt is serious in his introduction when he asks, "Shrinkage as a New Potential?" The selection of artwork-chiefly photographs-that accompanies the plethora of essays bears this out best, from Andrew Zago's portraits of majestic Detroit banks converted into tire shops and gas stations to Tobias Zelony's candid shots of urban youth malaise in "Behind the Block" to Pierre Huyghe's positive spin on the concrete skeletons of unfinished Mediterranean homes in "Structures of Possibility." There is a certain beauty to the force of entropy at work in shrinking cities, different but just as striking as the endless new skyscrapers of Shanghai or the teeming masses of humanity in Mumbai. In a way, their challenges seem easier to overcome-massive investments of capital, both human and financial, ensure that attention to them will never waver. Dealing with a lack is harder, especially when the best solution isn't top-down control but rather individual innovation. It is difficult to inculcate such behavior, especially through a collection such as this, with well over 100 contributors presenting a multiplicity of visions, many of which were specifically commissioned for the project. For the predominately European crowd who saw the exhibit at the Venice Biennale, the message was clear: This is our backyard. Our cities aren't perfect. In fact, their imperfection might be what makes them most exciting. Physically they may be emptying out, but for the intrepid and entrepreneurial, that just means an opportunity to fill them with something new. __ Shrinking Cities is online at www.shrinkingcities.com. In print: Shrinking Cities Volume 1 : International Research (2005, 736 pp.), Shrinking Cities Volume II : Interventions (2006, 896 pp.), and The Atlas of Shrinking Cities (2006, 160 pp.). All were edited by Philipp Oswalt for the Kulturstiftung des Bundes.
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