Rightsizing Shrinking Cities: The Urban Design Dimension [book chapter]

Abstract

Recently urban policy makers have begun to make “rightsizing” a watchword for the perceived mismatch between shrinking city populations, physical and infrastructural plants, and bud gets. Built for a population in some cases over twice that currently within the city limits, shrinking cities now have an unmanageably large array of streets, utilities, public buildings, parks, and housing. “Rightsizing” refers to the yet-unproved process of bringing cities down to a “right” size, meaning a size proportionate to city government’s ability to pay for itself. Rightsizing has thus far come to little in shrinking cities. In the United States, decades of optimistic master plans had little or no effect in reducing rates of population loss in deindustrializing cities such as Cleveland, Baltimore, or Philadelphia, all of which lost 25 to 57 percent of their populations between 1950 and 2010. Even in New Orleans, a city that had good reasons to make deliberate decisions about where residents and others should not rebuild after Hurricane Katrina, political fears and widespread citizen opposition stymied rightsizing decisions.1 Just as suburban developers resent planners’ proclaiming that they may not develop a parcel of farmland, residents of New Orleans resented that planners might transform their property or even their neighborhood into swampland.