I was listening to NPR this morning and they were interviewing Dan Kildee of Flint, Michigan. Dan is the county treasurer and he has a unique plan to save his county from the years of foreclosures, fires and neglect experienced by the economic downturn: knock all the homes down.
The county of Genesee (which includes Flint) has been buying up parcels of foreclosed homes from the bank, giving them control over wide swaths of land long abandoned by residents and they are beginning to demolish homes and business on those tracts of land, essentially returning the land to open greenspace. Kildee believes that towns in economic despair like Flint, may need to contract about 40% concentrating the population and services in a smaller area, while beautifying once rough or burned out neighborhoods by turning them back into nature.
You can find a great article on this topic here. There were two things that really stuck out to me when listening to him this morning:
1. He talked about the American obsession with growth and expansion as central to most American's view of our country, and that proposing intentional demolition went against the ideals that most people he talked about this with, held. That it's been so ingrained in our brains for so many years (since the Louisiana Purchase and Manifest Destiny) that Americans are meant to expand and colonize, against all odds, that we find it hard to comprehend creating a more cramped and close living space.
2. He used the term "new city design" to describe this chance to start over from practically scratch and to really take control over a city founded on the principle of personal, not public, transportation. The majority of America was developed after the proliferation of the personal automobile which empowered/enabled us to create these far-flung cities where suburbs were the promised land. You can see the vast difference with cities developed pre-1900 (San Francisco, New York, Boston, etc.) versus cities built up post-1900 (anywhere in the San Francisco East Bay, large parts of Los Angeles).
These models of suburban community and transportation have not been sustainable and ultimately have failed. Think of communities outside of Sacramento or in the Central Valley. The model is: new tract home, shopping center, new housing community, school, new housing community, shopping center and so on. These places lack what I feel is the traditional definition of community and can not support each other long term.
Begin at the beginning
This really got me thinking about the progression of Transit Oriented Development and Sustainable Building trends and how cities with situations similar to Flint will have a chance to maybe do it right this time around. A chance for a city to wipe the slate clean and think longer term about how their residents and businesses will interact and thrive. The Obama Administration is already speaking with Mr. Kildee about applying this philosophy to 50 cities around the nation.
I don't think there's any doubt that our transportation, cities and economies will be vastly different in the next 20 or 30 years and many of our cities are not physically designed to encourage or support the kind of sustainable, connected communities of the future.
The bad economy can be seen as a fresh start, a reset, for many people. And maybe in this case, a chance for a city founded on 100 year old ideas to rise from the literal ashes of it's burnt out former homes and communities.
A chance for us to think smarter, even in our own communities, about great and true "placemaking" for future generations and for future sustainability.
Jared Willis
Comments