A Commune With the City

The High Line opened earlier this month, an abandoned elevated railway turned park on the lower west side. It was built in the 1930s as a short line to service the manufacturing concerns in the area, including the cattle needs of the Meatpacking District. By the 1990s, as factories left the city and the neighborhood declined, it was derelict and slated for demolition. Rather than knock it down as a now-unsavory relic of a bygone area, a couple visionaries saw its potential as a greenway – a uniquely New York expression of the rails-to-trials movement.

The new High Line is an elevated urban promenade, the first portion of which runs from Gansevoort Street to 20th Street. It's a space to commune with nature, including plant species indigenous to Manhattan. It's an oasis of calm hovering above the hustle-bustle. It's also a place to commune with the city. By removing oneself from the life of the street, by changing one's perception – by surveying the city from a perch one story up – one can see the city with new eyes. Its magnificent architecture, garish commercialism, relentless energy, surprising quaintness, its natural beauty is revealed, as if to remind us of the possibility of being in gotham but not of it.

Shrinkage

This strikes me as an interesting idea. Obviously it's not a policy that a city should adopt lightly – it will involve substantial displacement – but for cities like Flint that have undergone massive population declines over a period of decades, demolishing neighborhoods and condensing the population may actually be the least miserable option. Higher density will make the city easier and cheaper to manage, and the negative externalities of derelict spaces will be eliminated.

Dozens of proposals have been floated over the years to slow this city’s endless decline. Now another idea is gaining support: speed it up. Instead of waiting for houses to become abandoned and then pulling them down, local leaders are talking about demolishing entire blocks and even whole neighborhoods.

The population would be condensed into a few viable areas. So would stores and services. A city built to manufacture cars would be returned in large measure to the forest primeval. “Decline in Flint is like gravity, a fact of life,” said Dan Kildee, the Genesee County treasurer and chief spokesman for the movement to shrink Flint. “We need to control it instead of letting it control us.”...

“A lot of people remember the past, when we were a successful city that others looked to as a model, and they hope. But you can’t base government policy on hope,” said Jim Ananich, president of the Flint City Council. “We have to do something drastic.”...

Nothing will happen immediately, but Flint has begun updating its master plan, a complicated task last done in 1965. Then it was a prosperous city of 200,000 looking to grow to 350,000. It now has 110,000 people, about a third of whom live in poverty....

But what about the people who do live here and might want their sidewalk fixed rather than removed? “Not everyone’s going to win,” he said. “But now, everyone’s losing.”

On many streets, the weekly garbage pickup finds only one bag of trash. If those stops could be eliminated, Mr. Kildee said, the city could save $100,000 a year — one of many savings that shrinkage could bring....

“If it’s going to look abandoned, let it be clean and green,” he said. “Create the new Flint forest — something people will choose to live near, rather than something that symbolizes failure.”