Dozens of US cities may have entire neighbourhoods bulldozed as part of drastic "shrink to survive" proposals being considered by the Obama administration to tackle economic decline. The government looking at expanding a pioneering scheme in Flint, one of the poorest US cities, which involves razing entire districts and returning the land to nature. Local politicians believe the city must contract by as much as 40 per cent, concentrating the dwindling population and local services into a more viable area. The radical experiment is the brainchild of Dan Kildee, treasurer of Genesee County, which includes Flint. Having outlined his strategy to Barack Obama during the election campaign, Mr Kildee has now been approached by the US government and a group of charities who want him to apply what he has learnt to the rest of the country. Mr Kildee said he will concentrate on 50 cities, identified in a recent study by the Brookings Institution, an influential Washington think-tank, as potentially needing to shrink substantially to cope with their declining fortunes...Telegraph
There you have it, kind of a "Buffalo Commons" for urban areas.
2 comments:
The comparison between this proposal and the Buffalo Commons is inexact. Anyone who wants more information on the Buffalo Commons should look at my Rutgers website, policy.rutgers.edu/faculty/popper. I and my wife Deborah Popper, a geographer at the College of Staten Island/City University of New York and Princeton Universities, originated the Buffalo Commons idea. The concept envisions no involuntary removals from the rural Plains, just the continued impersonal workings of demography and the market that have been moving in a Buffalo Commons direction at least since the 1930s Dust Bowl.
I suspect that if the /urban/ policy this blog describes ever materializes, probably many years from now, it will use just compensation for landowners. No other approach would be politically acceptable or fair. My wife, I and others deal peripherally with these urban issues in the material in the smart decline section of my website.
The only group specifically devoted to achieving the Buffalo Commons is the Great Plains Restoration Council, headquartered in Fort Worth and with operations in Colorado and South Dakota, gprc.org. I chair its board, and its executive director is Jarid Manos, greatplains@gprc.org.
Frank Poppper
Rutgers and Princeton Universities
fpopper@rci.rutgers.edu, fpopper@princeton.edu
732-932-4009, X689
Although I was trying to be humorous, thanks for the clarification.
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