The flip side of “smart growth” is “smart shrinkage.”
USA Today examines how the city of Richmond is dealing with its declining population: downsizing gracefully, as it were. Following the lead of hundreds of European cities, where populations are shrinking, many American cities are reinventing themselves as well.
“Everybody’s talking about smart growth, but nobody is talking about smart decline,” says Terry Schwarz, senior planner at Kent State University’s Urban Design Center of Northeast Ohio. The center runs the Shrinking Cities Institute in Cleveland, a city that has lost more than half its population since 1950. “There’s nothing that says that a city that has fewer people in it has to be a bad place.”
It’s a startling admission in a nation that has always equated growth with success. Cities are downsizing by returning abandoned neighborhoods to nature and pulling the plug on expensive services to unpopulated areas. Some have stopped pumping water, running sewer lines and repaving roads in depopulated neighborhoods. They’re turning decimated areas into parks, wildlife refuges or bike trails. They’re tearing down homes no one is living in and concentrating development where people want to move.
The problem of shrinking city populations in the United States is not as acute as in Europe, where fertility rates have plummeted nationally and immigration has been limited. But household sizes are getting smaller in the U.S., meaning that even cities with the same number of households support a population. USA Today portrays the City of Richmond as a city that is handling the transition well.
Money quote from Greg Wingfield with the Greater Richmond Partnership:
The city wants to grow, but it’s not waiting for a population boom, says Greg Wingfield, president and CEO of Greater Richmond Partnership Inc., an economic development marketing group. “We don’t as a region aspire to be the next Atlanta or the next Charlotte,” he says. “It’s about quality. It’s not about growing for the sake of growing.”
