US Plans To Bulldoze 50 Shrinking Cities

chrb writes "Two days ago Slashdot discussed broke counties grinding their tarmac roads into gravel. Now the Telegraph reveals plans to raze huge sections of at least 50 US cities to the ground. The resulting smaller cities will be more economical to run, and the recovered land will be returned to nature."

Comments

Urban Transit

[royallthefourth]

White flight into the suburbs has brought us nothing but Wal-Mart and SUV's. I grew up in a suburb, and I hated how I was not able to go anywhere without a ride from my parents because everything was so far apart. Should I have children, I will not put them through that sort of social isolation.

Re:Urban Transit

[harks]

You never had a bicycle? Riding bikes to friends houses was the highlight of living in the 'burbs.

Re:Urban Transit

[Daniel Dvorkin]

If I had a choice of putting my kids through that or a car accident, I would pick the car accident any day.

Then you've never seen a bad car accident.

I was in emergency medicine for nine years, first as a military medic, then as a civilian EMT. I've seen plenty of gunshots and plenty of crashes. There is nothing that happens in a gang war that can make the kind of mess out of a human body that a moment of inattention on the road can. As far as deliberate violence goes, you have to get to bombs and artillery before you see that kind of destruction -- and street criminals don't generally go after each other with howitzers and B-52s.

You think you were traumatized by watching someone getting shot? Try picking up pieces of bodies strewn across half a mile of highway.

Re:Urban Decay?

[Kadin2048]

Part of the point of this is to raise population densities. Right now you have huge tracts of abandoned buildings, with people living here and there among them. It's a huge drain on public resources (providing police and, especially, fire protection to all the abandoned buildings), and doesn't really foster healthy communities.

Most of the plans that I've seen, including the one in Flint, involve buying up abandoned properties and demolishing them, while simultaneously restoring ones in better areas and encouraging people to move from blighted areas into them. The result is condensing the remaining residents of the city into a smaller, more densely-populated area. More public services in a smaller area, better public transportation, etc.

They're not trying to chase people out of the cities and into the suburbs or exurbs, quite the opposite. Most of the areas they're trying to get rid of were the original suburbs, and what they are trying to achieve is a rebuilding of the urban core.

Yeah, it would be great to get people to move in from the suburbs and fill in the high-density rowhousing in places like Baltimore, but that's just not going to happen. Nobody wants to live there, not given the way the areas are now. And those areas aren't going to get better. What's needed is a "rebooting" of cities -- get people back into the core areas, demolish some of the older urban/suburban transitional areas, and show that cities actually work. When people out in the 'burbs see that a city can be a nice place to live again, and not just a ghetto for people who have nowhere else to go, then it'll be time for new construction. (But this time, build mixed-use and actually plan the growth, rather than just letting stuff grow and create huge tracts of transportation-dependent, single-use housing, miles away from commercial or industrial areas.)

This is the first step towards making cities desirable again.