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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."
This seems like a win-win scenario. Construction companies get hired to demolish the old buildings, which stimulates the economy and if the right buildings get the axe, old run down buildings full of lead paint and asbestos insulation go away and are replaced with meadows, forests or new greener buildings. The catch would be all the geezers coming out of the wood-work to save all the "historical sites"
This reminds me of the "urban renewal" projects of the 50s and early 60s, when huge sections actually were razed in various major cities. Boston's West End was a victim of this.
It's widely considered to be one of the stupidest projects the government's ever done.
Here I thought we were supposed to encourage people to move back into cities so high population densities would make mass transit more viable. Silly me.
This is understandably a touchy subject for a lot of people. It's hard to overstate the sense of loss; more than that, the sense of historical obliteration. Neighborhoods where once happy, prosperous people lived productive lives are vacant, and one cannot help but feel that those happy, prosperous people are gone, perhaps never to return, and those empty houses stand like tombstones marking the death of their dreams.
Of course, this is thankfully not really true - those happy and productive people simply moved to other places, where they continue to live out their happy, productive lives. We feel bad about razing these homes because we feel like we are razing the lives of the people that used to occupy them. But those people left those homes behind long ago. They've moved on - so should the rest of us.
We feel sick about obliterating what should be valuable assets. This is a hard problem too. laborers built these structures, many of them good strong structures, some of them the likes of which will not be seen again. With care, they should be able to last centuries. But a society too obsessed with preserving the past - particularly a past that is not valued - is a moribund society. We should not carelessly annihilate our history. But at the same time we need to remember who we, historically, are:
We are a dynamic society. We are a dynamic people. The only constant is change. These cities shrank while other cities grew. It is in many ways a reflection on the freedom of our society, that people and businesses decided to leave and go elsewhere. Other places gained while these places lost. Now it's time for the principle of creative destruction to come into play. It's time to give up on what people have freely decided they don't value. It's time to re-allocate resources from failure to profit. It's time to clear the landscape of the ruins of yesterday, to make room for the possibilities of the future.
The ideas in this article are on the right track. We can't get sentimental about a past that is gone, never to return. Raze the unowned buildings, now sheltering criminals and vagrants. Hell, de-annex the empty land and return it to the township. Sell whatever mobile capital goods are underutilized. Wipe the ordinance book clean and start over again. Put every budget item and every tax on the chopping block. Clear the path for future opportunity, or it will never arrive.
If you don't know where you are going, you will wind up somewhere else.
It would be very interesting to close off part of a disused city or even a whole city and leave it as it is to see how nature would take over without human influences. Would it decay as some predict?. Would nature take over tower blocks for high rise living? ... The nearest experiment we have is Chernobyl, but thats nothing like American conditions such as weather etc.. and a 2nd city to compare how nature adapts to part or even a whole city without humans around would be fascinating.
Also part of a disused city would be a very valuable and useful proving ground for advanced research in robotics, such as cars using the road networks and urban exploring robots. Its a once in a life time chance to gain unrestricted access to a big part of a city.
Another very good use would be to leave part of a disused city as a film set of a slowly decaying abandoned city. (The WW2 Blitz in London created a lot of disused buildings that appeared in many films for decades). Part of a city would be an incredible once in a lifetime opportunity to create a huge film set that doesn't disrupting and interrupt normal working cities and its cheaper and easier for film companies to use. So its win win for these companies helping the US film industry and other businesses in cities otherwise inconvenienced by filming. The film companies must be able to see the potential. It would be such a good help to the US film industry for many years to come. They could even set up a joint company to manage the disused part of a city for the film industry and lease parts out to film companies world wide.
No. This is the result of deindustrialization of the West. As our economy becomes increasingly information-based and decreasingly manufacturing-based, old manufacturing centers are crumbling. But a new economy is rising, one based on information and information technology.
The RIAA/MPAA fiascos and the rise of iTunes and P2P, the failing auto industry, and the current economic disaster are all results of the growing pains associated with this transformation.
Anybody who doesn't realize it at this point should re-open Heidi and Alvin Toeffler's books, because they provided the roadmap years ago. The fact that is happening now is not a surprise to me at all.
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You know, It may be true statistically speaking but I don't fear driving a car as I do standing on the street minding my own business while two idiots shoot at each other while trying to run away at the same time and emptying 8 or 9 or more rounds of ammo each.
I've seen it happen live on multiple occasions, one of which I was less then 5 foot from one of the gang bangers who got shot. I'm not scared of guns, I own my own, I wouldn't have any reservations shooting someone to protect myself or someone else, but I also down stand down range at a shooting/taget range. In the one instance, It was in Venice CA (a suburb of Los Angelos and within the greater LA area) on a business meeting, I went for a walk afterward to find some lunch, and next thing I know, I hear a gunshot right beside me and a bullet whizzing by, I ducked behind a car and was joined by a woman and her toddler sized kid as I heard several more gunshots. There was about a dozen more shots when we saw someone attempting to run backwards by the car go down while shooting. He dropped the gun as he hit the ground, the action was open signaling it was empty, and blood started pooling around his upper torso. The shooting stopped and everyone waited a minute or so before standing back up. It felt like it took forever when it happened, 5 or 10 minutes when thinking back about it, but it happened in less then 1 minute.
No one who wasn't in the gunfight was injured outside of emotionally, I mean watching a stranger die in front of you isn't exactly pleasant. I don't know if I witnessed the death blow or if he was hit before we saw him go down, there was no blood spray or bodies flying through the air like in the movies. The cops said they thought it was a rival gang ordeal where someone went into another territory.
If I had a choice of putting my kids through that or a car accident, I would pick the car accident any day. I doubt too many young kids can go through that without being fucked in the head for a while. That's probably one of the reasons why people don't make it out of the inner city.
Oh, by the way: Portland (and Oregon at-large) pretty much pioneered the urban planning and growth boundary system that you are cheerleading with your car-hate and enviro-spew in the 1970s.
Sigh. Typical US-centric thinking, even by supposedly enlightened west-coasters.
The idea of a green belt dates to biblical times, and the modern idea of a legislated development-free belt around a rapidly expanding city dates to 1930s London (England)
But since the London greenbelt happened after the Great Disappearance of the Rest of the World in 1776, you can be forgiven for not knowing about it.
Children don't do that anymore.. Their parents are too terrified they will be kidnapped. Sadly, I'm not joking.. its pretty damn sad. Check out www.Freerangekids.org for one lady fighting back against the "think of the children" fear.
What are we going to do tonight Brain?