The Incredible Shrinking City

Sometimes, it's not smart growth that a city needs. It's smart shrinkage. The article after the link makes the salient point that all cities face decline at some point - recognizing this fact gets you a long way toward choosing the proper policies.

Random Thought of the Day

Some believe that people who find themselves drawn to city life are drawn, specifically, to the constant flux that characterizes any vibrant city. What they crave, it is said, is change - as though a love for the urban life were really just a species of restlessness, or a proclivity to boredom, either of which, I guess, they think would be cured by a spell on the farm. But I don't think this is right. While I draw a great deal of excited energy from living in a city, it is not change that I seek, and too fast a pace of change - as in, say, New York or Los Angeles - can even ruin the urban experience for me. No, what I like about city life can, I think, be shown in what I like about city neighborhoods. They change and they stay the same, though of course not always at the same time. A block that, say, started out as tenement housing may subsequently enjoy a second life as a home for several Vietnamese families, and then another life again as a faux-dive hotbed for hipsters who have far more money than they like to let on. Each of these neighborhoods - the poor one, the Vietnamese one, the poseur one - can last for a spell, but each too is certain to be replaced, as it replaced the neighborhood before it. These little puddles of reality stay for a while, and then evaporate, and then new puddles form, and then they too evaporate.

I don't think city people crave constant changes. I think they crave changing constants.