How and why do cities change ? How should cities change? These are questions that great minds have grappled with since the most prominent architect and engineer of Ancient Rome, Vitruvius, strolled the cardo and the decumanus—the main streets of his city —on his way to meet with contemporaries in the forum.
This book seeks to slice off more focused research questions under those broader themes and contribute answers through an in-depth case study of New Bedford , Massachusetts . The urban studies literature is rich with general answers to urban change questions, but much less is understood about the nature of change in places facing depopulation and distress .
By many measures, New Bedford is a great city. But for much of the last century, it has also faced shrinkage in terms of jobs, and population and income levels . How can this be if growth is what makes a city great? Western culture tends to measure greatness in terms of expansion , development , and wealth . How can a city be great when these elements are in decline ?
The New Bedford story—its rapid nineteenth-century rise as a global whale oil capital to its twenty-first century celebrity for a robust stock of abandoned housing, crime, and unemployment —is not a unique one. While the nearby Boston region exploded in population, from 3.9 million in 1970 to 4.6 million in 2012, New Bedford dropped from 101,777 to 94,929 people. The factors that make New Bedford great, then, are not completely obvious.
Decline or “shrinking” does tend to wreak havoc on a city. Decline extracts wealth from a place, leaving behind vast levels of poverty , criminality , and social change . New Bedford is no different. Losing jobs has meant fewer people, emptying out once much more populated streets and neighborhoods . But this phenomenon of change happens everywhere. The world is always changing, and cities are constantly cycling in and out of growth and decline —if not citywide, then certainly at the scale of neighborhoods and blocks. What matters, and really makes a difference, is how that change is managed. Looking closely at just one rather typical city helps to elucidate that change management.
Zoning—still the primary local land-use regulation —originated at the beginning of the twentieth century and was aimed to manage the ill effects of growth. In fact, the entire urban planning and local government development apparatus is built around managing growth : subdivision control regulation, design review boards, development impact fees, and so on. When I interviewed a Phoenix planner several years ago about what his office was working on during the Great Recession , when growth ground to a halt, he said they were getting ready for the next round of growth. When I asked him how the Phoenix’s planning office was working to manage decline , he said that they weren’t. The city was overwhelmed with tens of thousands of vacant homes, but the answer was that the planning office did not do that kind of work. Other cities have attempted to manage decline , but most, like Phoenix, manage only growth.
Cities have been, historically, a lot less adept at managing decline than managing growth . Through both historical and contemporary viewpoints, this book seeks to examine this very conundrum. How does a city manage its shrinkage? Who does, and who ought to do, the managing? What does well-managed decline mean for the people who live in a shrinking place? What does it mean for the physical form of neighborhoods when streets, parks, and institutions like schools and hospitals decline?
How does local government respond to this shrinkage? Within cities, what does the city planning function do relative to shrinkage? What can it do? Can public policy and planning make a difference in managing the change that comes with decline ?
By looking closely at one city—New Bedford—I offer in this book the beginnings of answers to those questions. This memoir of an ordinary city paints New Bedford’s story in a way that shows both the special qualities of a small coastal, postindustrial city in New England and how the process of decline and growth affect what is, by most measures, an average city. 1
New Bedford really represents an entire category of cities that escape mainstream urban studies’ more customary attention to global cities (e.g., New York ), booming cities (Atlanta ), and shrinking cities (Flint). New Bedford-style ordinary cities don’t belong in those categories as they neither grow nor decline drastically. In their inconspicuousness, however, they account for the vast majority of cities in the USA.
San Francisco has grown spectacularly in recent years, yet nearby cities including San Mateo, Richmond, and Daly City all grew less than 1% (California Department of Finance 2015). States and the federal government in the USA pay attention to the problems of the headliner cities , like the New York State billion-dollar investment in the dramatically shrinking city of Buffalo. But in tens of thousands of cities across the globe, the quotidian task of running a city without any appreciable growth or decline is left unstudied. In New England , for example, among the 168 cities and towns with a population of 20,000 or higher in 2010, only 33 grew by more than 1% per year since 1980 (booming cities). Twenty-four experienced a net loss (shrinking cities), but the wide majority, 111 cities, were in between—not really growing or shrinking. These middle-of-the-road cities are not topping any “best of” or “worst of” list of cities, though the challenges that local officials face are daunting. They have both the real estate and gentrification pressures of new development in some areas, while they experience the difficulties of depopulation and disinvestment in other areas. Such schizophrenia within a single city can be particularly hard to manage and effectively plan for.
My own research has used the easy, dichotomous growth-decline categorization to understand the problems of depopulation , disinvestment, and abandonment, but sometimes those categories are muddied in reality. One of my earliest research projects took me to a devastated neighborhood in Youngstown , Ohio, replete with abandoned buildings and overgrown lots. Through a mix of qualitative and quantitative research, I was able to say something meaningful about how the city changed when jobs and people started to leave. In retrospect, the problem with my initial conclusions was that some Youngstown neighborhoods are now thriving. The active investment going on in the downtown of the city meant that calling Youngstown a shrinking city was oversimplification. In this book, I seek to remedy that weakness of categorization by acknowledging that even in emptied-out cities, there is some growth. Similarly, as I’ve witnessed in my research into the Sun Belt region of the USA, there is decline even in growing cities.
For a little context on New Bedford, I offer here a quick tour of the demographic shifts in the surrounding New England landscape. New Bedford’s population decline began in the 1930s; but by 1950, nearby Boston and Providence also began to witness precipitous drops in their own populations, as did scores of similarly situated postindustrial cities in New England and throughout the Rust belt , like Hartford (Connecticut), Portland (Maine), Buffalo (New York ), Scranton (Pennsylvania), Cleveland (Ohio), Gary (Indiana), and many, many more (see Table 1.1
Table 1.1
Population and employment levels in New Bedford, 1920–2010
1920 | 1930 | 1940 | 1950 | 1960 | 1970 | 1980 | 1990 | 2000 | 2010 | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
New Bedford total population | 121,217 | 112,597 | 110,341 | 109,189 | 102,477 | 101,777 | 98,478 | 99,922 | 93,768 | 95,072 |
New Bedford total employment | – | 52,124 | 40,400 | 46,421 | 41,771 | 41,090 | 44,891 | 39,663 | 39,758 | 41,649 |
% pop fall from last decade | – | −7% | −2% | −1% | −6% | −1% | −3% | 1% | −6% | 1% |
% employ fall from last decade | – | – | −22% | 15% | −10% | −2% | 9% | −12% | 0% | 5% |
Sources | Total employed in Civilian labor force | Total employed (16 yrs+) in Civilian labor force | Total employed (16 yrs+) in Civilian labor force | Total employed (16 yrs+) in Civilian labor force | ||||||
Table 14, Gainfully Occupied Males and Females, 10 years and over, by Color and Nativity, for Cities of 100,000 or more: 1930. United States. Bureau of the Census.Title Fifteenth census of the United States: 1930. Abstract of the Fifteenth census of the United States.Publication Info. Washington, U. S. Govt. Print. Off., 1933 | U.S. Bureau of the Census. C... |