(2009-06-13) Bulldozing Cities

A new Urban Design idea is to bulldoze sections of shrinking-population cities like Flint Mi to creates higher-density areas. The radical experiment is the brainchild of Dan Kildee, treasurer of Genesee County, which includes Flint. Having outlined his strategy to Barack Obama during the election campaign, Mr Kildee has now been approached by the US government and a group of charities who want him to apply what he has learnt to the rest of the country. Mr Kildee said he will concentrate on 50 cities, identified in a recent study by the Brookings Institution, an influential Washington think-tank, as potentially needing to shrink substantially to cope with their declining fortunes... In Detroit Mi, shattered by the woes of the US car industry, there are already plans to split it into a collection of small urban centres (Urban Village) separated from each other by countryside... Karina Pallagst, director of the Shrinking Cities in a Global Perspective programme at the University of California, Berkeley, said there was "both a cultural and political taboo" about admitting decline in America. It sounds like they're still just getting up to low-density in Flint, still leaving Single Family Home-s with traditional plot-sizes. I think they need to get up medium-density, and maybe that means a single center. (Brown Field)