This is a big question – for which there are no easy answers. Some cities are quite resilient: places like NY or London seem to be able to remake themselves seamlessly for new economic times. Others falter and never bounce back. But reading stories this weekend on two of my favorite cities - Pittsburgh, where I lived for nearly two decades, and Detroit, where my wife Rana’s family lives and where we visit often – got me thinking.
The superb article on Detroit by Lawrence Ulrich in the Sunday Times captures the true soul and very real dilemma facing that city. It is a must-read for anyone who cares about cities and Detroit in particular.
The second article, also in the Times, takes a looks at Pittsburgh’s rebirth and, among other things, suggests there may be lessons there for Detroit and places like it.
It’s hard not to compare the two cities and regions, but they are really different places. Pittsburgh for one developed before Detroit. Its core industry was steel which emerged in the late 19th century; and it also had a more diverse industrial base – with leading firms like Westinghouse, Pittsburgh Plate Glass, Alcoa, Heinz, and others across a wide and diverse group of industries. Plus it was a financial powerhouse, with the Mellon interests not only being banking titans but functioning as an early sort of venture capital firm. Its major universities are located in the city. Its downtown core is intact (much of the worst decline was concentrated in mill town along the rivers outside the city’s limits). The city retains several very high-income neighborhoods and several excellent urban public schools. It has perhaps better “material” to work with and certainly a longer time frame to rebuild.
A colleague of mine once speculated that it takes at least two generations to overcome an economic crisis. And that seems to hold, at least generally, when looking at, say, the crisis of steel in Pittsburgh or the crisis of manufacturing a generation or so earlier in Boston.
Detroit, while it has long faced urban decline, is facing its real economic test today. Yes, it has many assets, as Ulrich mentions. And, yes, it has to imagine and act on a future after auto. Auto has a role in it, particularly in design. But design itself is a bigger part of it, as Ulrich notes, Detroit was – and is – a center of design broadly. But it also must realize that even more so than Pittsburgh or Boston it cannot save itself. It is home to several good universities, but its major intellectual assets are outside the city – the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, and Michigan State University in Lansing. It also has to realize that it can benefit from greater connectivity to major metros and mega-region hubs nearby – Chicago and Toronto.
So, what do you think?
January 16th, 2009 at 12:36 pm
In his underappreciated 1967 work “A preface to urban economics” Wilbur Thompson posited that once a city reached a certain size threshold its perpetuation was all but certain. This, he suggested, was due to the fact that large size yields a level of diversity sufficient enough to hedge against decline in any one particular city function. Thus, places like Boston, New York, Pittsburg and even Detroit have grown large enough and diverse enough for their perpetuation in the face of decline in an important economic base.
With this in mind, your question, “how long does it take for cities to come back?” seems to be the right one and your colleagues estimate of a generation of two seems quite reasonable.
Yet I am not so sure the rebirth of large cities is in fact inevitable at all. So Detroit may not come back ever. One needs only to take a look at the large cities mentioned in ancient works such as the Christian Old Testament (Uruk, Ur, Thebes, Memphis, Babylon, Nineveh, Mari, Khattushash, Lagash, Antioch, Sardis, Ephesus, ect, ect) to realize that the existence of even the very largest and most diverse cities are certainly not inevitable. Therefore, the question as I see it becomes not how long does renewal take, but rather, why do some cities exhibit renewal, at all, when others don’t, in spite of their seemingly sufficient diversity and largeness? Large populations and economic diversity does not seem (to me) to be the end all tell all and so other more mysterious or even stochastic factors must be deeply involved in the growth/decline sequence of cities. If this is the case, then Detroit cannot simply copy what Pittsburg did because we don’t understand what they actually did in the first place.
On the other hand, perhaps city systems today function differently than those of the ancient past and so my anecdote is nonsense. Perhaps diverseness means different things in the modern world. I, however, do not think the role of cities in society has changed at all. Cities are still playing the same role they have always played… that being, accumulators of capital (physical, human, and creative) or stated differently, they act as the environments that inspire and facilitate the creation of new things out of old things. Yet, if this is true, why then does the cycle seem to stop in many places… and is Detroit one of them?
January 16th, 2009 at 5:15 pm
I was reading this article form CNN Money: U.S. solar panel makers prefer overseas http://tinyurl.com/8jwc6r and it occurred to me that high taxes and misplaced regulation are the biggest impediments to cities in the US (and especially Detroit) trying to recover and compete in a global marketplace. We have the second highest corporate tax rate in the world – that is a serious roadblock to economic growth.
The highest business taxes in the world and regulators coming from every direction mean that more and more companies are leaving. As evidence you can see the states where the highest percentages of jobs are lost overseas. California, Texas and Masuchusettes are among the most regulated and losing the most jobs.
California had a net loss of 144,000 people last year. New York was second on the “get the hell out of here” list. Oddly, both high tax states. Interesting that there is also a correlation between large cities and the need for very high tax rates versus just being able live off the additional tax collected from each individual.
According to L. Neil Smith for about one hundred years our productivity has been sapped by 50% by taxes. An additional 50% has been taken through regulation. That means that our technological and productive progress could have been four times higher for over 100 years.
So, where would we be today if the integrated circuit had been invented in 1915? If nuclear power had been developed before that time? Would we be facing an energy crisis if we were 300 years beyond where we are today? Would the wars we fought over the past 100 years ever have happened without crises over energy and wealth?
January 17th, 2009 at 6:21 am
Is it difficult to campare post industrial revolution cities with that of former civilizations ones,as these were exposed to environmental, health and war crisis which would be difficult to repeat in a short or medium term.
I think that most of big cities in crisis have a chance of recovering. The big issue is to find out and develop their differential assets in a creative way. In Spain, take Bilbao, a black city based on the steel industry during the lass century, has become a vibrant city, take Barcelona, based on textil industry,is one of the European capitals of innovation and urban tourism.
Even Valencia, my city, which is carrying out a territorial strategy based on major events (American´s Cup, Formula One, etc.), logistics and urban tourism, has become one of the most valuable cities for investing (Cushman and Wakefield report). Tehre are no recipes but plannig, investing and citizen and government support.
January 17th, 2009 at 9:43 am
I attended the Creative Cities Summit in downtown Detroit in October, 2008( I live near Windsor, On). Richard Florida spoke there and we were only at the time getting unofficial “leaks” about an auto company financial crisis. I was very impressed with the efforts made to revitalize the downtown core. One of the issues I observed is the Michigan residents who live outside the downtown core are still “afraid” to come downtown – more based on historical perceptions than current reality. I also observed in attendance five or six hundred passionate people interested in making positive change happen. The current challenge may be in the formal leadership. The previous mayors challenges have been a huge distraction and the new regime must clarify the future vision for Detroit so all the passionate “informal” leaders including the 50 CEO’s that have joined together can get everyone putting their energy in the same more focused direction. I went to the Detroit Institute of Arts a few weeks ago and also stopped in at the renovated Book Cadillac – these are great assets – the art collection is world class.
And by the way, Motown turned 50 this month too and if you haven’t been to the Motown Museum – it’s a wonderful showcase of creativity and innovation in action in Detroit 50 years ago.
January 17th, 2009 at 10:53 am
Today I was surprised TOYOTA re-made the planning for a decreasing production in Japan. In Feb.-Apr. 50% down(compare last year), 9000 made in a day. This number equals the 30 years ago. I am afraid that it cause a severe effect for many related SMEs. We usually miss behind major topics. Not only Nagoya-City Region, many cities in Japan could not expect this years ‘Mobile Shock’ in their employment, tax revenues now.
January 23rd, 2009 at 11:44 am
The hope/desire/need that all above have expressed that cities should/have a right/need support to come back is based on what? I assert only a myth. As pointed out there are many cities that we know of that have not comeback, and there are cities or at least local trade agglomerations that have just disappeared. Always in the examples of “comeback” cities returning two points are given (1) The failing or failed city has wonderful museums, (2) the tourism (parties, sports events, vistas) is wonderful. This leaves the reader to infer that the source of growth, enablement, and development of a city is not the fiber (borrowing from MIT, mens et manus)of its creatives (in the broadest sense of defining contributors), but the artifacts and hedonistic activities that abound within the city lines.
In discussing with denizens of Durham NC, I was reminded that Durham was more than medicine; in Nashville TN, I was told that “we are more than country music”. These are example of cities ignoring a major sinew of their community in fact demonstraing disdain for the muscle or mind.
Cities unlike the phoenix, the firebird, has no reified privilege to be reborn whole and dazzling to live another 500 years. In today’s modern work a city’s rebirth comes from mens et manus. What made Detroit great…of course automobile development and manufacturing that generated tremendous wealth and attracted 100,000s of thousand of illiterate and semi-illiterate workers who now have grandchildren and great grand children. Well American prowess in automobiles is over. We are just another producer of a competitive global commodity, the automobile. There is no rebirth for Detroit, Chicago, Gary Buffalo, Cleveland, etc.
What can be done to help such cities: “NOTHING”. They are all economic sinkholes. They are not sinkholes because they are doing something thereby working and struggling fruitlessly; They are sinkholes because they are doing nothing that is based on mens et manus, and they will only be point attractors for government funds. There is no alternative point; there is no possibility of developing a strange attractor which will have the power to overcome all the black hole gravity of the point attractor which is reinforced by years of discrimination, urban ignorance, blight, deteriorating infrastructure, and governmental corruption.
How did things get this way? My thesis is that two things happened simultaneously. One, the technology/professional world movement occurred; more scholarly/knowledge based skills were required to compete in the changed world. The demand for professional/technical talent and the utilization of such talent was required for the development and deployment of innovation to compete and flourish in the modern world. Two, in the cities that developed because of location, eg Chicago, or one time innovation periods like, Detroit did not facilitate/enable the development of their illerate or semiliterate urban citizens to be participants in the changed world. Just as they like let their urban physical infrastructure fail they also facilitated the disablement/failure of their urban intellectual infrastructure. The outcome remains a point attractor sinkhole.
Lastly, scholars have indicated that Philadelphia has over the last three centuries (not currently) has rebirthed several times. It would be enlightening to have someone comment if that was due to indigenous development or was a new population the source of the resepctive change.