One professor from Tufts has been looking at what’s happening in Flint, MI and sees that as properties are abandoned, new gardens happen. Here are my notes from one of his presentations last Fall:

Went to a session on Monday, November 10, 2008, on “Sustainable Design and (un) Development in Cities” by Justin Hollander of Tufts at Harvard. As a student of the Professors Popper at Rutgers who first proposed the Buffalo Commons, Hollander has been examining the cities that have lost population in the last 50 years or so, asking how people are planning for decline rather than growth. He is part of a small movement called “smart decline.”

It was a rudimentary presentation mostly dealing with Hollander’s studies of the Rust Belt and Flint, MI. It seems that some of the loss in housing has been replaced by urban agriculture but Hollander didn’t really get that agriculture can be both economically transformative and necessary for survival in a sustainable future. Hollander spoke with favor about the transition now happening in Youngstown, OH and their mayor, Jay Willliams, and the work of the Shrinking Cities Institute at UC Berkeley.

Planning for decline as well as growth is a wise move but politically difficult. Nobody talked about the present housing and mortgage crisis and how it might relate to these issues which I thought was interesting. I brought up resource issues and Peak Oil, especially as one cause mentioned for population decline was the transition away from rail transport and we may soon be transitioning back from trucks. Lots of blinders here, smart people with extremely narrow vision.

370 cities lost population from 1950-2000 worldwide
122 metropolitan areas in the US lost population from 2000-2004

http://www.shrinkingcities.com – German Federal Cultural Council
European countries are confronting population loss (and aging)

Smart decline toolkit to be released soon by Kent State Univ
http://www.tufts.edu/~jholla03

I was (one of many, perhaps) the guy who suggested that you provide paging of the entries. I was ecstatic that you implemented it…

so I have another request: Can you simply page using n entries rather than by day? It’s frustrating to go back “a day earlier” several times only to see the same entries appear again and again!

If you can allow us to page back and forth efficiently, it would be really nice!