Sculpture to Invigorate St. Louis, a Shrinking City - NYTimes.com
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/05/arts/design/05close.html?_r=1

One telling measure of a city's past glories and present challenges (St. Louis)... The United States Census of 1950 reported roughly 850,000 people living in St. Louis; today the number is around 350,000. Or there’s this: In 1988, when Jonathan Franzen published “The Twenty-Seventh City,” a novel about real and fictional tribulations afflicting St. Louis, his title referred to the city’s plunge in rank to 27th largest in America from 4th in less than a century. If he wrote the book now, just two decades later, he would have to call it “The Fifty-Second City.”

Signs of the depleted population are everywhere, from the boarded-up houses that dot the city’s north side to the stubbornly vacant office buildings downtown.

Over the last 10 years, however, civic groups, private developers and city leaders have been trying to nurse downtown St. Louis back to life. Taking cues from revitalization drives in other midsize cities, they have created thousands of residential loft units. There is now a bookstore in the area, and next month a local grocery chain plans to open its first downtown branch.

But perhaps the most original — and conspicuous — step in the campaign is Citygarden, a 2.9-acre sculpture park that opened Wednesday on two blocks of the city’s central corridor, known as the Gateway Mall.

Financed by the Gateway Foundation, a nonprofit organization that installs public art in the St. Louis area, the park cost between $25 million and $30 million — which does not include the collection of 24 works by artists including Fernand Léger, Tony Smith, Jim Dine and Bernar Venet. (The foundation, which has a longstanding policy of not commenting to the news media, declined to disclose the collection’s value.)

Within walking distance of the Gateway Arch, the park is intended to bring tourists and art fans to the mall and to draw office workers and loft dwellers outside with an array of amenities. “It’s really a hybrid landscape,” said Warren Byrd, a principal of Nelson Byrd Woltz, the landscape architecture firm in Charlottesville, Va., that designed Citygarden. “It’s some combination of a city park and a sculpture garden.”

The sculpture collection, which includes both modern and contemporary works, is cosmopolitan in flavor, ranging from Mr. Dine’s whimsical treatment of Pinocchio in “Big White Gloves, Big Four Wheels” to the mysterious, egglike form of the Japanese sculptor Kan Yasudas’s “Door of Return.” Visitors can call up an Acoustiguide-style audio tour, read by prominent St. Louisians, by dialing a dedicated number on their cell phones.

The park’s other features include a cafe, a massive “spray plaza” and a split-level pool whose two parts are joined by a waterfall. A granite-capped “meander wall” snakes through the park’s southern portion, offering seating and spatial definition, while a complementary wall of Missouri limestone arcs diagonally through the northern section. The walls, Mr. Byrd said, were “our way of marking several territories in the site” — which was previously two empty squares of grass — and of linking the two blocks.

The park, shown below in a rendering by Nelson Byrd Woltz, has no formal entrances or barriers to segregate its manicured paths and quiet spaces from the streets around it.

“It has no limits,” said Mr. Byrd, whose firm also designed the Flight 93 National Memorial in Shanksville, Pa. “We wanted to make this site accessible to everybody.”

He added that the landscape included several “design gestures” — rows of Ginkgo trees, native plants, wide sidewalks — that could be extended to other portions of the Gateway Mall.

City planners say they share that vision, but for now they are looking to these two blocks to spur economic development on their own.

“There are several development opportunities right in the vicinity, and as the economy recovers, I think Citygarden will make those sites a lot more attractive,” said Barbara Geisman, the city’s executive director of development. “This is probably one of the best things that’s happened downtown in the last couple of decades.”

You can read this article in full at the above link




June 2009 from Karina
With the current economic recession, the US media is paying huge attention to the topic shrinking cities. Here is some of the coverage (US and abroad).

Shrinking Cities International Research Network (SCiRN) in the News:

The New York Times published an article on April 22 regarding Flint, MI and their idea to control the city's decline by demolishing entire blocks and even whole neighborhoods, condensing the population as well as stores and services into a manageable core. You can read about it here: 
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/22/business/22flint.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=pallagst&st=cse

On June 12, shrinking cities was the topic of To The Point, a daily current affairs discussion program broadcast nationally on public radio from KCRW NPR station in Los Angeles, looks at how cities are coming up with new solutions to control change, instead of simply trying to cope with it as more and more metropolitan areas lose populations and healthy tax bases. It's all about shrinking, not growing. This is a great discussion with five experts. Link to the podcast: http://www.kcrw.com/news/programs/tp/tp090612honey_i_shrunk_the_c

Additional coverage of shrinking cities occurred in print in a controversial article in the London Daily Telegraph on June 12 about "Bulldozing cities". According to the article, dozens of U.S. cities may have entire neighborhoods ‘bulldozed’ as part of a "shrink to survive" strategy to tackle urban decline. Read the article here: 
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/financetopics/financialcrisis/5516536/US-cities-may-have-to-be-bulldozed-in-order-to-survive.html


March 2009 from Jasmin
NYTimes.com

All Boarded Up
TONY BRANCATELLI, A CLEVELAND CITY COUNCILMAN, yearns for signs that something like normal life still exists in his ward. Early one morning last fall, he called me from his cellphone. He sounded unusually excited. He had just visited two forlorn-looking vacant houses that had been foreclosed more than a year ago. They sat on the same lot, one in front of the other. Both had been frequented by squatters, and Brancatelli had passed by to see if they had been finally boarded up. They hadn’t. But while there he noticed with alarm what looked like a prone body in the yard next door. As he moved closer, he realized he was looking at an elderly woman who had just one leg, lying on the ground. She was leaning on one arm and, with the other, was whacking at weeds with a hatchet and stuffing the clippings into a cardboard box for garbage pickup. “Talk about fortitude,” he told me. In a place like Cleveland, hope comes in small morsels.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/08/magazine/08Foreclosure-t.html?_r=1&ref=magazine


Feb 01 2009 from Laura

Rock Bottom for Decades, but Showing Signs of Life
As Americans wonder just how horrible the economy will become, Braddock, Pa., offers a perverse message of hope: Things cannot
possibly get any worse than they are here.
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Dec 16 2008 from Jasmin

"Century of the city" is published by Rockefeller Foundation.

"... This book is an impassioned call for action. Vibrant with images and littered with sidebars, Century of the City is magazine-readable but book-intelligent. It’s the result of a month-long colloquy hosted by the Rockefeller Foundation to identify and strategize on the challenges faced by rapidly urbanizing 21st century cities. The focus is on taking multidisciplinary approaches to the issues faced by cities, from the underserved slums of India to the most bustling economic powerhouses of the new China. Readers will come away convinced that even the most inefficient cities are incredibly important to the livelihood of both local citizens and global citizens, and that making them better is truly an international imperative..."


Oct 19 2008 from Cristina

Job losses spread in Silicon Valley
A wave of job losses has started to spread across California's Silicon Valley as the optimism of technology start-ups turns to pessimism amid the market rout
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