Public Space |
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Vol. 8, No. 1 (September 2003) |
___Eduard
Führ Cottbus |
How Is It That Cities Can Shrink? |
In Urban
planning and urban sociology the “Shrinking City” is a technical term, which
denotes cities, where the population is considerably decreasing and where it
seems conceivable that this is a continuing process. This ”shrinking” is seen
as a danger for the city and as a task for the urban planner.
In the last
decade, predominantly cities in East Germany have been shrinking. However the
phenomenon can be observed everywhere and at all times. Everybody knows Rome,
where the population reached only in the 19th century a similar
level as in the height of its Antiquity. Today it is a capital full of life,
where one gladly spends a couple of days. It stands in line with New York,
Paris and London. This – by the way – inspires hope for the shrinking East
German cities.
I believe, that
the denotation becomes important for the management of the
process, hence – before dealing with the denoted process – I would like to
examine the connotations. Let us therefore try – by playing with words and
images – to specify both the term and the notion of ”shrinking”, so that we may
understand what is actually meant by ”shrinking cities”.
We say that ”funds are shrinking”; if the funds shrank, you have less
money than before. If this happens on a major scale, you were rich before and
now you are poor. If you are not a Franciscan monk – which is a mendicant order
– the shrinking of your funds is consequently something bad. On the other hand
– if you actually are a Franciscan – it is both an obligation and a moral duty
and therefore it is a good thing.
An apple has
shrunk at the end of winter; this doesn’t spoil its taste at all. A Salami
also shrinks if you hang it up to season. The Salami matures and tastes
much better than if it was fresh. Frost grapes have shrunk and produce the best
wine. Thus shrinking is not such a bad thing after all.
If I dissolve a
lump of sugar in my tea, does it shrink? Is a tree shrinking, if it sheds its
leaves in autumn? Does an orange shrink, if I peel it? Do I shrink, if I get my
hair cut?
If I drink from
a jug, does it shrink? Is it not emptied? But remains otherwise a jug?
If I live in a
small family house, which has a living room, kitchen, parents’ bedroom and two
rooms for the children, does it shrink if both my children grow up and leave
home? Isn’t the house rather becoming bigger? Is it not true that many older
people move to a new smaller flat, because their old one ”has become too big”
for them?
Aren’t the
cities consequentially growing, if their population shrinks? Aren’t they
becoming bigger, because they are used by less inhabitants?
The shrinking is
yet conceived ambivalently in specific professional discourses. In July 2001,
the 32nd conference of the ”Environmental Design Research
Association” (EDRA) on the topic of ”Old World – New Ideas” took place in
Edinburgh. This conference was subtitled ”Environmental and Cultural Change and
Tradition in a Shrinking World”[1].
If you look at the papers presented at the conference, you will notice that the
shrinking of the world is neither a loss, nor a decrease or a reduction, but is
rather understood as a coming closer together.
In the
discourses of the ”shrinking city”, however, it has negative connotations. The
shrinking of the city calls for the saving touch of specialists.
To become
finally more abstract: to call a quantitative ”getting less and less”
”shrinking”, implies a value judgement on the process – on one hand already by
the use of the term, on the other in the connotations it carries in daily life
experience, which are implied and consequently not explicitly stated. We could
also see in the language games that ”shrinking” is a process, which addresses
the thing, which ”shrinks”, in its totality and in its innate material quality,
more specifically in its conceived essence (hence the tree doesn’t shrink if it
is shedding leaves). The term seems only in so far applicable, if the existence
of the thing that ”shrinks” isn’t called into question, because what ”shrinks”
doesn’t disappear (as the lump of sugar).
”Shrinking” is
an intrinsic process, which takes somehow external influences into account (it
is the external frost which lets grapes shrink to become frost grapes), however
the focus, the perspective one imparts with the use of the word ”shrinking” is
oriented on the state of ”becoming” or the state of ”being” of the thing,
rather than on the causes for its state of being. You can’t say ”the city is
being shrunk by” (which is – by the way – semantically incorrect, even though
it appears in a film title ”Honey, I Shrank the Kids”); you can say ”the city
shrinks”, it seems thus auto-poetic in the use of the term. ”Compression” on
the other hand – to use any other word from the same field of events –
verbalises the forces acting on an object, the dynamism of said force and
possible originators and actors. The ”shrinking city” takes the object ”city”
itself to be the actor of its shrinking process, the term doesn’t refer to any
external actors outside its object.
To call a diminishing
a ”shrinking or respectively a growing of X” – is to map out ”X”.
If you say for
example ”the flat is becoming bigger when the children leave home”, this is
strictly speaking wrong, because the actual living space remains the same, the
extent of the use activities of all the inhabitants is decreasing (rather than
increasing), consequently you can’t talk of a ”becoming bigger”. The statement
of the ”flat” ”becoming bigger” is only true, if we conceptualise ”flat” as a
relation between living space and use activities. To call the decrease of the
number of citizens, etc. a ”Shrinking of the City” – i.e. to denote a decrease
of individual components to significantly change the essential quality of a
complex phenomenon, maps out references, causalities and the identity of the
whole – by the simple use of the term which describes the process. On one hand
the number of citizens and the amount of tax revenue are seen as constituting
and essential preconditions for a city, on the other hand the city is essentially
designed by the number of inhabitants and the amount of tax revenue.
In the history
of science the term appears first in 1987 – as far as I know – in a book by Häußermann and Siebel on ”Neue Urbanität”. It refers as an adaptation of the sociological
term ”deglomeration” to the then loss of inhabitants
of West German(!) cities. In 1988 the term becomes worthy of a headline in an
essay by these two authors.[2]
Roughly at the
same time in 1987 Jean McFadden introduces the term ”shrinkage” in
the reflections on
Glasgow, which lost between 1946 and 1986 one third of its inhabitants.[3]
Today, the term refers mainly to the cities in East Germany and ”shrinkage” has
become one of the key terms of urban planning and city sociology.
The City
The above
considerations on the term shrinkage lead us to the question, if we can at all
talk about the shrinking of the city, and of what nature the ”city” is,
which shrinks?
If we conceptualise
the city according to the administrative terms of the present day in Germany,
i.e. if we define the city by the number of its inhabitants (a place with at
least 5,000 inhabitants is considered a town, a place with at least 100,000
inhabitants is a city of a higher order, not to say a metropolis), then we
could say that not only the number of inhabitants is decreasing, but also that
the city is shrinking. If a particular city used to have 110,000 inhabitants,
but now only 85,000 citizens populate the city, then the city shrank: the city
isn’t a city of a higher order any more (neither a metropolis), it is reduced
to town status.
If – by contrast – we
look at the medieval definition of the city and if we understand the city to be
a place which has been granted by the sovereign particular privileges and a
certain number of these, then the city wouldn’t shrink if it lost inhabitants,
but it would do so, if it lost one or several of its privileges. It would
shrink, if it lost e.g. the right to hold a market. If we defined the city as a
territorial power, like for example the Italian city states of the Renaissance,
it would grow, if it conquered additional territories, but it would shrink, if
it were dislodged by other powers.
Nowadays, the
cities are clearly defined as a territory by the respective national
constitutions. Their legal status has not changed in the recent years we have
been talking of their shrinking.
Their number of
inhabitants, however, has changed: if it had over 100,000 inhabitants before,
and if the number of citizens has dropped below this number, then it is from an
administrative perspective not a city of a higher order any more (neither a
metropolis), but only a town. If it used
to have 102,000 citizens and this number falls to 98,000 inhabitants, the city
may have shrunk. As a consequence, the municipality may also receive less funds
from the federal government. But I have to be aware, that I am using an
administrative definition of the city. Under these circumstances a decrease of
the population from 150,000 to 102,000 would be completely irrelevant.
Yet for the
administrative definition of the city it is important to define, if the
citizens living on the outskirts of the town are living within or outside the
city limits. The total population number shifts accordingly, it is in- or
decreasing, tax revenue, etc. is also changing. But does the city thus grow or
shrink at the same time?
We see with
these questions that it is necessary to define what a ”city” is. We have to
examine what we understand by the term ”city” when we assert that it is shrinking;
we have to investigate, if we want to agree with such a definition of the city
and we have to discuss, what rôle it is supposed to
play in our lives and what kind of institution it should be in our
commonwealth.
Within the scope
of the present essay I do not intend to provide a binding definition of the
term ”city” to develop on this basis a city culture; the reflected development
of the ”city” concept can only be the result of an existing and developed city
culture.
However, I would
like to point into this direction: the city is to my mind city culture and
urbanity. Urbanity has at least three aspects:
Georg Simmel, yet also
Alexander Mitscherlich – to name but two classic
thinkers – see in the city a place and a tool for cerebration. For Simmel (Die Großstadt und das Geistesleben, 1903) the mass
of sensory and cognitive challenges of the city has to overwhelm the receptive
capacities of the individual, so that it will lead to cultivated reticence,
individual liberation, reflected social actions and to cerebration. Alexander Mitscherlich (Die Unwirtlichkeit unserer Städte, 1965)
conceptualised the city as a homestead, which is only possible to come into
being, if there are mutually satisfactory interpersonal relationships within
its bounds and if the city has non-order, homely and strange qualities from
which the individual can wrest his home. (Mitscherlich
1965, p. 136f). It is the success of this wresting process, which creates the
home, it is the empowered and succeeding activities of its citizens. The home
is for Mitscherlich not an end in itself, to loose
oneself in or to close oneself off from the world, but home has to be a place
insofar as one ”... needs a set place where to start off from” (Mitscherlich 1965, p. 24).
”The inhabitant
who has degenerated to a habitation consumer” (Mitscherlich
1965, p. 38) shall become a citizen again, who is thus able to better satisfy
his impulses:
“Satisfaction doesn’t mean the repelling of passions and the channelling
in manipulated directions, towards manipulated objects, but a higher
cerebration. It signifies more intellectuality, a freer, cognitively controlled
intercourse with the animal drives, a firmer relationship between insight and
passion.” (Mitscherlich 1965,
p. 27)
Häußermann and Siebel try in
their above mentioned book to develop a new concept of urbanity and to that end
take recourse to the significance of the city in medieval times.
”Until the appearance of territorial states, which took the cities’
political and economic independence, there existed a clearly identifiable and
distinct city culture. This city culture consisted of a specific mixture of
economic, political and social structure, which existed in contrast to the
agricultural-feudal countryside. The city was ‘a social total phenomenon’ (Gurvitch), which represented a different society, an
earlier state of the bourgeois society with all positive and negative
attributes, which were later to characterise that society. Urbanity was hence
not only a way of living , but a way to organise a society. The basic category,
to which all of its attributes can be reduced, is that of freedom: freedom of
political dependency in the form of the civic autonomous government, of
exploitation in the form of free trade, of social degradation in the form of
legal equality. All this was joined in the city to property, the civic society
was from the start a class society – but even the dispossessed, the poor and
the rabble still distinguished themselves from the population of the
countryside by being free individuals and not serfs. Even if they were not
materially better off than the subjects of the sovereigns, they still shared as
city people in the historical perspective of their emancipation of individual oppression
and dependency on nature. They belonged, precisely because they were living in
the city, to a different future.”
(Häußermann / Siebel 1987, p. 238f)
From a
historical perspective this is of course not true: the medieval town was not an
enclave in the feudal system, but rather a specific part of that system; to
explain the ‘freedom’ of the lower class with their ‘share in the historical
perspective’ is nothing but a romanticising glorification. Still, Häußermann and Siebel are describing correct details.
However it concerns the citizens’ dream of the city (of the 19th
century), which we should try and continue to realise today.
Häußermann and Siebel see
further urbanities, which – according to them – developed in line with the
industrial capitalist city in the 19th century, the petty bourgeois
ones of the flaneur and the bohemian and the
proletarian one of the worker. These would be partial urbanities, which
developed as a sub-cultures or counter-cultures. Their understanding of
urbanity would postulate
”… the political freedom of the citizen under
the regulations of an enlightened rationality and the economic equality of
independent producers under the principles of the market economy. This is a
thoroughly anarchic utopia. The image of the belligerent solidarity of the
proletarian milieu similarly includes such an utopian perspective: the hope of
a liberated solidarity in a communist society. And even the flaneur
in its reduced social perspective represents still a partial aspect of civic
culture: the liberation from necessary work, the alleviation of the toils of
daily reproductive work, the being set free for sensual enjoyment and
culture...”
(Häußermann / Siebel 1987, p. 241)
For Häußermann and Siebel both urbanities have lost their
socio-political perspective at the end of the 20th century, for
them, the proletarian milieu only exists in folklore and the bourgeois urbanity
has lost all its emancipated content by being purely reduced to consumption.
‘Liberated solidarity’ and ‘being set free for sensual enjoyment and culture’
to take up their terms – even granting their justified criticism – would still
be daydreams today, which – to my mind – we should continue to work on to make them come true.
The material
endowment of the city, its infrastructure and its built institutions, serves
not only to liberate the individual from unnecessary work and inconvenience
(according to Häußermann and Siebel 1987, p. 246).
The theatre building and its ensemble, the public library and its stock of
books, the public swimming pool, a dense public transportation system and
reasonably priced, frequently running means of public transport – even after
the end of the theatre performance – not only help the public to become
liberated, but they are rather indispensable tools to create and accomplish
urbanity.
If we
conceptualise the city as urbanity, we have to note that it is not necessarily
the urban quality that has to ”shrink”, if the number of inhabitants and the
amount of tax revenue is decreasing.
If we grasp the
city as urbanity this doesn’t mean at all that we have miraculously solved the
problem. Especially in this case we have to notice that the urban quality
shrinks to a larger extent. The shrinkage of the urban quality is located in
one aspect in the city, in another it is also located to a much greater degree
in the country. I think it is therefore wrong, to try to solve the crisis of
the city by a migration from the countryside to the city, i.e. by allocating
areas close to the city core for the building of detached house in residential
areas. This will inevitably lead to a de-urbanisation of the city, i.e. a
further ”shrinkage of the city”. The aim of all activities has to be the
urbanisation of the city and – this has to be stressed – especially the
urbanisation of the whole country.
If in early human
cultures a place was shrinking[4], if the number of its inhabitants was decreasing, if its houses fell
into disrepair and were not rebuilt, if trade was dying down and if hunting and
farming was more and more limited to the immediately surrounding areas of the
place, then – and this is a bit speculative – the world of the inhabitants of
the place grew actually smaller, the remaining space, which was not appropriated by them, was not covered,
neither thought of and did not belong to their life experience any more.
Consequently we can actually talk of a ”shrinkage”.
Or a potential
development area. number decreases. Already the property titles – be that public
or private ones – still remain. The spaces are anytime and comparatively easily
available for people, be that as a holiday resort, a nature reserve or a future
development area. Even the absolutely devoid spaces will be appropriated as a
part of our world through cartography, cataloguing and cognitive de- and
ascription. All the things which have been removed from concrete use – to refer
to a close-by extreme example of the strip-mining areas of Lower Lusatia near Cottbus and a farther away one such as the
Antarctic – will be made part of our world by observation towers or television
programmes. There aren’t any ”blank spaces” any more in the charts of our
world; whatever has been discharged from appropriation by us and our everyday
life is still part of our world, but is now understood as nature.
Our world doesn’t shrink any more. It re-orders and re-structures
itself, it re-interprets places, it un-differentiates, un-sublimates and
un-civilises itself.
The shrinkage of
the urbanity of a city is not an intrinsic natural process and it not only
happens where the number of inhabitants and the amount of tax revenue is
decreasing. It is the result of a cultural attitude, it is the consequence of
the lack of interest in urbanity of many citizens, many civic and economic
actors in responsible positions. The shrinkage is not a quantitative, but
rather a qualitative process, by which the world is being reshaped – I don’t
want to say: how it was; but perhaps – how it was dreamt to be.
Cities – and here I would like to indicate the city as architecture and
not the life in, by and with the city – have their own way of physical
development, they are only actors themselves to a lesser degree: the buildings
fall into disrepair, the technical infrastructure rots. The planted spaces
follow their own biological development: they grow, overgrow and destroy the
pre-determined order and technical facilities. The architectural city is beyond
the aforementioned areas not an actor. It is not – as I have said earlier –
shrinking.
But who is acting
then?
It is at the
moment becoming common with the responsible urban planners, administrators and
politicians in the municipalities to criticise the citizens saying that they
should ask no more ”what is it, that the city can do for me”, but rather
instead ”what is it, that I can do for the city”. With this being established,
we have already identified one actor; it is indeed the citizens who shrink the
city.
In principle,
you can’t say anything against the appeal to presently ask ”what can I do as a
citizen for the city”, if it was thus aiming for urban and res-publican
attitudes and activities. But it would be all the more becoming and proper, if
it were directed to all the other actors as well.
However it seems
to me, that this appeal is only directed at the labour force and not as well at
the top management, the business people and the shareholders. Their flight from
responsibility for region and res-publican culture is
being excused and it is even legitimised by all of us under the term of
globalisation.
It seems to me,
that it is also the city which is neither asking what it could do for the city.
The city (administration) – to formulate the previous sentence less cryptically
– sees its job in the reduction both of its historically grown tasks and of the
thereby incurred costs and then in increasing the efficiency of its efforts for
the remaining tasks. The city administration interprets this job as the duty to
reduce expenditure for equipment and personnel – we can even talk of shrinkage
here – rather than to increase its efficiency with the given equipment and
staff, which would be at least equally effective. I can’t conceivably see that
the city (administration) is particularly putting a lot of effort into fostering
the city culture, living quality, participation and democracy in the city.
In my opinion, we have not to think about what the city(-zen) can do for the city (administration) and its funding, but what the city(-zen) and the city (administration) can do for the commonwealth of the city (culture).
[translated by Klaus Zehbe]
[1] Environmental Design Research Association (ed); Old World – New World.
Environmental and cultural change and tradition in a shrinking world.
Proceedings of the 32nd Annual Conference of the Environmental
Design Research Association; Edmond, Oklahoma 2001
[2] Häußermann / Siebel 1987, S. 32 und 1988
[3] In connection with a speech in the conference ”Stadt,
Kultur, Natur – Chancen zukünftiger Lebensgestaltung” (City, Culture, Nature – Opportunities of
Future Lifestyles), which was hosted by the Baden-Württembergian
government from 5th to 7th October 1987 in Stuttgart. See
also Wildenmann 1989
[4] on this see also Maier / Vogt 2001
Bibliography
Ursula Maier, Richard Vogt; Botanische und
pedologische Untersuchungen zur Ufersiedlung Hornstaad;
Stuttgart 2001
Hartmut Häußermann, Walter Siebel; Neue Urbanität; Frankfurt/M 1987
Hartmut Häußermann, Walter Siebel; Die schrumpfende Stadt und die
Stadtsoziologie; in: Jürgen Friedrichs (ed.); Soziologische Stadtforschung; Opladen 1988, p. 75 – 94 (special
edition of ”Kölner Zeitschrift für Soziologie und
Sozialpsychologie”)
Alexander Mitscherlich; Die
Unwirtlichkeit unserer Städte (1965); Frankfurt/Main 1980
Georg Simmel; Die Großstadt und das Geistesleben (1903); in: ebd.
(M. Landmann, ed.); Brücke und Tür. Essays des Philosophen zur Geschichte,
Religion, Kunst und Gesellschaft; Stuttgart 1957
Rudolf Wildenmann (ed.); Stadt, Kultur, Natur. Chancen zukünftiger Lebensgestaltung; Baden-Baden 1989
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