- Shrinking-City Urban Form as a Determinant of Urban Policy: the Case of Flint, Michigan, USA    1272 kb by    Ryan, Brent D. | bdr@mit.edu    Short Outline Flint, Michigan, USA is a paradigmatic shrinking city whose population has dropped over 50 percent in the past fifty years due to deindustrialization and suburbanization. This paper, one case in an expected wider comparative study across shrinking cities in different countries, examines the role of two architectural factors- detached single-family housing and large industrial facilities- in shaping post-2000 shrinkage policies. Abstract Large number of cities are “shrinking” around the industrialized world (Oswalt and Rieniets 2006). While urban shrinkage is due to national factors like deindustrialization, demographic change, or suburbanization, the forces guiding local urban policy to confront shrinkage are even more diverse. In this paper I argue that local policy factors are driven as much by the physical qualities of the urban fabric itself as they are by familiar forces like local political elites and legal regimes. The built fabric is a historic element that is often out of conformance with current building and social norms, but that may comprise the majority of housing units in a city. In other words, a confluence of institutional and architectural factors determines the nature and outcome of shrinkage policies. This paper, one case in an expected wider comparative study across shrinking cities in different countries, examines this confluence in the city of Flint, Michigan, USA. Flint is a mid-sized city, 2010 population 102,434, down from 196,940 in 1960. Once a locus of General Motors-related industrial enterprises, Flint is today a paradigmatic post-industrial city searching for a new economic and social role. Shrinkage policy in Flint has been shaped by two architectural factors: detached wooden single-family housing that is subject to rapid deterioration, and large industrial facilities owned by a single corporation sensitive to liability concerns. This combination has led to a built environment characterized by a near tabula rasa condition. Rather than having too much obsolescent building stock to contend with, Flint has too little. It must instead contend with reuse possibilities for vacant parcels that are either small and dispersed or large, polluted, and concentrated. This condition bears comparison with other shrinking cities in different settings that contend with different combinations of housing type, property centralization, and industrial obsolescence. Keywords Case Study presented on the ISOCARP Congress 2012: Fast Forward: Planning in a (hyper) dynamic urban context   Click to open the full paper as pdf document   Click to send an email to the author(s) of this paper