American Shrinking Cities May Not Need to Grow Deborah E. Popper and Frank J. Popper Series: Shrinking Cities Successful cities are expected to continually grow, and when this doesn’t happen, city managers typically try to stimulate growth at all costs. But what if growth isn’t the answer for shrinking cities? Deborah and Frank Popper argue instead for smart decline, where cities in difficulty accept their shortcomings and plan accordingly. For most of US history, cities were expected to grow, and they largely did. The nation celebrated economic growth, and cities were its prime producers and beneficiaries—until they weren’t. Until the 1950s, most large American cities were winners in a sort of national and international competition for population growth, continually pulling in people from smaller cities, rural areas, and abroad to staff their factories and spur their real-estate and retail expansion. As long as cities grew, even if slowly, they represented achievement. But when prospects changed, especially for the old, large, long-industrial cities in the Northeast and Midwest, and they began consistently shrinking, they were ignored or even denounced. Nothing seemed to counter the trend. They needed a profound rethinking, a whole new ethos to counter the congenital American one that favored growth. By now, it is clear that shrinking cities need to plan as if growth is neither inevitable nor especially desirable. Until recently, when the numbers and persistence of shrinking cities became impossible to ignore, such places were on their own. As their plight became widely public, their leaders tried to explain its cause. The cities were victims of globalization, racism, Wall Street, or suburbia. They housed the deserving poor. They needed support. But their campaigns for help faced strong resistance from higher levels of government and their state’s more prosperous places, including the suburbs. Such aid ran counter to a strong historic bias toward government as enabler for all rather than an aid for those in need. We would like to suggest a way around this barrier: change objectives. The current situation In 2002, the two of us began to urge shrinking cities to consider “smart decline,” that is, to stop assuming they should keep campaigning for and promoting growth. Instead, they had to reimagine their objectives. We argued that governments, citizens, and organizations could help their cities best by assessing and accepting their losses and finding ways to reimagine themselves with their current numbers, or even lower ones. Smart decline meant deciding what to remove or renovate—perhaps some roads, houses, and individual lots. Then what should replace them—larger lots, say, or bigger or new parks, urban agriculture, alternate energy, land banks, outsider art, pop-up projects, or abandoned factories and warehouses turned into studios or mixed-use developments. These options 1