[Marxism] Small, Green And Good By Catherine Tumber

[sabocat59@xxxxxxx]

Full:
http://www.countercurrents.org/tumber140309.htm

Small, Green And Good By Catherine Tumber
 14 March, 2009
STWR.org 

Growing up in a small town, I regularly took bus trips with my mom and little 
sister into “the city”: Syracuse. Like most middle-class families in the 1960s, 
we had only one car, which my dad drove to work. So we would buy our tickets at 
the village pharmacy, board the Big Dog, and barrel though miles of farms and 
sparsely developed land until we reached the highway.  Nearing the final 
stretch, we had to endure the stench of the Solvay chemical works to our right, 
and the creepy mint green of polluted Onondaga Lake on our left. But we would 
disembark in Syracuse’s vibrant downtown, all glittering lights and vertical 
planes, filled with department stores, jewelry and candy shops, theaters and 
movie palaces, “ethnic” food, and people who were interestingly not like us.

  Smaller American cities, places like Syracuse—and Decatur, New Bedford, 
Kalamazoo, Buffalo, Trenton, Erie, and Youngstown—were once bustling centers of 
industry and downtown commerce, with wealthy local patrons committed to civic 
improvements and the arts. In the ’70s they began a decline from which they 
have not recovered.  Today, most are scanted as doleful sites of low–paying 
service jobs, with shrinking tax bases and little appeal to young professionals 
or to what urban theorist Richard Florida calls the “creative class.” 

In Syracuse itself the center of gravity has shifted northward, toward Carousel 
Mall, leaving a ghostly downtown where Rite–Aid, now the largest store, 
presides over parking lots and abandoned buildings.  Historians and economic 
demographers generally attribute the decline of small–to–mid–size cities of 
50,000 to 500,000 souls to deindustrialization, since many sit in the 
Midwestern Rust Belt or the Northeast. But the history of smaller–city decline 
is more complex than that. Smaller cities were also victims of post–war 
development policies better suited to large cities—or rather, that were 
painful, but less disastrous, for large metropolitan areas.

  Extraordinary mid–twentieth century changes in transportation, zoning, 
housing construction, mortgage financing, and domestic taste facilitated the 
creation of wide swathes of “bourgeois utopias” that now ring our cities far 
out into the exurbs. They are the products of a radical transformation of 
land–use policy that extended supply chains with vast highway systems, further 
separating people from their workplaces, energy producers from consumers, and 
farmers from their markets.  Large cities survived the changes and the 
resulting onslaught of suburban shopping malls—itself a reaction to extended 
supply–chains—in the late ’70s. 

In smaller cities, malls decimated what was left of retail districts already 
damaged by massive downtown highway systems that choked off commercial centers 
from surrounding urban neighborhoods.  Neglect of the smaller city, as both 
place and idea, continued through the rest of the century. As 
large–metropolitan real estate values skyrocketed in the 1990s, big cities 
attracted millions of dollars in capital improvements and large–scale 
development. “New Urbanism” among designers and architects, though not in 
theory intended only for big cities, attracted funding for pedestrian–friendly 
thoroughfares, mixed–use building, open spaces, and the preservation of 
historic architecture that enhanced the metropolitan boom.

 Now, with the call for reducing the urban carbon footprint, cosmopolitan 
living is going green. Two recent books proposing models for a low–carbon 
economy—Thomas Friedman’s Hot, Flat, and Crowded, and Jay Inslee and Bracken 
Hendricks’s Apollo’s Fire—speak throughout of “villages” and “large cities.” 
Not a word for the distinctive role smaller cities might play in a low–carbon 
world.  That is too bad. Smaller cities have idiosyncratic charms of their 
own–worthy of sustained attention and renewal. And, fortuitously, they have a 
distinctive and vital role to play in the work of the new century: smaller 
cities will be critical in the move to local agriculture and the development of 
renewable energy industries. These tasks will almost certainly require a 
dramatic rethinking of land–use policy, and smaller cities have assets that 
large cities lack. Their underused or vacant industrial space and surrounding 
tracts of farmland make them ideal sites for sustainable land-use policies, or 
“smart growth.” 
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