-
Title
-
Theorizing the Death of Cities
-
Author
-
Eisinger, Peter
-
Research Area
-
Social Processes
-
Topic
-
Urbanization
-
Abstract
-
Although ancient cities often followed a trajectory of birth, prosperity, decline, and death, modern cities have more commonly exhibited a high degree of resilience. Yet some contemporary cities—notably some of the old industrial cities of the American Midwest—seem on an inexorable course toward death. Our understanding of urban dying and death, however, lacks theoretical elaboration. This essay suggests that an assessment of a city's morbidity can be accomplished by examining the condition of a city's three principal vital urban functions: its governance capacity, its economic stewardship, and its cultural production and preservation. By assessing these we can make a judgment about the course of urban dying, though urban death—the endstate—still eludes theoretical understanding.
-
Identifier
-
etrds0359
-
extracted text
-
Theorizing the Death of Cities
PETER EISINGER
Abstract
Although ancient cities often followed a trajectory of birth, prosperity, decline, and
death, modern cities have more commonly exhibited a high degree of resilience. Yet
some contemporary cities—notably some of the old industrial cities of the American
Midwest—seem on an inexorable course toward death. Our understanding of urban
dying and death, however, lacks theoretical elaboration. This essay suggests that an
assessment of a city’s morbidity can be accomplished by examining the condition of
a city’s three principal vital urban functions: its governance capacity, its economic
stewardship, and its cultural production and preservation. By assessing these we
can make a judgment about the course of urban dying, though urban death—the
endstate—still eludes theoretical understanding.
A glance at any map of the ancient world shows the names of dozens of
cities, large and small, that no longer exist except perhaps as archeological
sites. These vanished cities of antiquity grew, flourished, declined, and died.
Some died from natural catastrophe; some were abandoned for mysterious
reasons; others were conquered and destroyed. The “lost cities” of the desert
or the jungle is a familiar concept, and modern observers hardly find this
cycle of urban birth, life, and death remarkable. But the notion that modern
cities might follow a similar trajectory is less familiar and more difficult to
contemplate. One reason is that very few contemporary cities—many whose
history began in the last two millennia or so, or in the case of the new world in
the last 400 years—have actually died and disappeared. Modern social scientists have been struck in fact at how resilient existing cities are: regeneration
is the common story of cities that experience the blows of severe destructive forces. Cities utterly destroyed by war or natural disaster—Hiroshima,
Warsaw, Berlin, San Francisco, and so on—have reemerged from almost total
devastation to flourish again. Even cities that have experienced other sorts
of destructive forces—huge population declines and economic convulsions
are examples—have sometimes had the capacity to regenerate and flourish
Emerging Trends in the Social and Behavioral Sciences. Edited by Robert Scott and Stephen Kosslyn.
© 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. ISBN 978-1-118-90077-2.
1
2
EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES
again. Boston, Pittsburgh, and Philadelphia as well as some of the old industrial cities of the English Midlands are cases in point.
But now modern societies are beginning to see the decline of certain cities
where the levels of social and economic morbidity are so extreme that the possibility of regeneration or renewal seems increasingly unlikely. Sharp population and job losses, sustained over long periods of time, may signal an end
to these cities’ very reasons for existence. Furthermore, in such situations of
existential transformations no alternative basis for recovery or vitality can
reasonably be imagined. By all indicators, then, these seem to be what we can
only characterize as dying cities, and we are challenged to understand—or
to theorize—the notion of urban dying and death in the modern world. At
this point, we may believe that some cities are dying, but we do not entirely
have a full understanding of the processes at work.
Clearly, severe population loss is a necessary condition for urban death.
This represents the loss of taxpayers and workers and talent or to put it
another way, human capacity and capital. In the United States, such places
dot the older industrial Midwest, including Gary, Flint, Benton Harbor, and
East St. Louis. Detroit, however, is the largest and most dramatic example.
Nearly, every social scientist and informed observer writes about that city
using the language of morbidity and death.1 The basis for this judgment rests
principally on the city’s almost catastrophic population and job losses in the
last half century and its attendant consequences, including the social dysfunctions of highly concentrated extreme poverty and the enduring effects
of racial stratification. But is population loss all we need to understand the
nature of urban dying? Does population loss give us enough information
to make a judgment about a city’s prospects? Let us theorize the diagnostic
markers of urban dying.
URBAN LIFE FUNCTIONS
It is useful for theoretical purposes to employ and extend the organic analogy that posits a life cycle for cities that may eventually end with death.2
Even if urban death is an uncommon occurrence and even if it lies in the very
distant future, it helps us to focus on present signs of urban morbidity. The
notion of morbidity as applied to cities points us to an assessment of crucial
life functions that are essential to urban health and—most importantly—make
1. For example, George Galster writes that Detroit is “suicidal” and ends his book by writing an “epitaph” for its “grave” (2012). Mark Binelli writes an account of the city’s trials and casts it as a story of
Detroit’s “afterlife” (2012). Charlie LeDuff sets out in his book to conduct an “autopsy” of the city (2013).
2. A minor tributary in urban studies once pursued the idea of city “life cycles,” that is, the notion
that cities are capable of birth, growth, decline, and death (see, e.g., Baer, 1976; Norton, 1979). According
to Susan Roberts (1991), the tradition can be traced to Victorian British writers influenced by Darwinian
ideas. Whether urban death is inevitable is not addressed in this literature, nor is it theoretically clear that
it must occur.
Theorizing the Death of Cities
3
places cities. Even if we do not embrace the idea that cities follow an inevitable
trajectory from birth to death, we can still see that compromise of any of
these essential functions suggests a high level of morbidity. I would suggest that when many vital functions fail, morbidity levels are lethal. What
remains—perhaps a reserve population of people who cannot or will not
leave—is not so much a city as a concentration of people living in a situation
of minimal community structure, skeletal or nonexistent public services, high
levels of dependency on outside public and nonprofit social providers, and
depressed or nonexistent economic activity. In other words, the closest analogue to a dying or dead city is a refugee camp. The key, then, is to identify
critical urban life functions and assess their health in any given city.
We can posit three crucial urban life functions that transform high concentrations of people into viable cities. These urban functions are governance,
economic stewardship, and cultural production and preservation. We can
distinguish smaller organized communities (towns, villages) from cities by
the increasingly complex character of each of these functions in larger places.3
GOVERNANCE
In general, governance involves the exercise of public authority within a particular territory. The creation of a municipal corporation, a legal construct, is
the first step in establishing a city’s governance powers. In particular, these
involve in the first instance the management of budgetary matters involving
taxation, spending, and borrowing. Although cities in virtually every society
are dependent on higher levels of government for some of their revenues,
cities also typically raise own-source monies and borrow money in their own
names. Furthermore, local officials generally play a leading role in allocating
those revenues for a wide variety of public services and purposes.
A second crucial element in the governance function is the maintenance of
public safety. Modern cities in America and Europe date the establishment
of police and fire services to nineteenth century developments, but this is an
ancient function: older cities fulfilled public safety responsibilities by building and manning walls and employing night watchmen.
A third component of the governance function is the control of public and
private space in the public interest. This is inherent in the zoning power, in
the establishment of public parks and squares, and in fostering or enabling
real estate development projects. This latter set of activities overlaps with
local economic stewardship.
3. This sort of argument recalls Louis Wirth’s famous “Urbanism as a Way of Life” (1938), in which
he argued that urban places are distinguished from other sizes and types of human settlements by certain
social and demographic characteristics, such as size, density, social heterogeneity, institutional complexity
and specialization, and reliance on formal rules, each of which vary along a continuum.
4
EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES
ECONOMIC STEWARDSHIP
Although some ancient cities were first established as settlements around
holy places and others were created deliberately for administrative purposes
(including some in the modern age4 ), the preponderance of cities were first
founded for economic reasons.5 Settlements were located on trading routes
or at transportation crossroads or near valuable resources or because they
served as central markets for the hinterlands. The earliest functions of most
American cities in their infancy was literally to own and manage the markets,
regulating wages and prices, maintaining public docks and the off-loading
process, and guaranteeing fair weights and measures (Teaford, 1975).
The economic stewardship function of modern cities has at least three principal components: the city acts to host and encourage densely concentrated
economic activities; it serves as a market to match labor and employers; and
it fosters, enables, and regulates most real estate development investment by
private actors. Vibrant cities are those that play an active role—as initiators
of development, as brokers, as enablers—in shaping and growing their local
economies.
To speak of a dense concentration of economic activities is in the first
instance to capture the city’s role in hosting and building economic
agglomerations, that is, the clustering of mutually supportive, complementary businesses or nonprofit employers. Business incubators and
industry-targeted tax incentives are examples. In the second instance, it
is to make reference to classical location theory, the notion that cities that
thrive are those that minimize the cost of production factors (raw materials,
labor, capital) while maximizing access to export markets. This is largely
a function of location on favorable transport routes, but cities can create
location advantages by investment in transportation infrastructure.
The healthy city is not merely a passive actor in maintaining its function
as a labor market. Cities actively seek investment by business and nonprofit
employers precisely, in part, to create jobs for their residents and in-migrants.
Successful cities may also pursue policies that attract and retain skilled workers, including encouraging affordable housing, providing good schools, and
fostering an array of consumption amenities.
Finally, economic stewardship involves an active role in economic development, including zoning, strategic and city planning, financing, and
infrastructure. Cities play the public role in public–private development
partnerships, ideally guiding, regulating, leavening but also enabling private
ambition.
4. Brasilia comes to mind.
5. On the religious origins of ancient cities, see Mumford (1961).
Theorizing the Death of Cities
5
CULTURAL PRODUCTION AND PRESERVATION
Large, diverse populations create a market of sufficient scale to support cultural institutions such as museums, theaters, orchestras, libraries, publishers, news media, and galleries. The presence of these institutions and their
patrons, combined with the personal freedom that comes with urban life,
attract cultural producers: artists, musicians, writers, performers, curators,
and so on, and their presence in turn attracts other cultural producers seeking the benefits that derive from numbers: mutual stimulation, competition,
access to supportive services.
Again, vibrant cities are not passive bystanders in the creation of active
cultural institutions. The revitalization of Times Square theaters in New York
City, the creation of the Houston arts district, and the construction of major
new public libraries designed as architectural showcases in cities from Seattle
to Albuquerque to Madison are examples of cultural development led by
municipal action.
ASSESSING THE VITALITY OF CRITICAL URBAN LIFE FUNCTIONS
Each of the urban life functions can be assessed for morbidity, some by the
application of clear metrics, others by less systematic means. Both methods
are familiar to medical diagnosticians. Each element of each separate
function represents a spectrum of values, and there are few points, save at
the polar ends of the spectrum, at which one can determine with certainty
the life prospects of a city. Nevertheless, a composite assessment can offer a
well-supported judgment about whether a city is dying or not. The moment
of death, as with human beings, remains unknowable.
Consider, for purposes of illustration, the case of Detroit, the most prominent example of a dying city. The city scores low on most indicators of
governance vitality. Detroit was placed in the hands of an outside receiver
appointed by the state governor in 2013, and it declared bankruptcy shortly
thereafter. This means that it had lost its fundamental ability to govern itself:
no locally elected official had budget or borrowing authority, nor was there
any formal power in city hall to carry out the business of the city except
for those granted by the externally appointed emergency manager. At the
most basic level, then, Detroit was no longer an autonomous municipal
corporation.
Detroit scores poorly on other indicators of governance capacity. Its ability
to provide for public safety, as measured by crime rates and by police, fire
department and emergency medical services response times rank the city as
a highly dysfunctional outlier compared to others of its size (City of Detroit,
2013). Another element of the governance function is the management of
space. The city nearly closed half its public parks before private philanthropy
6
EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES
forestalled this drastic step; it has a stock of tens of thousands of abandoned
buildings that it cannot tear down or sell and that then become targets for
drug dealers, thieves, and arsonists. When the city does manage to demolish such buildings, it must manage huge tracts of open space that stress its
ability to provide police and fire protection, sidewalk and road maintenance,
and street lighting. Efforts to consolidate neighborhoods by persuading isolated remaining residents to move to denser areas have failed. The city cannot
manage its territory.
An examination of the city’s economic stewardship function indicates an
equally high level of morbidity. Detroit long ago lost its comparative advantage as a center of automobile manufacturing, and it has not replaced the
manufacturing jobs that have been leaving the city over the last half century.
The sheer number of jobs lost, the low ratio of remaining jobs to population,
and the declining proportion of all metropolitan jobs still located in the city
all offer hard metrics of the city’s moribund labor market.
Although there has been recent downtown investment in software, medical
insurance processing, and financial businesses, the jobs created or relocated
have not replaced the lost jobs in numbers nor have they absorbed the displaced industrial workers or other unemployed residents. A smaller proportion of Detroit residents are college graduates than in any other large city in
the United States. Not surprisingly, then, many of the new jobs are filled by
suburban commuters. Detroit is no longer a vibrant labor market, nor does
it play a distinctive economic role in the regional or national economy. In a
sense it has lost its economic reason for being.
Another measure of a city’s economic stewardship function is its ability
to help shape the local economy, including business investment patterns
and real estate development. New York City’s aggressive efforts under
Mayor Michael Bloomberg to build a high tech engineering campus and
its rezoning of nearly 40% of the city’s underused light industrial land
and abandoned waterfront neighborhoods for housing and commercial
development are prime examples of vibrant economic stewardship. By
contrast, a few wealthy entrepreneurs have treated Detroit as a blank canvas
on which they have pursued development projects without reference to any
city plan or public priorities.
Although Detroit advertises itself as having the second largest theater district in the nation, its role in cultural production and preservation has been
deeply compromised by the well-publicized struggle to save the art in the
Detroit Institute of Art from sale to pay off the city’s creditors. Unlike the
contents of most museums, much of the great art in the DIA was purchased
by the city in its more prosperous days. Like other municipal assets it was
potentially liable to liquidation to satisfy retirement pension and bond obligations.
Theorizing the Death of Cities
7
It is true that small clusters of young artists, attracted by extraordinarily
cheap real estate and the pathos and exoticism of the city’s dramatic industrial ruins, have settled in the city in recent years, but their role in the cultural
economy and life of the region and nation is marginal. The nation’s largest
museum devoted to black history is located in Detroit and its building is
owned by the city, but the institution has been in financial difficulty from
its inception. It has survived only because the city subsidized half its operating expenses, but when the city declared bankruptcy it reduced its subsidy
by half, jeopardizing the survival prospects of the museum.
WHAT IS THE FUTURE OF A DYING CITY?
By most indicators the vital life functions of Detroit are failing. The city no
longer functions as an effective municipal corporation, nor is it a magnet for
people seeking economic advantage, either in the form of employment or
investment returns. It has no resources and little authority to play a proactive
role in its own economic development plans. Cultural institutions that rely on
city support face a bleak future. Scenarios for the city’s return to prosperity
lack plausibility. Detroit is not unique; it is simply the largest of the country’s
dying cities.
But theorizing the urban dying process and theorizing the endstate of
urban death are two different matters. Unlike with the death of humans, the
dying cities of modern societies are not on the brink of vanishing. People
remain, some by virtue of habit or preference, others because they have
nowhere else to go nor means to settle elsewhere. A city in this condition is fit
for hospice, a situation in which it must be cared for by others. The appointment of a receiver with sovereign powers is a first step in this direction. The
reassignment of local municipal responsibilities to regional authorities or
to state, county or private providers is another step, one taken already in
several instances in Detroit.6 Private voluntary initiatives—neighborhood
safety watches, car pooling cooperatives in the absence of public transportation, guerilla urban gardens in vacant city lots—take over what were
once municipal functions. Opportunistic investors may find the inexpensive
real estate too cheap to resist, sparking pockets of economic activity in an
otherwise moribund environment and playing out personal schemes of
regeneration.
At this point, then, we can begin to understand the process of dying. We
can understand the loss of municipal authority and the withering of economic functions. But the dying cities of the United States are not Pompeii or
Carthage; they have not been extinguished. We do not know whether a dying
6. The state legislature established a Regional Convention Authority in 2009 and a (limited) Regional
Transit Authority in 2012.
8
EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES
city’s catastrophic population loss will level out, stabilizing at some reserve
population, or whether over time the city will eventually fully empty out.
We have a theoretical framework to understand dying, but the theory of the
final stage, the mystery of death, eludes us.
REFERENCES
Baer, W. (1976). Death of cities. The Public Interest, 45, 3–19.
Binelli, M. (2012). Detroit is the place to be: The afterlife of an American metropolis. New
York, NY: Metropolitan Books.
City of Detroit (2013). Detroit performance dashboard. Detroit, MI: Office of the Mayor.
Galster, G. (2012). Driving Detroit: The quest for respect in Detroit. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
LeDuff, C. (2013). Detroit: An American autopsy. New York, NY: Penguin.
Mumford, L. (1961). The city in history. New York, NY: Houghton Mifflin.
Norton, R. D. (1979). City life-cycles and American urban policy. New York, NY: Academic Press.
Roberts, S. (1991). A critical evaluation of the city life-cycle idea. Urban Geography,
12, 431–435.
Teaford, J. (1975). The municipal revolution in America: Origins of modern urban government, 1650-1825. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Wirth, L. (1938). Urbanism as a way of life. American Journal of Sociology, 44, 1–24.
PETER EISINGER SHORT BIOGRAPHY
Peter Eisinger (PhD, Yale, 1969, Political Science) is retired from the Milano
School of the New School, where he held the Henry Cohen Chair. He
previously taught for nearly three decades at the University of WisconsinMadison, where he directed its La Follette Institute of Public Affairs from
1991–1996. From 1997–2005, he lived in Detroit while he taught at Wayne
State University and established and directed its State Policy Center. He has
been a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences
in Palo Alto and a Distinguished Fulbright Chair in the Netherlands. He
has written a number of books on topics including economic development
policy in American states and localities, hunger and food assistance policy
in the United States, and the response of white elites in Detroit and Atlanta
to the rise of black political dominance. His more than 60 articles include
studies of political protest, racial politics at the local level, cities in the
federal system, municipal public policy issues, and the nature of nonprofit
grassroots organizations, among others. He lives in New York City and
Wellfleet, Massachusetts.
Theorizing the Death of Cities
9
RELATED ESSAYS
Neighborhoods and Cognitive Development (Psychology), Jondou Chen and
Jeanne Brooks-Gunn
Cities and Sustainable Development (Sociology), Christopher Cusack
Causes of Fiscal Crises in State and Local Governments (Political Science),
Vladimir Kogan
Exploring Opportunities in Cultural Diversity (Political Science), David D.
Laitin and Sangick Jeon
Civic Engagement (Sociology), Peter Levine
Politics of Immigration Policy (Political Science), Jeannette Money
Migration and Globalization (Political Science), Margaret E. Peters
The Politics of Disaster Relief (Political Science), Alexander J. Oliver and
Andrew Reeves
The Future of Class Analyses in American Politics (Political Science), Jeffrey
M. Stonecash
-
Theorizing the Death of Cities
PETER EISINGER
Abstract
Although ancient cities often followed a trajectory of birth, prosperity, decline, and
death, modern cities have more commonly exhibited a high degree of resilience. Yet
some contemporary cities—notably some of the old industrial cities of the American
Midwest—seem on an inexorable course toward death. Our understanding of urban
dying and death, however, lacks theoretical elaboration. This essay suggests that an
assessment of a city’s morbidity can be accomplished by examining the condition of
a city’s three principal vital urban functions: its governance capacity, its economic
stewardship, and its cultural production and preservation. By assessing these we
can make a judgment about the course of urban dying, though urban death—the
endstate—still eludes theoretical understanding.
A glance at any map of the ancient world shows the names of dozens of
cities, large and small, that no longer exist except perhaps as archeological
sites. These vanished cities of antiquity grew, flourished, declined, and died.
Some died from natural catastrophe; some were abandoned for mysterious
reasons; others were conquered and destroyed. The “lost cities” of the desert
or the jungle is a familiar concept, and modern observers hardly find this
cycle of urban birth, life, and death remarkable. But the notion that modern
cities might follow a similar trajectory is less familiar and more difficult to
contemplate. One reason is that very few contemporary cities—many whose
history began in the last two millennia or so, or in the case of the new world in
the last 400 years—have actually died and disappeared. Modern social scientists have been struck in fact at how resilient existing cities are: regeneration
is the common story of cities that experience the blows of severe destructive forces. Cities utterly destroyed by war or natural disaster—Hiroshima,
Warsaw, Berlin, San Francisco, and so on—have reemerged from almost total
devastation to flourish again. Even cities that have experienced other sorts
of destructive forces—huge population declines and economic convulsions
are examples—have sometimes had the capacity to regenerate and flourish
Emerging Trends in the Social and Behavioral Sciences. Edited by Robert Scott and Stephen Kosslyn.
© 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. ISBN 978-1-118-90077-2.
1
2
EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES
again. Boston, Pittsburgh, and Philadelphia as well as some of the old industrial cities of the English Midlands are cases in point.
But now modern societies are beginning to see the decline of certain cities
where the levels of social and economic morbidity are so extreme that the possibility of regeneration or renewal seems increasingly unlikely. Sharp population and job losses, sustained over long periods of time, may signal an end
to these cities’ very reasons for existence. Furthermore, in such situations of
existential transformations no alternative basis for recovery or vitality can
reasonably be imagined. By all indicators, then, these seem to be what we can
only characterize as dying cities, and we are challenged to understand—or
to theorize—the notion of urban dying and death in the modern world. At
this point, we may believe that some cities are dying, but we do not entirely
have a full understanding of the processes at work.
Clearly, severe population loss is a necessary condition for urban death.
This represents the loss of taxpayers and workers and talent or to put it
another way, human capacity and capital. In the United States, such places
dot the older industrial Midwest, including Gary, Flint, Benton Harbor, and
East St. Louis. Detroit, however, is the largest and most dramatic example.
Nearly, every social scientist and informed observer writes about that city
using the language of morbidity and death.1 The basis for this judgment rests
principally on the city’s almost catastrophic population and job losses in the
last half century and its attendant consequences, including the social dysfunctions of highly concentrated extreme poverty and the enduring effects
of racial stratification. But is population loss all we need to understand the
nature of urban dying? Does population loss give us enough information
to make a judgment about a city’s prospects? Let us theorize the diagnostic
markers of urban dying.
URBAN LIFE FUNCTIONS
It is useful for theoretical purposes to employ and extend the organic analogy that posits a life cycle for cities that may eventually end with death.2
Even if urban death is an uncommon occurrence and even if it lies in the very
distant future, it helps us to focus on present signs of urban morbidity. The
notion of morbidity as applied to cities points us to an assessment of crucial
life functions that are essential to urban health and—most importantly—make
1. For example, George Galster writes that Detroit is “suicidal” and ends his book by writing an “epitaph” for its “grave” (2012). Mark Binelli writes an account of the city’s trials and casts it as a story of
Detroit’s “afterlife” (2012). Charlie LeDuff sets out in his book to conduct an “autopsy” of the city (2013).
2. A minor tributary in urban studies once pursued the idea of city “life cycles,” that is, the notion
that cities are capable of birth, growth, decline, and death (see, e.g., Baer, 1976; Norton, 1979). According
to Susan Roberts (1991), the tradition can be traced to Victorian British writers influenced by Darwinian
ideas. Whether urban death is inevitable is not addressed in this literature, nor is it theoretically clear that
it must occur.
Theorizing the Death of Cities
3
places cities. Even if we do not embrace the idea that cities follow an inevitable
trajectory from birth to death, we can still see that compromise of any of
these essential functions suggests a high level of morbidity. I would suggest that when many vital functions fail, morbidity levels are lethal. What
remains—perhaps a reserve population of people who cannot or will not
leave—is not so much a city as a concentration of people living in a situation
of minimal community structure, skeletal or nonexistent public services, high
levels of dependency on outside public and nonprofit social providers, and
depressed or nonexistent economic activity. In other words, the closest analogue to a dying or dead city is a refugee camp. The key, then, is to identify
critical urban life functions and assess their health in any given city.
We can posit three crucial urban life functions that transform high concentrations of people into viable cities. These urban functions are governance,
economic stewardship, and cultural production and preservation. We can
distinguish smaller organized communities (towns, villages) from cities by
the increasingly complex character of each of these functions in larger places.3
GOVERNANCE
In general, governance involves the exercise of public authority within a particular territory. The creation of a municipal corporation, a legal construct, is
the first step in establishing a city’s governance powers. In particular, these
involve in the first instance the management of budgetary matters involving
taxation, spending, and borrowing. Although cities in virtually every society
are dependent on higher levels of government for some of their revenues,
cities also typically raise own-source monies and borrow money in their own
names. Furthermore, local officials generally play a leading role in allocating
those revenues for a wide variety of public services and purposes.
A second crucial element in the governance function is the maintenance of
public safety. Modern cities in America and Europe date the establishment
of police and fire services to nineteenth century developments, but this is an
ancient function: older cities fulfilled public safety responsibilities by building and manning walls and employing night watchmen.
A third component of the governance function is the control of public and
private space in the public interest. This is inherent in the zoning power, in
the establishment of public parks and squares, and in fostering or enabling
real estate development projects. This latter set of activities overlaps with
local economic stewardship.
3. This sort of argument recalls Louis Wirth’s famous “Urbanism as a Way of Life” (1938), in which
he argued that urban places are distinguished from other sizes and types of human settlements by certain
social and demographic characteristics, such as size, density, social heterogeneity, institutional complexity
and specialization, and reliance on formal rules, each of which vary along a continuum.
4
EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES
ECONOMIC STEWARDSHIP
Although some ancient cities were first established as settlements around
holy places and others were created deliberately for administrative purposes
(including some in the modern age4 ), the preponderance of cities were first
founded for economic reasons.5 Settlements were located on trading routes
or at transportation crossroads or near valuable resources or because they
served as central markets for the hinterlands. The earliest functions of most
American cities in their infancy was literally to own and manage the markets,
regulating wages and prices, maintaining public docks and the off-loading
process, and guaranteeing fair weights and measures (Teaford, 1975).
The economic stewardship function of modern cities has at least three principal components: the city acts to host and encourage densely concentrated
economic activities; it serves as a market to match labor and employers; and
it fosters, enables, and regulates most real estate development investment by
private actors. Vibrant cities are those that play an active role—as initiators
of development, as brokers, as enablers—in shaping and growing their local
economies.
To speak of a dense concentration of economic activities is in the first
instance to capture the city’s role in hosting and building economic
agglomerations, that is, the clustering of mutually supportive, complementary businesses or nonprofit employers. Business incubators and
industry-targeted tax incentives are examples. In the second instance, it
is to make reference to classical location theory, the notion that cities that
thrive are those that minimize the cost of production factors (raw materials,
labor, capital) while maximizing access to export markets. This is largely
a function of location on favorable transport routes, but cities can create
location advantages by investment in transportation infrastructure.
The healthy city is not merely a passive actor in maintaining its function
as a labor market. Cities actively seek investment by business and nonprofit
employers precisely, in part, to create jobs for their residents and in-migrants.
Successful cities may also pursue policies that attract and retain skilled workers, including encouraging affordable housing, providing good schools, and
fostering an array of consumption amenities.
Finally, economic stewardship involves an active role in economic development, including zoning, strategic and city planning, financing, and
infrastructure. Cities play the public role in public–private development
partnerships, ideally guiding, regulating, leavening but also enabling private
ambition.
4. Brasilia comes to mind.
5. On the religious origins of ancient cities, see Mumford (1961).
Theorizing the Death of Cities
5
CULTURAL PRODUCTION AND PRESERVATION
Large, diverse populations create a market of sufficient scale to support cultural institutions such as museums, theaters, orchestras, libraries, publishers, news media, and galleries. The presence of these institutions and their
patrons, combined with the personal freedom that comes with urban life,
attract cultural producers: artists, musicians, writers, performers, curators,
and so on, and their presence in turn attracts other cultural producers seeking the benefits that derive from numbers: mutual stimulation, competition,
access to supportive services.
Again, vibrant cities are not passive bystanders in the creation of active
cultural institutions. The revitalization of Times Square theaters in New York
City, the creation of the Houston arts district, and the construction of major
new public libraries designed as architectural showcases in cities from Seattle
to Albuquerque to Madison are examples of cultural development led by
municipal action.
ASSESSING THE VITALITY OF CRITICAL URBAN LIFE FUNCTIONS
Each of the urban life functions can be assessed for morbidity, some by the
application of clear metrics, others by less systematic means. Both methods
are familiar to medical diagnosticians. Each element of each separate
function represents a spectrum of values, and there are few points, save at
the polar ends of the spectrum, at which one can determine with certainty
the life prospects of a city. Nevertheless, a composite assessment can offer a
well-supported judgment about whether a city is dying or not. The moment
of death, as with human beings, remains unknowable.
Consider, for purposes of illustration, the case of Detroit, the most prominent example of a dying city. The city scores low on most indicators of
governance vitality. Detroit was placed in the hands of an outside receiver
appointed by the state governor in 2013, and it declared bankruptcy shortly
thereafter. This means that it had lost its fundamental ability to govern itself:
no locally elected official had budget or borrowing authority, nor was there
any formal power in city hall to carry out the business of the city except
for those granted by the externally appointed emergency manager. At the
most basic level, then, Detroit was no longer an autonomous municipal
corporation.
Detroit scores poorly on other indicators of governance capacity. Its ability
to provide for public safety, as measured by crime rates and by police, fire
department and emergency medical services response times rank the city as
a highly dysfunctional outlier compared to others of its size (City of Detroit,
2013). Another element of the governance function is the management of
space. The city nearly closed half its public parks before private philanthropy
6
EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES
forestalled this drastic step; it has a stock of tens of thousands of abandoned
buildings that it cannot tear down or sell and that then become targets for
drug dealers, thieves, and arsonists. When the city does manage to demolish such buildings, it must manage huge tracts of open space that stress its
ability to provide police and fire protection, sidewalk and road maintenance,
and street lighting. Efforts to consolidate neighborhoods by persuading isolated remaining residents to move to denser areas have failed. The city cannot
manage its territory.
An examination of the city’s economic stewardship function indicates an
equally high level of morbidity. Detroit long ago lost its comparative advantage as a center of automobile manufacturing, and it has not replaced the
manufacturing jobs that have been leaving the city over the last half century.
The sheer number of jobs lost, the low ratio of remaining jobs to population,
and the declining proportion of all metropolitan jobs still located in the city
all offer hard metrics of the city’s moribund labor market.
Although there has been recent downtown investment in software, medical
insurance processing, and financial businesses, the jobs created or relocated
have not replaced the lost jobs in numbers nor have they absorbed the displaced industrial workers or other unemployed residents. A smaller proportion of Detroit residents are college graduates than in any other large city in
the United States. Not surprisingly, then, many of the new jobs are filled by
suburban commuters. Detroit is no longer a vibrant labor market, nor does
it play a distinctive economic role in the regional or national economy. In a
sense it has lost its economic reason for being.
Another measure of a city’s economic stewardship function is its ability
to help shape the local economy, including business investment patterns
and real estate development. New York City’s aggressive efforts under
Mayor Michael Bloomberg to build a high tech engineering campus and
its rezoning of nearly 40% of the city’s underused light industrial land
and abandoned waterfront neighborhoods for housing and commercial
development are prime examples of vibrant economic stewardship. By
contrast, a few wealthy entrepreneurs have treated Detroit as a blank canvas
on which they have pursued development projects without reference to any
city plan or public priorities.
Although Detroit advertises itself as having the second largest theater district in the nation, its role in cultural production and preservation has been
deeply compromised by the well-publicized struggle to save the art in the
Detroit Institute of Art from sale to pay off the city’s creditors. Unlike the
contents of most museums, much of the great art in the DIA was purchased
by the city in its more prosperous days. Like other municipal assets it was
potentially liable to liquidation to satisfy retirement pension and bond obligations.
Theorizing the Death of Cities
7
It is true that small clusters of young artists, attracted by extraordinarily
cheap real estate and the pathos and exoticism of the city’s dramatic industrial ruins, have settled in the city in recent years, but their role in the cultural
economy and life of the region and nation is marginal. The nation’s largest
museum devoted to black history is located in Detroit and its building is
owned by the city, but the institution has been in financial difficulty from
its inception. It has survived only because the city subsidized half its operating expenses, but when the city declared bankruptcy it reduced its subsidy
by half, jeopardizing the survival prospects of the museum.
WHAT IS THE FUTURE OF A DYING CITY?
By most indicators the vital life functions of Detroit are failing. The city no
longer functions as an effective municipal corporation, nor is it a magnet for
people seeking economic advantage, either in the form of employment or
investment returns. It has no resources and little authority to play a proactive
role in its own economic development plans. Cultural institutions that rely on
city support face a bleak future. Scenarios for the city’s return to prosperity
lack plausibility. Detroit is not unique; it is simply the largest of the country’s
dying cities.
But theorizing the urban dying process and theorizing the endstate of
urban death are two different matters. Unlike with the death of humans, the
dying cities of modern societies are not on the brink of vanishing. People
remain, some by virtue of habit or preference, others because they have
nowhere else to go nor means to settle elsewhere. A city in this condition is fit
for hospice, a situation in which it must be cared for by others. The appointment of a receiver with sovereign powers is a first step in this direction. The
reassignment of local municipal responsibilities to regional authorities or
to state, county or private providers is another step, one taken already in
several instances in Detroit.6 Private voluntary initiatives—neighborhood
safety watches, car pooling cooperatives in the absence of public transportation, guerilla urban gardens in vacant city lots—take over what were
once municipal functions. Opportunistic investors may find the inexpensive
real estate too cheap to resist, sparking pockets of economic activity in an
otherwise moribund environment and playing out personal schemes of
regeneration.
At this point, then, we can begin to understand the process of dying. We
can understand the loss of municipal authority and the withering of economic functions. But the dying cities of the United States are not Pompeii or
Carthage; they have not been extinguished. We do not know whether a dying
6. The state legislature established a Regional Convention Authority in 2009 and a (limited) Regional
Transit Authority in 2012.
8
EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES
city’s catastrophic population loss will level out, stabilizing at some reserve
population, or whether over time the city will eventually fully empty out.
We have a theoretical framework to understand dying, but the theory of the
final stage, the mystery of death, eludes us.
REFERENCES
Baer, W. (1976). Death of cities. The Public Interest, 45, 3–19.
Binelli, M. (2012). Detroit is the place to be: The afterlife of an American metropolis. New
York, NY: Metropolitan Books.
City of Detroit (2013). Detroit performance dashboard. Detroit, MI: Office of the Mayor.
Galster, G. (2012). Driving Detroit: The quest for respect in Detroit. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
LeDuff, C. (2013). Detroit: An American autopsy. New York, NY: Penguin.
Mumford, L. (1961). The city in history. New York, NY: Houghton Mifflin.
Norton, R. D. (1979). City life-cycles and American urban policy. New York, NY: Academic Press.
Roberts, S. (1991). A critical evaluation of the city life-cycle idea. Urban Geography,
12, 431–435.
Teaford, J. (1975). The municipal revolution in America: Origins of modern urban government, 1650-1825. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Wirth, L. (1938). Urbanism as a way of life. American Journal of Sociology, 44, 1–24.
PETER EISINGER SHORT BIOGRAPHY
Peter Eisinger (PhD, Yale, 1969, Political Science) is retired from the Milano
School of the New School, where he held the Henry Cohen Chair. He
previously taught for nearly three decades at the University of WisconsinMadison, where he directed its La Follette Institute of Public Affairs from
1991–1996. From 1997–2005, he lived in Detroit while he taught at Wayne
State University and established and directed its State Policy Center. He has
been a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences
in Palo Alto and a Distinguished Fulbright Chair in the Netherlands. He
has written a number of books on topics including economic development
policy in American states and localities, hunger and food assistance policy
in the United States, and the response of white elites in Detroit and Atlanta
to the rise of black political dominance. His more than 60 articles include
studies of political protest, racial politics at the local level, cities in the
federal system, municipal public policy issues, and the nature of nonprofit
grassroots organizations, among others. He lives in New York City and
Wellfleet, Massachusetts.
Theorizing the Death of Cities
9
RELATED ESSAYS
Neighborhoods and Cognitive Development (Psychology), Jondou Chen and
Jeanne Brooks-Gunn
Cities and Sustainable Development (Sociology), Christopher Cusack
Causes of Fiscal Crises in State and Local Governments (Political Science),
Vladimir Kogan
Exploring Opportunities in Cultural Diversity (Political Science), David D.
Laitin and Sangick Jeon
Civic Engagement (Sociology), Peter Levine
Politics of Immigration Policy (Political Science), Jeannette Money
Migration and Globalization (Political Science), Margaret E. Peters
The Politics of Disaster Relief (Political Science), Alexander J. Oliver and
Andrew Reeves
The Future of Class Analyses in American Politics (Political Science), Jeffrey
M. Stonecash
Theorizing the Death of Cities
PETER EISINGER
Abstract
Although ancient cities often followed a trajectory of birth, prosperity, decline, and
death, modern cities have more commonly exhibited a high degree of resilience. Yet
some contemporary cities—notably some of the old industrial cities of the American
Midwest—seem on an inexorable course toward death. Our understanding of urban
dying and death, however, lacks theoretical elaboration. This essay suggests that an
assessment of a city’s morbidity can be accomplished by examining the condition of
a city’s three principal vital urban functions: its governance capacity, its economic
stewardship, and its cultural production and preservation. By assessing these we
can make a judgment about the course of urban dying, though urban death—the
endstate—still eludes theoretical understanding.
A glance at any map of the ancient world shows the names of dozens of
cities, large and small, that no longer exist except perhaps as archeological
sites. These vanished cities of antiquity grew, flourished, declined, and died.
Some died from natural catastrophe; some were abandoned for mysterious
reasons; others were conquered and destroyed. The “lost cities” of the desert
or the jungle is a familiar concept, and modern observers hardly find this
cycle of urban birth, life, and death remarkable. But the notion that modern
cities might follow a similar trajectory is less familiar and more difficult to
contemplate. One reason is that very few contemporary cities—many whose
history began in the last two millennia or so, or in the case of the new world in
the last 400 years—have actually died and disappeared. Modern social scientists have been struck in fact at how resilient existing cities are: regeneration
is the common story of cities that experience the blows of severe destructive forces. Cities utterly destroyed by war or natural disaster—Hiroshima,
Warsaw, Berlin, San Francisco, and so on—have reemerged from almost total
devastation to flourish again. Even cities that have experienced other sorts
of destructive forces—huge population declines and economic convulsions
are examples—have sometimes had the capacity to regenerate and flourish
Emerging Trends in the Social and Behavioral Sciences. Edited by Robert Scott and Stephen Kosslyn.
© 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. ISBN 978-1-118-90077-2.
1
2
EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES
again. Boston, Pittsburgh, and Philadelphia as well as some of the old industrial cities of the English Midlands are cases in point.
But now modern societies are beginning to see the decline of certain cities
where the levels of social and economic morbidity are so extreme that the possibility of regeneration or renewal seems increasingly unlikely. Sharp population and job losses, sustained over long periods of time, may signal an end
to these cities’ very reasons for existence. Furthermore, in such situations of
existential transformations no alternative basis for recovery or vitality can
reasonably be imagined. By all indicators, then, these seem to be what we can
only characterize as dying cities, and we are challenged to understand—or
to theorize—the notion of urban dying and death in the modern world. At
this point, we may believe that some cities are dying, but we do not entirely
have a full understanding of the processes at work.
Clearly, severe population loss is a necessary condition for urban death.
This represents the loss of taxpayers and workers and talent or to put it
another way, human capacity and capital. In the United States, such places
dot the older industrial Midwest, including Gary, Flint, Benton Harbor, and
East St. Louis. Detroit, however, is the largest and most dramatic example.
Nearly, every social scientist and informed observer writes about that city
using the language of morbidity and death.1 The basis for this judgment rests
principally on the city’s almost catastrophic population and job losses in the
last half century and its attendant consequences, including the social dysfunctions of highly concentrated extreme poverty and the enduring effects
of racial stratification. But is population loss all we need to understand the
nature of urban dying? Does population loss give us enough information
to make a judgment about a city’s prospects? Let us theorize the diagnostic
markers of urban dying.
URBAN LIFE FUNCTIONS
It is useful for theoretical purposes to employ and extend the organic analogy that posits a life cycle for cities that may eventually end with death.2
Even if urban death is an uncommon occurrence and even if it lies in the very
distant future, it helps us to focus on present signs of urban morbidity. The
notion of morbidity as applied to cities points us to an assessment of crucial
life functions that are essential to urban health and—most importantly—make
1. For example, George Galster writes that Detroit is “suicidal” and ends his book by writing an “epitaph” for its “grave” (2012). Mark Binelli writes an account of the city’s trials and casts it as a story of
Detroit’s “afterlife” (2012). Charlie LeDuff sets out in his book to conduct an “autopsy” of the city (2013).
2. A minor tributary in urban studies once pursued the idea of city “life cycles,” that is, the notion
that cities are capable of birth, growth, decline, and death (see, e.g., Baer, 1976; Norton, 1979). According
to Susan Roberts (1991), the tradition can be traced to Victorian British writers influenced by Darwinian
ideas. Whether urban death is inevitable is not addressed in this literature, nor is it theoretically clear that
it must occur.
Theorizing the Death of Cities
3
places cities. Even if we do not embrace the idea that cities follow an inevitable
trajectory from birth to death, we can still see that compromise of any of
these essential functions suggests a high level of morbidity. I would suggest that when many vital functions fail, morbidity levels are lethal. What
remains—perhaps a reserve population of people who cannot or will not
leave—is not so much a city as a concentration of people living in a situation
of minimal community structure, skeletal or nonexistent public services, high
levels of dependency on outside public and nonprofit social providers, and
depressed or nonexistent economic activity. In other words, the closest analogue to a dying or dead city is a refugee camp. The key, then, is to identify
critical urban life functions and assess their health in any given city.
We can posit three crucial urban life functions that transform high concentrations of people into viable cities. These urban functions are governance,
economic stewardship, and cultural production and preservation. We can
distinguish smaller organized communities (towns, villages) from cities by
the increasingly complex character of each of these functions in larger places.3
GOVERNANCE
In general, governance involves the exercise of public authority within a particular territory. The creation of a municipal corporation, a legal construct, is
the first step in establishing a city’s governance powers. In particular, these
involve in the first instance the management of budgetary matters involving
taxation, spending, and borrowing. Although cities in virtually every society
are dependent on higher levels of government for some of their revenues,
cities also typically raise own-source monies and borrow money in their own
names. Furthermore, local officials generally play a leading role in allocating
those revenues for a wide variety of public services and purposes.
A second crucial element in the governance function is the maintenance of
public safety. Modern cities in America and Europe date the establishment
of police and fire services to nineteenth century developments, but this is an
ancient function: older cities fulfilled public safety responsibilities by building and manning walls and employing night watchmen.
A third component of the governance function is the control of public and
private space in the public interest. This is inherent in the zoning power, in
the establishment of public parks and squares, and in fostering or enabling
real estate development projects. This latter set of activities overlaps with
local economic stewardship.
3. This sort of argument recalls Louis Wirth’s famous “Urbanism as a Way of Life” (1938), in which
he argued that urban places are distinguished from other sizes and types of human settlements by certain
social and demographic characteristics, such as size, density, social heterogeneity, institutional complexity
and specialization, and reliance on formal rules, each of which vary along a continuum.
4
EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES
ECONOMIC STEWARDSHIP
Although some ancient cities were first established as settlements around
holy places and others were created deliberately for administrative purposes
(including some in the modern age4 ), the preponderance of cities were first
founded for economic reasons.5 Settlements were located on trading routes
or at transportation crossroads or near valuable resources or because they
served as central markets for the hinterlands. The earliest functions of most
American cities in their infancy was literally to own and manage the markets,
regulating wages and prices, maintaining public docks and the off-loading
process, and guaranteeing fair weights and measures (Teaford, 1975).
The economic stewardship function of modern cities has at least three principal components: the city acts to host and encourage densely concentrated
economic activities; it serves as a market to match labor and employers; and
it fosters, enables, and regulates most real estate development investment by
private actors. Vibrant cities are those that play an active role—as initiators
of development, as brokers, as enablers—in shaping and growing their local
economies.
To speak of a dense concentration of economic activities is in the first
instance to capture the city’s role in hosting and building economic
agglomerations, that is, the clustering of mutually supportive, complementary businesses or nonprofit employers. Business incubators and
industry-targeted tax incentives are examples. In the second instance, it
is to make reference to classical location theory, the notion that cities that
thrive are those that minimize the cost of production factors (raw materials,
labor, capital) while maximizing access to export markets. This is largely
a function of location on favorable transport routes, but cities can create
location advantages by investment in transportation infrastructure.
The healthy city is not merely a passive actor in maintaining its function
as a labor market. Cities actively seek investment by business and nonprofit
employers precisely, in part, to create jobs for their residents and in-migrants.
Successful cities may also pursue policies that attract and retain skilled workers, including encouraging affordable housing, providing good schools, and
fostering an array of consumption amenities.
Finally, economic stewardship involves an active role in economic development, including zoning, strategic and city planning, financing, and
infrastructure. Cities play the public role in public–private development
partnerships, ideally guiding, regulating, leavening but also enabling private
ambition.
4. Brasilia comes to mind.
5. On the religious origins of ancient cities, see Mumford (1961).
Theorizing the Death of Cities
5
CULTURAL PRODUCTION AND PRESERVATION
Large, diverse populations create a market of sufficient scale to support cultural institutions such as museums, theaters, orchestras, libraries, publishers, news media, and galleries. The presence of these institutions and their
patrons, combined with the personal freedom that comes with urban life,
attract cultural producers: artists, musicians, writers, performers, curators,
and so on, and their presence in turn attracts other cultural producers seeking the benefits that derive from numbers: mutual stimulation, competition,
access to supportive services.
Again, vibrant cities are not passive bystanders in the creation of active
cultural institutions. The revitalization of Times Square theaters in New York
City, the creation of the Houston arts district, and the construction of major
new public libraries designed as architectural showcases in cities from Seattle
to Albuquerque to Madison are examples of cultural development led by
municipal action.
ASSESSING THE VITALITY OF CRITICAL URBAN LIFE FUNCTIONS
Each of the urban life functions can be assessed for morbidity, some by the
application of clear metrics, others by less systematic means. Both methods
are familiar to medical diagnosticians. Each element of each separate
function represents a spectrum of values, and there are few points, save at
the polar ends of the spectrum, at which one can determine with certainty
the life prospects of a city. Nevertheless, a composite assessment can offer a
well-supported judgment about whether a city is dying or not. The moment
of death, as with human beings, remains unknowable.
Consider, for purposes of illustration, the case of Detroit, the most prominent example of a dying city. The city scores low on most indicators of
governance vitality. Detroit was placed in the hands of an outside receiver
appointed by the state governor in 2013, and it declared bankruptcy shortly
thereafter. This means that it had lost its fundamental ability to govern itself:
no locally elected official had budget or borrowing authority, nor was there
any formal power in city hall to carry out the business of the city except
for those granted by the externally appointed emergency manager. At the
most basic level, then, Detroit was no longer an autonomous municipal
corporation.
Detroit scores poorly on other indicators of governance capacity. Its ability
to provide for public safety, as measured by crime rates and by police, fire
department and emergency medical services response times rank the city as
a highly dysfunctional outlier compared to others of its size (City of Detroit,
2013). Another element of the governance function is the management of
space. The city nearly closed half its public parks before private philanthropy
6
EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES
forestalled this drastic step; it has a stock of tens of thousands of abandoned
buildings that it cannot tear down or sell and that then become targets for
drug dealers, thieves, and arsonists. When the city does manage to demolish such buildings, it must manage huge tracts of open space that stress its
ability to provide police and fire protection, sidewalk and road maintenance,
and street lighting. Efforts to consolidate neighborhoods by persuading isolated remaining residents to move to denser areas have failed. The city cannot
manage its territory.
An examination of the city’s economic stewardship function indicates an
equally high level of morbidity. Detroit long ago lost its comparative advantage as a center of automobile manufacturing, and it has not replaced the
manufacturing jobs that have been leaving the city over the last half century.
The sheer number of jobs lost, the low ratio of remaining jobs to population,
and the declining proportion of all metropolitan jobs still located in the city
all offer hard metrics of the city’s moribund labor market.
Although there has been recent downtown investment in software, medical
insurance processing, and financial businesses, the jobs created or relocated
have not replaced the lost jobs in numbers nor have they absorbed the displaced industrial workers or other unemployed residents. A smaller proportion of Detroit residents are college graduates than in any other large city in
the United States. Not surprisingly, then, many of the new jobs are filled by
suburban commuters. Detroit is no longer a vibrant labor market, nor does
it play a distinctive economic role in the regional or national economy. In a
sense it has lost its economic reason for being.
Another measure of a city’s economic stewardship function is its ability
to help shape the local economy, including business investment patterns
and real estate development. New York City’s aggressive efforts under
Mayor Michael Bloomberg to build a high tech engineering campus and
its rezoning of nearly 40% of the city’s underused light industrial land
and abandoned waterfront neighborhoods for housing and commercial
development are prime examples of vibrant economic stewardship. By
contrast, a few wealthy entrepreneurs have treated Detroit as a blank canvas
on which they have pursued development projects without reference to any
city plan or public priorities.
Although Detroit advertises itself as having the second largest theater district in the nation, its role in cultural production and preservation has been
deeply compromised by the well-publicized struggle to save the art in the
Detroit Institute of Art from sale to pay off the city’s creditors. Unlike the
contents of most museums, much of the great art in the DIA was purchased
by the city in its more prosperous days. Like other municipal assets it was
potentially liable to liquidation to satisfy retirement pension and bond obligations.
Theorizing the Death of Cities
7
It is true that small clusters of young artists, attracted by extraordinarily
cheap real estate and the pathos and exoticism of the city’s dramatic industrial ruins, have settled in the city in recent years, but their role in the cultural
economy and life of the region and nation is marginal. The nation’s largest
museum devoted to black history is located in Detroit and its building is
owned by the city, but the institution has been in financial difficulty from
its inception. It has survived only because the city subsidized half its operating expenses, but when the city declared bankruptcy it reduced its subsidy
by half, jeopardizing the survival prospects of the museum.
WHAT IS THE FUTURE OF A DYING CITY?
By most indicators the vital life functions of Detroit are failing. The city no
longer functions as an effective municipal corporation, nor is it a magnet for
people seeking economic advantage, either in the form of employment or
investment returns. It has no resources and little authority to play a proactive
role in its own economic development plans. Cultural institutions that rely on
city support face a bleak future. Scenarios for the city’s return to prosperity
lack plausibility. Detroit is not unique; it is simply the largest of the country’s
dying cities.
But theorizing the urban dying process and theorizing the endstate of
urban death are two different matters. Unlike with the death of humans, the
dying cities of modern societies are not on the brink of vanishing. People
remain, some by virtue of habit or preference, others because they have
nowhere else to go nor means to settle elsewhere. A city in this condition is fit
for hospice, a situation in which it must be cared for by others. The appointment of a receiver with sovereign powers is a first step in this direction. The
reassignment of local municipal responsibilities to regional authorities or
to state, county or private providers is another step, one taken already in
several instances in Detroit.6 Private voluntary initiatives—neighborhood
safety watches, car pooling cooperatives in the absence of public transportation, guerilla urban gardens in vacant city lots—take over what were
once municipal functions. Opportunistic investors may find the inexpensive
real estate too cheap to resist, sparking pockets of economic activity in an
otherwise moribund environment and playing out personal schemes of
regeneration.
At this point, then, we can begin to understand the process of dying. We
can understand the loss of municipal authority and the withering of economic functions. But the dying cities of the United States are not Pompeii or
Carthage; they have not been extinguished. We do not know whether a dying
6. The state legislature established a Regional Convention Authority in 2009 and a (limited) Regional
Transit Authority in 2012.
8
EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES
city’s catastrophic population loss will level out, stabilizing at some reserve
population, or whether over time the city will eventually fully empty out.
We have a theoretical framework to understand dying, but the theory of the
final stage, the mystery of death, eludes us.
REFERENCES
Baer, W. (1976). Death of cities. The Public Interest, 45, 3–19.
Binelli, M. (2012). Detroit is the place to be: The afterlife of an American metropolis. New
York, NY: Metropolitan Books.
City of Detroit (2013). Detroit performance dashboard. Detroit, MI: Office of the Mayor.
Galster, G. (2012). Driving Detroit: The quest for respect in Detroit. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
LeDuff, C. (2013). Detroit: An American autopsy. New York, NY: Penguin.
Mumford, L. (1961). The city in history. New York, NY: Houghton Mifflin.
Norton, R. D. (1979). City life-cycles and American urban policy. New York, NY: Academic Press.
Roberts, S. (1991). A critical evaluation of the city life-cycle idea. Urban Geography,
12, 431–435.
Teaford, J. (1975). The municipal revolution in America: Origins of modern urban government, 1650-1825. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Wirth, L. (1938). Urbanism as a way of life. American Journal of Sociology, 44, 1–24.
PETER EISINGER SHORT BIOGRAPHY
Peter Eisinger (PhD, Yale, 1969, Political Science) is retired from the Milano
School of the New School, where he held the Henry Cohen Chair. He
previously taught for nearly three decades at the University of WisconsinMadison, where he directed its La Follette Institute of Public Affairs from
1991–1996. From 1997–2005, he lived in Detroit while he taught at Wayne
State University and established and directed its State Policy Center. He has
been a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences
in Palo Alto and a Distinguished Fulbright Chair in the Netherlands. He
has written a number of books on topics including economic development
policy in American states and localities, hunger and food assistance policy
in the United States, and the response of white elites in Detroit and Atlanta
to the rise of black political dominance. His more than 60 articles include
studies of political protest, racial politics at the local level, cities in the
federal system, municipal public policy issues, and the nature of nonprofit
grassroots organizations, among others. He lives in New York City and
Wellfleet, Massachusetts.
Theorizing the Death of Cities
9
RELATED ESSAYS
Neighborhoods and Cognitive Development (Psychology), Jondou Chen and
Jeanne Brooks-Gunn
Cities and Sustainable Development (Sociology), Christopher Cusack
Causes of Fiscal Crises in State and Local Governments (Political Science),
Vladimir Kogan
Exploring Opportunities in Cultural Diversity (Political Science), David D.
Laitin and Sangick Jeon
Civic Engagement (Sociology), Peter Levine
Politics of Immigration Policy (Political Science), Jeannette Money
Migration and Globalization (Political Science), Margaret E. Peters
The Politics of Disaster Relief (Political Science), Alexander J. Oliver and
Andrew Reeves
The Future of Class Analyses in American Politics (Political Science), Jeffrey
M. Stonecash
