Public Space in the Time of Shrinkage
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 19^th 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 32^nd 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:

 

 

Cerebration

 

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)

 

 

Social and Political Aims of Action

 

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 19^th 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 19^th 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 20^th 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.

 

 

Material Foundations

 

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.

 

 

              Shrinkage

 

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.

 

 

             Actors

 

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]

 

 

      Notes