Cities die when people no longer want to live in them.
I live in an enormous city that has not died but increased and prospered and which remains a magnet for smart, enterprising people all over the planet. But this, at least in this country, is almost unique and certainly the exception. It helps for a city to be mega-sized--the megalopolis creates its own social weather and is more impervious to the push and pull of real estate tropes.
Very few cities in the U.S. can claim this mantle. And almost none exist that aren't in some way blighted by core-abandonment, wretched highway planning, and profound ugliness in the form of parking lots where once stood thriving business districts. Certainly the advent and popularity of the automobile has gutted perhaps a majority of American cities, and it is easy to blame the automobile industry. But as with so many things, I have found the silly throwaway line from the old Pogo comic strip to be the case: "We have met the enemy and he is us."
People bought cars and drove out to the country and liked what they saw and moved there and built better schools for their kids and that is how the suburbs were born. I personally cannot stand living in the suburbs--find it stultifying and disgracefully overcrowded with traffic (at least in this megalopolis). But the suburbs are where the American has made his/her stand. It may not work out--there are signs it will not. But that's another story.
Again: cities die because people don't want to live there. You don't. I don't. Nobody does. Think about St. Louis, where they steal the very bricks of abandoned houses to ship off to New Orleans for renovations. Or Detroit, where they knock down abandoned houses routinely. Or Cleveland, where entire neighborhoods are jobless and suffering rapid abandonment. Or Philadelphia, easily the most underperforming major city in the U.S., where dowdiness is practically part of the city charter and which has an altogether mindless devotion to accommodation of the automobile and only the most pathetic mass transit "system" (the subway has one lonesome line).
It is somehow chic to decry the loss of our great American cities. But here's my gripe: if they were so great, how come nobody wanted to live there? My guess is, because they were lousy places to live--even back in that lamented and perhaps fanciful "golden era". Odds-on, if you're not an urban-pioneering, loft-dwelling, latte-sipping, wirelessly-empowered dandy, they still are today. And they continue to lose population because of this.
What were the great failures of many of these cities? Primarily two things, I believe. First, physical ugliness. Row after row of wretchedly unaccommodating houses served by block after block of wretchedly unfriendly-looking storefronts. Perhaps there was a sense of optimism in those who once lived there: "I can make this work for me". But they could not. It takes much more imagination than average to create an interesting storefront (rather than, say, a collection of orthopedic devices or a few dusty water pumps); and the same goes for the row of industrial-friendly hovels. Certainly if you are an artist, writer, antique-buyer, entrepreneur not needing to commute and no children to educate, you can make this work for you. But you are in a tiny minority.
Second, sheer brutality. The typical major American city, or at least those portions built during the industrial age, were designed and (over)built to feed the great maw that ate cheap labor all day and half the night: the cheapest possible housing and rapid access to the factory. Libraries, parks, schools, museums, civic monuments: except for a few showpieces to assuage the ostensible guilt of a few wealthy locals looking back upon what might have been, these are either entirely absent the landscape or when present, clearly an afterthought and not to be taken seriously. This type of carelessness about the spiritual and educational needs of people remains brutal and creates brutality of its own: desperation, corruption, crime, police intervention, resentment, hatred, ruin.
These cities are still being abandoned because they were never very good places to live even in their so-called "heyday". No, they were crowded, desperate, awful places to live. And the moment folks could get the hell out, they did. Possibly this is because the populace--unereducated, overworked, media-manipulated--lacked the collective imagination to make much of the place in concert. The suburb is nothing if not a sprawling monument to the sheer self-interest of the ex-urbanite and represents the apotheosis of un-neighborliness: high fences and rolling isolation booths are its chief characteristics.
In a singular kink of high irony, many of these cities, having spent a hundred years spitting on and squatting upon the hopes and dreams of the creative minds trapped inside them, now try to lure humans back into a re-inhabited, adorable "urban core" by touting, emptily for the most part, "the arts". There is no city too mundane for a brave new loft building. None too quotidian for an "arts center". None ashamed enough to avoid quirky, pointless, unloved and entirely misapprehended street sculpture often in irksome abundance. And even the barest crossroads trying to "reinvent" itself must have a "downtown mall" where suburbanites can, for reasons unfathomable, drive a long way only to end up where parking is harder and the mall has escalators and where, once "outside", beggars wait to be noticed via some handlettered placard announcing their failures as well as immediate need for coin (the "failure placard" is another unique feature of the American cityscape--I have not seen it elsewhere).
Most "failing" cities never in fact "worked"--not for the people who lived there. The failure can be traced to a lack of any sense of pride, a near vacuum of romance (or of any emotional support whatsoever), and no practical sense of prospect except where it intersected with the needs of a stultifying corporate culture. Big American cities were built for the Company and when the Company decamped, so, with barely contained glee, did the people who worked for the Company. What remains is a rotting shell, like some old coconut shard from which all the meat has been clawed.
In our next installment we shall discuss the role in which race hatred has played in the death of American cities--a phenomenon lamented mostly by, and caused mostly by white people.
Until such time, let the bricks fall where they may. Greater cities than St. Louis have been abandoned over the course of history--and what to make of it really, except to find a crumbled foundation buried long in the sand?
