BOOK Brent D. Ryan, Design After Decline: How America Rebuilds Shrinking Cities, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012.

Brent D. Ryan, Design After Decline: How America Rebuilds Shrinking Cities, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012.
http://www.upenn.edu/pennpress/book/14995.html

Almost fifty years ago, America’s industrial cities – Detroit, Philadelphia, Cleveland, Baltimore, and others – began shedding people and jobs. Today they are littered with tens of thousands of abandoned houses, shuttered
factories, and vacant lots. With population and housing losses continuing since the 2007 financial crisis, the future of neighborhoods in these places is precarious. How we will rebuild shrinking cities and what urban design vision will guide their future remain contentious and unknown.

In _Design After Decline_, Brent D. Ryan reveals the fraught and intermittently successful efforts of architects, planners, and city officials to rebuild shrinking cities following mid-century urban renewal. With modern architecture in disrepute, federal funds scarce, and architects and planners disengaged, politicians and developers were left to pick up the pieces. In twin narratives, Ryan describes how America’s two largest
shrinking cities, Detroit and Philadelphia, faced the challenge of design after decline in dramatically different ways. While Detroit allowed developers to carve up the cityscape into suburban enclaves, Philadelphia
brought back 1960s-style land condemnation for benevolent social purposes. Both Detroit and Philadelphia “succeeded” in rebuilding but at the cost of innovative urban design and planning.

Ryan proposes that the unprecedented crisis facing these cities today requires a revival of the visionary thinking found in the best modernist urban design, tempered with the lessons gained from post-1960s community
planning. Depicting the ideal shrinking city as a shifting patchwork of open and settled areas, Ryan concludes that accepting the inevitable decline and abandonment of some neighborhoods, while rebuilding others as new neighborhoods with innovative design and planning, can reignite modernism’s spirit of optimism and shape a brighter future for shrinking cities and their residents.

*Table of Contents*
Preface
Chapter 1. “The Burden Has Passed”: Urban Design After Urban Renewal
Chapter 2. Shrinkage or Renewal? The Fate of Older Cities, 1950-90
Chapter 3. “People Want These Houses”: The Suburbanization of Detroit
Chapter 4. “Another Tradition in Planning”: The Suburbanization of North Philadelphia
Chapter 5. Toward Social Urbanism for Shrinking Cities.

Brent D. Ryan
Assistant Professor of Urban Design and Public Policy
Department of Urban Studies and Planning, MIT
http://dusp.mit.edu/faculty/bdr