thoughts on jane jacobs four: east german cities

one of my favorite blogs, Pruned, also pointed me to this Economist article about former East German cities now being radically depopulated.

SOMETHING odd is happening to the cities of eastern Germany. Plattenbauten, the soulless prefabricated apartment blocks thrown up by the region's former communist rulers, are being knocked down. Occasionally one will be truncated, shorn of its upper storeys. Older streets are gap-toothed where wreckers have removed abandoned houses. Cityscapes are being pruned, removing dead and dying edifices in the hope of saving the rest.

City planners, normally keen to promote the building of homes, factories and roads, are responding to a double demographic crisis: the collapse of communist-era industry, which sent workers, especially young women, fleeing westwards; and a sharp decline in the birth rate.

Those who remain are fearing blight in the empty areas--some emptied by up to 20%. So they're removing housing units by the thousands ... and expensive infrastructure such as roads. Some cities are taking the problem as an opportunity (ogd, I sound like I should have my own DVD).

That may account for the spirit of zany experimentalism that prevails in cities such as Dessau and Köthen. Under the motto “city islands”, Dessau is nudging life and commerce towards “core areas”, which means making a verdant city (which is already three-quarters parkland) even greener.

Traces of Dessau's busier past—a disused tower for smoking sausages or a dairy's chimney now occupied by storks—are being preserved. Parts of the void are being parcelled into “claims” of 400 square metres, which citizens can use free of charge for projects such as growing biomass for fuel. “Where buildings fall, gardens rise,” a hopeful billboard claims.

Köthen, home of the father of homeopathy, is creating a homeopathy library and school, and even employing homeopaths to help cure the city. "On their advice, the municipality [conducted] painstaking interviews to find out how [residents] thought the newly-created space should be used. To provoke a sharper reaction, the city dimmed the street lights, highlighting only the buildings designated for sacrifice." And Stassfurt removed its entire city center, affected by subsidence because of mining, and replaced it with ... that's right: a lake.

Dessau is also preparing an international Bauaustellung or Building Exposition for 2010, a German tradition intended to bring the best architectural and planning minds to bear on new circumstances and changing trends. (You'd better bet I'm going to be there. That's only two years away!)

The article ends with: "From the death of cities, the hope is that new life will emerge," which brings us to the important question:

WWJJD? Dunno, what do you think? Is this situation unprecedented? (Can't be.)  What happens when cities regress back to large towns? Is that even possible?

Comments

[Eric Fischer]

Maybe the precedent is Rome, whose population is said to have dropped from a million to 20,000, only to recover hundreds of years later?

[claire]

well, but rome wasn't just a city. it was the power center of an entire empire, all of which took a dive at the same time.

these cities were never national centers, just sizable but middling cities in an otherwise still flourishing and politically stable nation.

but it's an interesting comparison: will the great civic buildings of depopulated cities fall to ruin?