20 cities to avoid - or not?

CNBC.com has put together an interesting slide show of 20 cities you don't want to live in ... yet.
With each are a few paragraphs about that city's problems and its good points, too. Not surprisingly, Detroit tops the list. Flint, Mich., is on there, too. And Fresno and Stockton, Calif., as well as Jackson, Miss., Little Rock, Ark., and Birmingham, Ala.

But I started looking at the unemployment rates listed with each of the so-called loser cities – and I don't think they're loser cities, but certainly troubled ones in many cases. The Charlotte regional jobless rate tops those of Cleveland, Buffalo, St. Louis, and possibly even Detroit. The blurb just said Detroit is "above 10 percent." As is this region's jobless rate: 10.7 percent in February. Mecklenburg's rate in February was 10.2 percent. Hmmm - unemployment worse than Detroit? That would not be a Charlotte Chamber slogan you'll be seeing anytime soon. Though it does portend sinking pay and desperate workers, which might attract some jobs ...

Seriously, it's a quick and interesting snapshot – based on someone's set of criteria – of some cities. As the article quotes Bert Sperling of BestPlaces.net saying, in many cases young urban pioneers are moving back into the distressed cities such as Detroit, Cleveland and New Orleans, attracted by the housing prices and urban opportunities.

(Naked City is taking another long weekend break. I'll be speaking Thursday in Beaufort, S.C., at 6:30 p.m. at the Technical College of the Lowcountry, 921 Ribault Road. The lecture's free and open to the public so if you're in that neighborhood, come on by. Sponsors are the Beaufort chapter of CNU Carolinas, the City of Beaufort, and Brown Design Studio.)

How Detroit is reinventing itself

Rick Tetzeli of Time Inc. runs the company's multi-platform, multi-publication effort to cover the transformation of Detroit. They have bought a house in Detroit and reporters are covering the city's transformation for Time mag, Fortune, even Sports Illustrated, as well as blogging, et al. He just talked to "The Reinvented City" conference I'm attending in Cambridge, Mass.

Here's his quick rundown of how Detroit is having to and is reinventing itself:
-The city is shrinking. The population is down from 2 million to 800,000. Within the confines of the city of Detroit you could put the footprint of Manhattan, Boston AND San Francisco.
-The school system is such a disaster that they're considering "all different kinds of things." Example: public boarding schools.
-They're considering light rail between the city and the suburbs, to help connect both geographically and socially.
-Urban farming is, er, taking root.
- "A huge psychic change – nobody expects the car industry to save them anymore."

Shrinking cities, 'shovel-ready' and more

That great Web site, Planetizen.com, and writers Nate Berg and Tim Halbur offer their take on the biggest planning issues of 2009. Top o the list, you'll not be surprised to see, is the Great Recession.

Next is "Shrinking Cities," followed by "The 'Shovel-Ready' Conundrum," and "High-Speed Rail."
Except for the high-speed rail, this region experienced all those travails.

The Planetizen recession article has a link with this woeful headline: "Architect Tops List of Hardest-Hit Jobs." Carpenters came in at No. 2. I think the devastation in the architure profession may be one of the great underreported stories of 2009.

The section on Shrinking Cities ends with a link to an LA Times report that a large commercial farm is buying abandoned land in Detroit with hopes of establishing a large-scale commercial enterprise. Here's another link, to a Fortune magazine piece on the same topic. It may sound crazy, but if so, a lot of respected planners are crazy. The Fortune piece notes: "After studying the city's options at the request of civic leaders, the American Institute of Architects came to this conclusion in a recent report: 'Detroit is particularly well-suited to become a pioneer in urban agriculture at a commercial scale.' "

The high-speed rail section includes this paragraph, quoting the always quotable author and dystopian James Howard Kunstler: "James Howard Kunstler, who famously said that America has 'a railroad system that the Bulgarians would be ashamed of,' commented that high-speed rail is overspec'd and unnecessary. In 2009, Kunstler wrote that 'Californians (and the U.S. public in general) would benefit tremendously from normal rail service on a par with the standards of 1927, when speeds of 100 miles-per-hour were common and the trains ran absolutely on time (and frequently, too) without computers (imagine that!)'

There are a wealth of links. Happy reading.

Agriburbia? Tell that to Detroit

My earlier posting on "agriburbia" – saying "Agriculture is the new golf" and reporting on an in-the-works development near here that will feature farm fields instead of a golf course or – brought an e-mail with this link to a story from the online Detroit Free Press.

It seems some visiting urban planners, noting the enlarging areas of disinvestment in the Motor City, have proposed that eventually the city will resemble clusters of villages surrounded by farmlands. Back to the future, indeed.

Does anyone know of any urban land that has successfully reverted to farmland?

I asked a soil specialist some years back about the feasibility of turning abandoned big-box stores and their huge parking lots back into farmland and was told that, unfortunately, the development scrapes away the topsoil, which takes centuries to create. Maybe with enough chickens and livestock one could replenish the soil?