Keywords

smart decline - urban shrinkage optimization graph theory sustainability

Detroit is largely composed, today, of seemingly endless square miles of low-density

failure, stated the journalist Jane Jacobs back in 1961 when the city was still enjoying its
state of grace as one of the most thriving hub of commerce and industry. Nowadays the
aforementioned quote echoes around the 40 square miles of abandoned land out of the
total 139 and no words could have been more prophetic than these ones, anticipating the
shared path the industrial rust belt cities undertook just a decade later until their final
collapse. The biggest challenge both local and national institutions have to deal with, is
therefore represented by giving back to its citizens high standards of life in a stimulating
environment.
Aim of this paper is to explore the context that took the city to its breakdown, together
with giving insights of what actions have currently been adopted or may be taken into
consideration to tackle the urban shrinkage, a newly coined term which specifically refers
to the concomitant process of demographic and economic decline with a structural impact
on the density of population and its economic functions. In particular, great emphasis is
put on the growing need to support plans and decisions with rigorous and robust
mathematical methods.

The process of regeneration, which is affecting the Motor City, consists primarily in gaining
awareness of the factors that induced and accelerated the decline of the town to detect all
the possible maneuver areas; since the flaws and the faults of traditional urban planning
have been widely acknowledged, a new concept, regarded as smart decline, is bursting
into the scene in order to face the urban shrinkage, supported by a deeper attention to
sustainability and community engagement. Contributions coming from the mathematic
field, such as optimization and graph theory, may assist planners and institutions in the
decision making procedure and in the subsequent assessment.

In a matter of decades, Detroit went from being the shining star of American
industrialization and working-class power to the brink of the abyss. The rock bottom was
actually hit in 2013, when the so called Motor City filed for Chapter 9 bankruptcy: the

largest city in the history of the United States had collapsed. This event represented only
the culmination of a disastrous downfall, whose initial symptoms trace back to the early
years of 1960s, when the globalization, along with financial missteps and racial tensions,
paved the way to Detroits relentless decline.
During all these years many experts have tried to get to the root of this downward spiral
but very few efforts have been made to turn the tide. What happened to this once
prosperous industrial city, crib of the Big Three auto companies (Ford, General Motors,
Chrysler), which by 1914 was producing half the countrys cars? The main cause of its rise,
and subsequently fall, lies in the auto industry, which in the 20 th century fueled a growth
spurt that contributed to make Detroit the fourth largest city in the USA, whose population
peaked 1.85 millions of people in the 50s. However, Henry Fords great innovation, the
conveyor belt-driven assembly line, which allowed to produce cars per year, played a
major role in the process of dehumanization of manufacturing work: skilled craftsmen
where no longer required since everyone would have been able to perform a basic task
and in such a way it drew to Detroit the relatively uneducated and the lower economic
strata. Subsequently, the laws of free market forced the auto companies to decentralize
the production to seek out the cheapest labor, in order to remain competitive once the
Japanese Honda entered the market. Though other industrial cities like Pittsburgh and
Chicago experienced their own phases of prosperity and depression, Detroit suffered the
most because it did not diversify its economy beyond auto-making, but kept sticking to
what it seemed to do best. In addition to this, tension between the races, embittered by
anti-integration and slum-clearing policies adopted over the years by political exponents,
contributed to destabilize that complex socio-economic system. As streams of Southern
blacks flowed into the city in search of jobs, a parallel exodus of middle-class whites
occurred, at a bigger rate, towards newly built suburbs which caused the population to
drop to the current 700,000 inhabitants. This full scale escape from the city core resulted
in an unusual sprawl, if compared to those that affected other urban areas like Chicago
and Philadelphia, because of the depopulation which followed the city expansion, i.e. the
sprawl was not a consequence of a growth, but consisted in drawing existing residents
from the center to the periphery. Homes in the central city were abandoned and the tax
revenues coming from those households vanished, leaving Detroit unequipped to deal with
this fallout. The new scattered urban layout led, inevitably, to the constitution of an
impressively sprawled job market, with the great majority of jobs located quite far from
the downtown center, thus remaining beyond the reach of low-income people who lack
transportation facilities and often live in the inner city. Indeed, in the hometown of the
auto industry, public policies encouraged a car culture, where the great majority of the
investments have been made in building highways rather than in developing an efficient
public transportation system. The aforementioned cascade of events led to the current
36% of the population below the poverty level in addition to a residential vacancy rate of

27%, but recently various actions have been undertaken in order to let the city rise from its
own ashes. All these proposals, actually, belong to a broader project, already carried out in
many urban realities, which aims at taking advantage from the already described process
of city shrinkage: instead of stubbornly and hopelessly striving to give Detroit back to its
past splendor, a more affordable plan of smart decline is on the way. Under the definition
smart decline fall a range of strategies and methods to empower cities to detect other
possible uses of dismissed and vacant properties along with the aim to maintain high
standards of living; these involve demolition of existing tumbledown buildings and
rehabilitation of abandoned land and facilities in a sustainable viewpoint. However,
addressing such a downsizing process is immensely challenging and despite the
appearance it is technically demanding, expensive and time-consuming. Since the past few
years, also Detroit has been engaged in a regeneration plan, started with a phase of
deconstruction of part of those 33,529 derelict homes which helped to bring the
perception of an improving safety, due to the reduction of crime by physically eliminating
spaces designated to hide and foster illegal activities. Simultaneously, many measures to
attract firms and people to the core town have been adopted; among these free rents to
artists and researchers and no taxation for the first 5 years for industries and companies
who choose to locate their production in Detroit. Dan Gilbert, a Detroit born billionaire,
has become the poster boy of such initiative by moving thousands of employees
downtown, providing also money to help renovating buildings. Motivated by the benefits
deriving from these funding programs, the majority of which are largely supported by
private investments, in the meantime 248 startups have found in the Motown a fertile
environment to flourish, contributing to draw skilled and young people determined to
restore the citys long-lost claim as capital of innovation. Complementing private projects,
citizen initiatives are also spreading all over the metropolitan area, promoting a
sustainable lifestyle achieved through social cooperation in order to provide for those
services which are missing. One of these associations, the Detroit Mower Gang has the
goal to recover abandoned parks and playgrounds and to give them back for the
community to enjoy, while others are engaged in urban farming projects to supply local
residents with fresh and genuine products, and therefore to subtract land from illegal
purposes, by developing a network of food entrepreneurs.
Nevertheless, in order to generate radical and effective changes to the current situation, a
more cohesive and comprehensive plan, which takes into account every essential aspect,
should be formulated by a competent authority. In contrast with cities facing economic
and population booms, in cases of decline it is usually not so evident how planners should
proceed to revolutionize the region and preserve at the same time the productivity of
different level and types of activities. In this sense, in support of stakeholders and
decisionmakers to find innovative responses, comes the data analytics, related in particular
to decision modeling, together with graph theory applied to urban environments. The

former contributes to devise ways to use data to generate insights about strategies and
operations to carry out, while the latter helps in overcoming marginalization due to
excessive clustering of neighborhoods and minorities. Indeed conventional planning
policies encompass practices that often fail at considering suitable tradeoffs between goals
and constraints in a global point of view, whereas the use of optimization methods
facilitate cities in deciding how to invest and in which areas , as well as at what level, to
optimize performance measures. Furthermore they make the process more transparent
and unbiased since they allow to incorporate multiple perspectives and objectives
embodying principles or values that are considered fundamental for the regeneration of
the city, avoiding the preponderance particular opinions. The procedure begins with the
identification of the core actions, that are regarded as the most suitable to tackle the
problem, followed by the selection of criteria, by which it is possible to determine whether
the selection of a given area would be likely to corroborate the core actions, and of the
constraints that must be satisfied: the assessment phase, which eventually leads to
definitive choice of the areas of interest, consists in the pick and computation of
appropriate measures or indices that can be quantified by data. At the same time, graph
theory plays an important role in building up a mathematical model which enables to
understand the dynamics affecting the neighborhoods in exam along with providing a
powerful guide to decisions about the relative importance of individual districts to the
overall landscape connectivity, which in a shrinking setting is of primary importance. The
entire landscape, thus, is represented in terms of a graph whose pairs of nodes, i.e. the
habitat parcels, are functionally linked by edges; in such a way it is easier to handle with
issues of connectivity in an heterogeneous environment as an entire set of mathematic
tools comes in handy to show dynamically the impacts of a given arrangement on the
urban network.
The Detroit case study, due to the huge numbers involved, has drawn great attention to
the need, in order to guarantee long-lasting success to cities and districts, of fostering
diversity of business and space uses through incentives: in such a way clustering and
isolation can be avoided.
Furthermore, another key factor that contributes to eliminate social and physical barriers
is represented by social engagements, which can be achieved by promoting shared
activities,
However, since the regeneration process is highly expensive in terms of time and money,
the areas destined to requalification and its relative projects on them should be carefully
selected in order to have effective impacts and to lift the current situation. In this sense
analytic tools can help to have a broader view of the problem by taking into consideration
every aspect.