Defiant Imagination

The new ghost town is… brand new.

Ghost towns… We used to think about them as icons of the Wild West, traces of an ancient civilization (Petra) or as the unfortunate consequences of an accident (Prypiat, abandonned after the Chernobyl catastrophe.)

Financial speculation has since created another kind of ghost town, one created by the laws of modern banking and the rules of real estate. In the U.S., these towns are the foreclosed neighbourhoods of California or Florida, bought for a fortune and sold for nothing.

I’ve recently learned that the U.S. were not the only country dealing with a real estate bubble, far from it. Spain has been plagued with a problem of unfinished developments and unsold housing lots, well documented in these articles from the New York Times and the Guardian. In the meantime, its youth can’t afford to buy property, unless they sign 50-year mortgages.

What surprised me the most was the situation in China, whose housing bubble is taking gigantic proportions. The New South China Mall, the biggest mall in the world, has been sitting empty for years. Nearby, towns built for millions of people have a 25% occupancy rate, while residents in Beijing can’t afford to buy decent property.

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Can young creatives save Detroit?

This article published in the New York Times on July 1st comes as rather good news for Detroit. It’s actually the first positive piece of news I’ve come across about this city in months — maybe years.

It seems the creative type has elected Detroit as its newest boom town. According to the article, “downtown Detroit experienced a 59 percent increase in the number of college-educated residents under the age of 35, nearly 30 percent more than two-thirds of the nation’s 51 largest cities.” Artists, designers, entrepreneurs and other types of young professionals have been taking advantage of low real estate prices and the growing number of career opportunities.

This phenomenon transpires in the number of trendy coffee shops and restaurants opening every year, renovated buildings as well as community initiatives being launched. I was particularly impressed by the Detroit Creative Corridor Center, an entrepreneurship hub providing services to new creative businesses.

There seems to be a certain parallel with what New Orleans has been experiencing since Katrina: a surge in creative initiatives and social entrepreneurship. Both cities still have a long way to go, but it seems that in such places that have been badly shaken by deep crisis, the feeling of community lies at the basis of the reconstruction effort. I hope we’ve only seen the beginning of what will be an amazing journey toward a renewed prosperity.

Photo credits: Ian Freimuth, some rights reserved.

The age of the global city

There’s a very interesting article in the September/October issue of Foreign Policy in which International Relations expert Parag Khanna discusses the evolution of our world toward an age of the city.

Khanna points out that cities have always been acting as focus points for civilizations (think Venice or Changdu.) However we’ve never lived in an age where mega-cities acting as centres of power are emerging in all areas of the world. In fact, Khanna argues that the future will not be about nation-states but about global cities.

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Doug Saunders: Arrival City

Another investigation into the world of slums has been published. Doug Saunders, from the Globe and Mail, is the author of Arrival City, in which he describes his experience in these vast and poor urban areas populated with thousands of people who often have relocated from the countryside. Although I haven’t had the chance to read it, I have gone through an excerpt published on Sep. 25 in the newspaper, accompanied by an article summing up his findings.

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Jane Jacobs on slums

Conventional approaches to slums and slum dwellers are thoroughly paternalistic. The trouble with paternalists is that they want to make impossibly profound changes, and they choose impossibly superficial means for doing so. To overcome slums, we must regard slum dwellers as people capable of understanding and acting upon their own self-interests, which they certainly are. We need to discern, respect and build upon the forces for regeneration that exist in slums themselves, and that demonstrably work in real cities. This is far from trying to patronize people into a better life, and it is far from what is done today.

Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities.