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What Happens When You Build A City And Nobody Comes?
Detroit, 1:48 AM
Wed Nov 25
23 posts in the last 24 hours
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What Happens When You Build A City And Nobody Comes? |
Original material is licensed under a Creative Commons License permitting non-commercial sharing with attribution.
08/19/09
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08/19/09
Unlike C City, Detroit is located in a temperate area; you can always find another use for the land currently occupied by abandoned suburbs. Last I heard, Michigan is a pretty decent place to grow apples and blueberries.
08/19/09
Also, this chick rides her motocycle through the radioactive ruins of Chernobyl!
[www.kiddofspeed.com]
08/19/09
Chernobyl, not so cool. Kind of a free fire wildlife refuge now. And a great exercise in what helicopters can build. But it's not so cool to go scavenging there when your hair start falling out a couple of weeks later.
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08/18/09
Maybe even set of a start/finish and do some time-trialing.
Any LA Jalops wanna make a day-trip of it?
08/18/09
08/19/09
Shoot me a message (private if you prefer) with your email and I'll let you know if anything's coming up.
08/18/09
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08/18/09
In addition to Killer Bee's mention of Vegas, LOTS of cities in the US were built in the desert - land is always cheap there at first & some of them actually worked out pretty well.
Some of them started out as simple stopping points on what were initially footroads, then horse or stagecoach runs, and later railroad stops - some of the former obviously tended to become some of the latter, while some of the "in between" stops flourished due to certain natural resources available in the area (water, gold, silver - and later, oil), and some fizzled away. Many of these from Texas to Northern Cali are located on the road (well, parts of MANY roads) known variously as the Mission Trail or Camino Real, with missions built at intervals roughly a days' distance apart as traveld by foot at first, which also worked out well for horses too later on, as they needed to at least stop for water periodically.
We have a number of desert cities that if it weren't for ONE GOOD REASON wouldn't be there today - whatever that reason for the particular city might be, or - more properly in the case of some - whatever may have been at that time... and yet they still exist because people haven't the sense to leave. Or - perhaps they've developed enough of an infrastructure beyond the "one good reason", to keep them going. The Permian basin in Texas is a great example of this... what does the Midland/Odessa region do now that the oil is all but played-out? What does an Appalachian coal-town do once the coal is all gone? What does Detroit do now that things are the way they are in their most key industry?
Sorry if anyone thought that was a near-threadjack - I just find it a fascinating subject, and it's a problem that's becoming more widespread in our country as various industries leave or shrink.
08/18/09
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08/18/09
Your question gets to the essence of things: What do cities do when the thing that spawned them fizzles out or is replaced by assets another place can command? The cities that have multiple resources, superior geography and can adapt will persist, and maybe even thrive beyond what they had previously achieved. Those that fall short will eventually perish.
This doesn't have to condemn Detroit or Appalachia. But it does limb the magnitude of the issues facing them. They must do what they have done even better, and regain their markets. They must retool and start to do other things that have value. They must find a way to colonize other places and productivity and repatriate the wealth. Or they will contract and reshape themselves as a much smaller and less important place.
Smaller and different doesn't have to mean worse, but it can. Some day, Buffalo will rise again - because it has the geography and resources to be a magnificent city. But it probably won't be doing it on the basis of steel mills or grain ports, or the Erie Canal. Maybe it will. It likely will have more to do with the education and industry of its population, and the quality of life that it is able to provide, things that make it desirable, pleasant and profitable to be there.
08/18/09
@something_unique_and_descripti...: You said hookers thrice...
08/18/09
Damn good epistle... allow me to reply/respond to a few of your points:
1.) History suggests - or at least there is some archaeological evidence to substantiate this - that the Vikings founded & tried to keep a colony going in North America with imported supplies. That's fine for awhile, until people on the export side realize that they're not getting much from that set of transactions except for whatever currency they've both agreed upon as the basis for transaction. Is that good enough? Sometimes. Can it be sustained? Only if there are resources available on the import side to sustain the flow of said currency. There are certain islands along the routes of cruise ship tours that are EXACTLY like this - they produce nothing, except for cash. They import all their food, prepare it at restaurants/bars and sell if for an insane markup, they import all their raw materials & sometimes finished products & either fabricate or sell them in the form of tourist-y tschochkes at an insane profit. They generate cashflow to their suppliers, and that's it. What happens if all the cruise lines decide to no longer stop there? That would pretty much be it for that entire economic cycle.
2.) What do cities do when their "one good reason" has fizzled-out? I'm not sure, because I don't know of too many American cities that have adapted to well from the late industrial age to the early new-technology age. Lots of them seem to have adepted well from the early industrial age to the late industrial age, but that next border seems to be harder to cross... how long can a "steel city", a city that adapted well from the days of James Watt to the days of James Carter - but hasn't changed a bit since then - survive right now? How many windows can stay boarded-up downtown for how many years before that city starts to resemble a Luxor or a Babylon?
3.) No, smaller & different doesn't necessarily mean "worse"... there IS indeed a bit of a zero-sum game involved, though; although some economic experts don't like to admit that... you can't have constant growth across ALL industries. Buggy-whips are no longer a dominant force in the American economic infrastructure, for example - only so much expenditure as a percentage relative to the GDP can be generated on the consumer side, and that total expenditure can often get re-directed... how many of us wrote checks for $75 or $100 a month to cell-phone companies 60 years ago, for example? Well, the answer is obviously NONE, because the freakin' cellphone was even invented yet! Multiply the average costs of the different things we all spend money on eahc month now vs 40 or 50 years ago, and it's easy to see how different the allocations are.
Problem is, some cities are waiting, drumming their fingers for those old paradigms to come back... some have adapted; and that is, at least, the good news.
08/19/09
1. The point of a colony is to give it the start to grow into something self supporting. If the colony can produce enough value in one area, then it justifies the continued, expensive importation of other things. It the value is insufficient, or additional stresses overwhelm the colony it may be abandoned.
2. Education and technology have generally been the solutions for cities that need to reinvent themselves. You can do a great deal with efficiency, taking in the belt another notch, and conservation, but it doesn't dig you out of a hole. Generally transformative events happen that cities can take advantage of. Your locally abundant and worthless resource suddenly becomes valuable. Instead of being pirates, you become international shippers. You move from steel to aerospace or computers. You move from growing grain to making Pop Tarts. Or from physical labor to knowledge work that can create even greater returns. And being a city, it means that you can support the new, transformative industries as they emerge, while also maintaining and refining the older core industries for as long as they can remain viable. No one actually knows what the future will be, so a smart region tries to make many bets, hoping that some will pay off tremendously and others will do alright and others will fail.
3. Exactly. There may be a kid in nursery school in Detroit who's going to create the next Ford, or Microsoft, or Motown. Something might happen and the nation will rely on immense iron block pushrod motors. Or Detroit might embrace greenhouse agriculture and be the winter supplier of tomatoes and flowers to the entire country. Likely, several things will happen. The important thing is to structure the process to encourage the greatest success, promote diverse activity, and ensure that shortfalls from any enterprise are not too damaging.
Maybe in a hundred years Detroit will be a tenth the size it is now. Or maybe it will be double what it was at its peak. The important thing now is to create opportunities that will foster renewal and allow it to flourish, and then to build on success. It won't look like what it was, but it might be magnificent.
08/19/09
08/18/09
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BTW, why haven't we scheduled a Jalopnik Rallycross here yet? I see quite a few good courses in there.
08/19/09
I was seriously planning a trip with my family for that purpose a little while ago. 2 WRXs, 1 A6 2.7T, a few 4x4s and a ghost town could make for a fun weekend.
08/18/09
[maps.pomocnik.com]
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[www.lakata.org]
08/19/09
SuperBurger rules!
08/19/09
i never knew california had so many ghost towns!
08/18/09
08/18/09
Remember seeing the sign for California City but figured it was just another sweltering, hole-in-the-wall, dead mining town.
There was nothing to indicate otherwise.
08/18/09
08/18/09
It's boring to drive through, but at night, you get the feeling, if you broke down, there'd be zombies coming after you in a hurry.
I've actually driven off-road...blazed a trail, kinda...with my wife's '02 RX300 AWD, using the nav system's paved roads as reference while avoiding a nasty wreck at 395.
A couple of cars followed, initially, but after about a mile, they both chickened out and turned back.
Bah! We had a full tank of gas, half a pack of cigarettes, and were wearing sunglasses...while it was dark out.
Hit it.
It is, BTW, the perfect place for a road course. Close enough to Lost Wages to keep you entertained before/after, and far enough from So-Cal to make the crazies at least have to expend effort to get there.
08/18/09
08/18/09
I have to admit, I have every Steely Dan song recorded, those of which I'm aware, at least, and right now, I'm finally getting to see FM for the first time.
Back, jack...do it again. Thank you, VH1 and TiVo!
Even saw a concert of theirs back in 1994, I think, right after Fagen released Kamakiriad.
I'm a music geek, to some degree.
08/18/09
08/18/09
One of our favorite things to do was ride across the desert (full speed) en route to Edwards to plane spot all the cool toys being tested by the Air Force. We'd fill up our tanks in Rosemond and head to the base. It was quite open then (may still be, for all I know) so getting close enough to see the action was never a problem.
Many a time on the return trip we would ride through California City, the city that never was. It was as surreal as you can imagine. Most of the streets were not only cut but were paved, replete with curb cuts for driveways and sidewalks in the barren neighborhoods. Back then one could also see the weather-beaten billboards from the 60's upon which you could make out the wildly optimistic "pitch" of the developers for some of the sub-divisions. The place gave me an eerie "I'm in a post-apocalyptic Twilight Zone scene" way before I knew what that meant.
Weird place.
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