Philadelphia, like most American cities, suffers from blight and abandonment. Many theories have been tested in efforts to combat blight in cities and in today’s New York Times there is an Op-Ed by Diana Lind, the editor at large for the quarterly magazine Next American City, on programs being implemented in Philadelphia’s most hard-hit areas, specifically the Kensington neighborhood.
This October Dr. Soji Adelaja, director of the Land Policy Institute out of Michigan State University spoke at the National Brownfield Association’s Canadian-U.S. Brownfield Summit in Buffalo.
“I want you to know that the thing about shrinking cities is that it’s not just a subset of cities that are shrinking. It’s a problem of urban America downsizing, and this is a problem that has been going on for a very long time,” Adelaja said.
While the measure of blight and abandonment in rust-belt cities like Buffalo, Detroit and Cleveland far outweigh those in our biggest cities finding solutions for these problems is an American issue, not just a problem for the rust-belt. Reinventing cities, and areas of cities, is a task that urban planners and policy-makers face in cities and towns across the nation.
