The Mayors’ Institute on City Design Works with Older Industrial Cities
July 2007 – WASHINGTON –The Mayors’ Institute on City Design (MICD) held a special National Institute Session focused on the issues facing older industrial cities. Sponsored by the Bank of America, this session brought together eight mayors facing downtown decline and industrial job losses. The session dealt with issues surrounding adaptive re-use of factories, transportation networks that were built to accommodate port and truck traffic, and center city revitalization.
In the past year, the Brookings Institution published two reports that identify several physical environmental consequences of shifting employment patterns that are common to many of the former industrial powerhouse cities:
- large numbers of contaminated or potentially contaminated parcels,
- central city cores with declining tax bases as compared to more affluent suburbs that were fueled by federal mortgage subsidies after World War II,
- central business districts that are virtually empty after business hours with few economic development catalysts, and
- city waterfronts and other prime land areas that are abandoned or occupied by disparate remaining industrial uses, making redevelopment of assets more challenged.
MICD assisted Brookings with their report distribution strategy to our list of 226 alumni mayors who are still in office. Additionally, MICD has received a generous 3-year grant from the Surdna Foundation to organize a series of events to expand upon the environmental design trends identified in the Restoring Prosperity report. These conversations will focus on strategies for transforming the physical landscape of these cities to accommodate improved economic outcomes. The planned events will offer an opportunity for alumni mayors to meet with their peers and to discuss locally led approaches for brownfield redevelopment, industrial land re-use, and city place-making that helps to re-connect urban cores to their regional economies.
To read the Brookings Institution’s work on this topic, please see:
http://www.brookings.edu/reports/2007/05metropolitanpolicy_vey.aspx
http://www.brookings.edu/projects/blueprint.aspx
MICD is a partnership program of the National Endowment for the Arts, the American Architectural Foundation, and the United States Conference of Mayors. To date, the program has assisted over 750 mayors in transforming their communities through good urban design. Additional funding has been provided through a generous gift from the Edward W. Rose III Family Fund of the Dallas Foundation and the Bank of America.
For more information on MICD, call 202-463-1930 or go to www.micd.org.
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