Not all cities are growing, Leipzig demonstrates

KARACHI:

If you ask anyone in Karachi they will tell you that one of its problems is that it is uncontrollably ever expanding. In fact, across the world, we generally think of this as a frightening characteristic of urban centres.

But it isn’t true, argues Federico Pedrini, an associate architect in Copenhagen and Brussels, whose paper, ‘Shrink Positive! Leipzig: Re-writing a City’ was presented by a faculty member at the 7th NED seminar on urbanization on Saturday. Unfortunately, it had to be read out, as Pedrini couldn’t make it.

Stop and think for a second of the examples of Detroit, Liverpool, Lisbon and Leipzig, he says. They are experiencing deurbanisation or shrinking. And now planners and the government are faced with the challenge of working on defragmentation.

Shrinking does, however, present unexpected opportunities for these stakeholders, he argues. It opens up the possibility of working on quality as opposed to quantity development.

He studied the historical city of Leipzig to demonstrate it. It has lost 31% of its population, 27% (about 60,000) of its buildings are empty, abandoned and collapsing. This is what a ghost town looks like.

He asks the question - Can negative growth be planned for? But he cautions that we can’t build cities, we can only change them.

Pedrini made a fragmentation diagram of the city, taking into account big housing blocks, abandoned lots and voids in Leipzig. Once this was established it became clear how and where urban planners could work around and go back to using those spaces.

Published in The Express Tribune, April 2^nd, 2012.