Ed Morrison · Creatively shrinking Youngstown

May 30th, 2009

Christian Science Monitor reports from Youngstown. My brother, Hunter, expresses the challenge we now face across the Great Lakes. How do we creatively shrink cities?

When the steel mills closed more than 30 years ago, Youngstown was left without much of the stable, middle-class base that kept the city humming. Thousands of vacant properties now blight city streets, and natives often find themselves the only remaining residents on a block that once housed 10 families.

But without manufacturing, the city was forced to redefine itself, says Hunter Morrison, director of the Center for Urban and Regional Studies at Youngstown State University. Successfully reorienting a dying city requires identifying what strengths the city has left and building out from there, he says.

“It’s the big bang theory: Just the way the universe expands it also contracts, and when you contract you go back to the core,” says Mr. Morrison, an early architect of the 2010 plan. For cities in flux, the core becomes any kind of business that can’t go anywhere – the permanent economic engines, Morrison says. With the steel mills gone, what’s left in Youngstown is a university and a couple of hospitals – “eds and meds,” city planners say.

“We’re going from a mill town to a college town,” Morrison says. Youngstown State is far from an economic and research powerhouse, but, he says, it’s the city’s best hope for a future, and it’s here to stay.

“The university has 14,000 immigrants to the knowledge economy every year,” he says. “If we link and leverage our resources, more will stay here.”

  • A Rust Belt city tries to shrink its way to success

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