“Ever bigger machines, entailing ever bigger concentrations of economic power and exerting ever greater violence against the environment, do not represent progress: they are a denial of wisdom. Wisdom demands a new orientation of science and technology towards the organic, the gentle, the non-violent, the elegant and beautiful.” E.F. Schumacher

CNN Money has an interesting article on shrinking cities. What, as a city administrator, do you do when your industrial base disappears and your population declines?

Youngstown, Ohio, has seen its population shrink by more than half over the past 40 years, leaving behind huge swaths of empty homes, streets and neighborhoods.

Now, in a radical move, the city - which has suffered since the steel industry left town and jobs dried up - is bulldozing abandoned buildings, tearing up blighted streets and converting entire blocks into open green spaces. More than 1,000 structures have been demolished so far.

Under the initiative, dubbed Plan 2010, city officials are also monitoring thinly-populated blocks. When only one or two occupied homes remain, the city offers incentives - up to $50,000 in grants - for those home owners to move, so that the entire area can be razed. The city will save by cutting back on services like garbage pick-ups and street lighting in deserted areas.

They’re onto something there. Leaving the homes abandoned and rotting would create vast slums and make the city even less attractive to any potential residents and businesses. Better still it brings a sense of pride back into the remaining population, lifts some of the despair, anger and feelings of betrayal by the system that Obama rightly referred to the other day. Creating green spaces and new farming areas helps a city immensely.

What they are doing is attracting attention from other cities falling into dereliction. Permanent growth is a myth of capitalism. There may be an appearance of such growth in a single economy but we live in a world economy now and that is ultimately a closed system, a zero sum game, where for one part to grow another must shrink.

With peak oil here or soon to be here, with global climate change about to bring massive disruption to food supply chains (check what’s happening to rice crops), with so much about to become in short supply it’s time for us to take a clue from E.F. Schumacher, Small Is Beautiful

In the first chapter of ‘Small Is Beautiful’, “The Problem of Production”, Schumacher points out that our economy is unsustainable. The natural resources (especially fossil fuels), are treated as expendable income, when in fact they should be treated as capital, since they are not renewable and thus subject to eventual depletion. He further points out that similarly, the capacity of nature to resist pollution is limited as well. He concludes that government effort must be concentrated on reaching sustainable development, because relatively minor improvements like education for leisure or technology transfer to the Third World countries will not solve the underlying problem of unsustainable economy.

Schumacher’s philosophy is one of “enoughness,” appreciating both human needs, limitations and appropriate use of technology. It grew out of his study of village-based economics, which he later termed “Buddhist Economics.” Buddhist Economics forms the basis for ‘Small is Beautiful’s fourth chapter.

He faults conventional economic thinking for failing to consider the most appropriate scale for an activity, blasts notions that “growth is good”, and that “bigger is better,” and questions the appropriateness of using mass production in developing countries, promoting instead “production by the masses.” Schumacher was one of the first economists to question the appropriateness of using GNP to measure human wellbeing, emphasizing that “the aim ought to be to obtain the maximum amount of well being with the minimum amount of consumption.”

Technorati Tags: shrinking cities, Youngstown, Plan 2010, capitalism, E.F. Schumacher, Small is Beautiful

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