Brent Ryan, Design After Decline: How America Rebuilds Shrinking Cities (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012).George Galster, Driving Detroit: The Quest for Respect in the Motor City (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012)

These two books, from different urban series published by the University of Pennsylvania Press, offer contrasting perspectives on the deindustrialization of America’s twentieth-century manufacturing centers. In Design After Decline, Brent Ryan focuses on the efforts of Philadelphia and Detroit to rebuild after decades of population loss and economic decline. He places both cities in the broader context of urban decline of twentieth-century industrial centers. While the collapse of Detroit is better known, Ryan documents the parallels between that city and Philadelphia, including the loss of jobs in a dominant industry (textiles in Philadelphia, automobiles in Detroit), population decline, housing abandonment, and racial change. Although Philadelphia’s overall decline is less dramatic than Detroit’s, the two cities are well matched. Ryan traces Philadelphia’s and Detroit’s largely ineffectual rebuilding efforts from the urban renewal era to the present day. Although both cities have had some successful projects, these have been limited and insufficient to revitalize rapidly declining areas such as the Near North End in Philadelphia or Detroit’s East Side. As Ryan notes, the extensive demolition programs in both cities were effective in producing vacant lots, which, in the absence of viable development markets, have generally remained vacant. Overall, Philadelphia has fared better than Detroit, largely because of residential growth in the city center and the retention of a substantial middle-class population. (There is surprisingly little mention, however, of the contributions of the University of Pennsylvania to inner city redevelopment. Fixing Broken Cities by John Kromer [2010] helps to close this gap.) Ryan contrasts the role of the city governments, and their local planning and development agencies, in the two cities. While critical of the Philadelphia planners’ urban design standards, which are seen as too suburban, Ryan finds a more cohesive and comprehensive redevelopment model than he does in Detroit. The Philadelphia City Planning Department ensured that redevelopment investments were concentrated and that both the architecture and urban design of the new development was not incompatible with the existing context. Changing street patterns to better integrate the new and old developments was also a factor. These efforts were effective, to a great extent because much of the new development consisted of assisted housing. Ryan sees Detroit’s rebuilding efforts as having been considerably less successful because of a lack of adequate design controls and an over-reliance on the private market to decide where and what to build. Detroit was willing to provide deep subsidies to market-rate housing developments that ignored market realities. The strategy has been largely ineffective; abandonment continues to outpace redevelopment. Design After Decline also describes other approaches to rebuilding shrinking cities, including landscape urbanism and new urbanism. Each of these options can be expected to have only limited effect, however. As a better approach, Ryan offers social urbanism, modeled after revitalization efforts in Medellı́n, Colombia. To be effective, social urbanism would require acceptance of a different future for a smaller city, better political leadership, a more democratic process and a great deal of patience. If these elements can be assembled and sustained, in 50 years America’s shrinking cities could become new “semi-topias”—not the places that they once were but better than they are today. Ryan assumes that the private market will complement public efforts to redevelop lowand