So as those who regularly read my other personal journal know, I've been doing a lot of bicycling lately; and that's partly because I recently quit smoking (74 days ago...but who's counting?), and partly because I'm creating a series of fun little customized bike maps in Google this summer, simply because I can. (I will eventually have a central page here at the website, by the way, for finding these maps; but for now, though, you can click on the following direct links to check out my maps of Lincoln Park South, Lincoln Park North, and a collection of northside neighborhood parks.) And so that has had me not only visiting a lot of city parks, for example, as an excuse to put stuff on my finished maps afterwards, but also doing a lot of research about these parks, and about Chicago history, and about the strange ways that cities actually morph and "grow" as the times change, and as different things are needed from them by society. And that's had me thinking about some interesting theories about city renewal lately, regarding not Chicago but some of the other cities around here in the Midwest; this will be a theory-heavy entry today, I'm warning you, plus a little goofy in a science-fictiony way...

For those who don't know, the American Midwest actually contains several dozen largish cities; Chicago, where I live, is the largest with almost three million people, but the Midwest also contains such metropolitan areas as Kansas City, Des Moines, Detroit, Tulsa, Little Rock and more. I grew up, for example, outside of St. Louis, so I'll use that for my stand-in example today, although what I'm talking about can be applied to a whole lot of cities around here in the Midwest. St. Louis in fact is very typical of these cities; actually settled in the late 1600s by French fur traders, it wasn't until the early 1800s and the Louisiana Purchase that the city really came into its own. It was one of many Midwestern meccas during the Industrial Age, a magnet for immigrants who became the day laborers that made this country what it now is; the population of the city grew by 800 percent, for example, just between 1840 and '60.

The height of St. Louis' history is arguably 1904, when it simultaneously held a World's Fair and the very first American edition of the modern Olympics, while also officially being the fourth largest city in the United States at the time. But then like most of these cities we're talking about today, a series of setbacks over the next half-century would put St. Louis into a permanent decline; first the twin devastations of World War I and II, then the transition from the Industrial Age to the Information Age, where suddenly people didn't need to live close together in small spaces so much anymore, leading to the middle class and white flight and the rise of the suburbs and all the rest. So now St. Louis is in this odd position, as are many of these other cities; that the entire metropolitan area, suburbs included, remains the 18th most populous metropolitan area in the US (at roughly three million people), but the city itself is now only the 52nd largest city in the nation (with only 350,000 people left, although that number is now finally holding steady for the first time in decades).

What it leaves you with in St. Louis are just these vast, vast sections of city where there is nothing left open; in some places, just miles upon miles of abandoned warehouses and factories and side streets and the like. It's depressing, and it's dangerous, and it's foolhardy to just keep all those hundreds of crumbling buildings just still standing around all empty; but yet no one in these cities do anything about it, because they're all still hoping to eventually repopulate the city to the extent it once was. But I'm thinking -- maybe it's time to just face up to reality, and admit publicly that St. Louis will simply never have a million people living in it again. It won't, because we no longer live in an age where a million people have to; in fact, you could say that we're all better off because of it, that it lessens pollution and increases individual happiness. But that doesn't change the fact, though, that the actual city limits of St. Louis are set up to handle several million people, but are only now handling 350,000, and probably with no much bigger of a realistic goal that can be set than an eventual population of half a million.

So in other words, that's more than half the original square footage in the city you no longer need, that can be used for some other purpose if you want, after you finally give up on the idea that you're going to be able to turn those 50 square miles of burnt-out warehouses all into coffeehouses and condos, and do the sensible thing instead and finally knock them all down. And this is where the science-fictiony part of my proposal kicks in; because I've been thinking, why not do something really bold in such a situation, and simply re-terraform the entire city of St. Louis from the ground-up? Start with the big vast stretches of abandoned city that currently exist, eventually end at half the former city limits altogether, leaving behind only the historically important buildings and commercial districts; and with the other half of the former city, turn the entire thing into an experimental series of vast green spaces, parks, wildlife preserves, cultural campuses, educational campuses and more, for equal benefit to all three million people still living in the surrounding suburbs, paid for through all their combined taxes. St. Louis the City is dead; St. Louis the Grand Experiment of the 21st Century is born.

No, seriously, there's a precedent for a project like this! Just look at world history about 150 years ago, when a series of natural disasters forced the rebuilding of such cities as Chicago, Paris, San Francisco and more. In Chicago's case, for example, a bold new vision was created for the post-fire city, something that would utterly transform not only how the city looked but how it worked; don't forget, before the Great Fire of 1871, Chicago consisted mostly of narrow lanes, with not only most houses but all the sidewalks made out of wood, and with no green spaces within the city itself whatsoever. People like Daniel Burnham, creator of the 1909 Chicago Plan, took the ideals of the Victorian Age and envisioned no less than an entirely different definition of the word "city" -- to a place full of parks and broad green avenues, punctuated with gleaming steel and terra-cotta skyscrapers, where trucks and other industrial traffic was shuttled to underground "lower drives," a city full of libraries and museums and tidy little underground pipes to carry all the sewage.

That goal actually came to fruition; that's what I've been thinking about a lot recently, touring all these neighborhood parks, because most of them were first created in this time period when the entire city was going through a profound transformation. So why couldn't we make such a bold change to a major city again? We've done it once; we could do it again. Come up with a, whatever, 30-year plan or however long you think it'll take, that would factor in every modern lesson we now know about city planning, and that would profoundly change St. Louis into the kind of utopian playground that all large Western cities are destined to become. Because that really is the way things are heading, isn't it? This is something else I've been thinking about a lot, because of all my recent bike trips; that even as a lot of formerly large cities in the Midwest are falling apart these days, Chicago really is becoming a sort of utopian playground. A place where you can get pretty much anywhere you want by bicycle and electric train; where almost any neighborhood you randomly pick is clean and pleasant and full of trees and lawns; with its own parks and public sports facilities and libraries and schools; where there are a plethora of cafes and bars and funky stores and pedestrian traffic around every corner; where crime is low and employment high; where a series of cutting-edge green architectural experiments are currently taking place; with a thriving music scene, and artistic scene, and literary community, and theatre community, and dance community, and just about any other kind of cultural activity you want to mention; and where everything is even surrounded by cutesy ornate wrought-iron fences too.

Tell a Chicagoan 150 years ago that this is what the city would be like 150 years in the future, and they would've laughed in your face -- they would've rightly claimed that the needs of an Industrial society simply wouldn't allow for such a large-scale utopian space. But as mentioned, we no longer live in an Industrial society -- we live in an Information one, where people don't have to live together in small spaces anymore if they don't want, in order to be close to their factory job or whatever, but rather choose to live together in small spaces, for all the best reasons there are to do such a thing (camaraderie, urban excitement, culture, etc). And this of course is what's simultaneously ruining many of these former large cities across the Midwest, while at the same time benefiting a place like Chicago -- that there are simply a whole lot less people who need to live in big cities anymore, and therefore choose not to, while those who do are tending to all flock to the biggest one in their area, and are in the process of transforming it into the urban oasis just mentioned. See as well San Francisco, big parts of London, the Brooklyn area of New York, Frankfurt, Sydney, and lots and lots of other places around the Western world where this is happening -- where lots of bigger cities throughout that region are disappearing, even as the main city of that region is flourishing like never before. It's external proof to back up these theories of mine, that the time really is ripe for such a major re-terraforming of a former Industrial city.

Imagine a best-case scenario, for example: imagine a St. Louis only a third of the size it currently is, where a full-time population of 400,000 or so live almost exclusively in either sleek modern lofts or historic mansions left over from the city's Victorian heyday. A place with few vehicular roads, implementing instead a comprehensive transit/bike-path system for the inner city, finally possible in a place like St. Louis because of it now only being a third of its former size. A city with a glittering new commercial district downtown, where all those companies from all those former sections of the city have now consolidated, in a space that mixes corporate offices with commercial retail as flawlessly as Chicago's Loop or New York's Madison Avenue (to cite just two examples).

That kind of transformation in St. Louis would be exciting enough; but now imagine taking that two-thirds of the former city you're no longer using, and turning the entire thing into one giant curving "uber-greenspace," designed to benefit all three million people in the entire metropolitan area? Not just a series of parks and wildlife spaces, mind you, but imagine also moving most of the area's dozens of community colleges into the space as well, along with many of its hospitals and museums. Imagine all these suburbs starting to build all future new public schools in their area of the greenspace, along with transit lines for getting students in and out each day? It would not just be a giant parkland space, that is, but a working part of the entire metropolitan area; an official acknowledgment for the first time that we should maybe stop thinking of the "St. Louis area" as one big city surrounded by a bunch of little suburbs, but rather as a large unified "megapolis," and to do our urban planning with this idea in mind.

That's definitely part of the problem, I think, and what would need to be part of the solution; that in many of these metropolitan areas I'm talking about, we need to officially acknowledge that the former "suburbs" of these areas have now become the main reason for these areas to still exist. It would be extremely interesting, I think, to see the hundreds of suburbs in the St. Louis area band together into a "St. Louis Union" of sorts; that much like the European Union, each suburb would still retain its own autonomy, city budget and city government, but also create a special joint government and budget just for one specific project, in this case the management of that giant greenspace that runs through the entire area. Each of these suburbs, then, would be required to kick in a certain percentage of their budget into a giant "St. Louis Union" budget, that would pay for the construction and maintenance of this giant greenspace; the space itself would have its own governing board, separate from any individual suburb, with all suburban citizens eligible to vote for the board's officers.

It's a really fascinating thing to contemplate, I think, the idea of America adding a whole new organizational element to its society; of all these regional areas banding together to run their own megapolis spaces, creating dozens of profoundly vast green zones across the United States, out of former industrial areas that used to be the cause of most of this country's pollution. If such a thing caught on, it could utterly transform American society; but of course that's the thing, that it's a rather profound paradigm shift we're talking about, and I wonder just how many people would have the courage to embrace such a thing? Detractors, of course, would say the whole thing smacks of Socialism, which is fine for those dirty godless Europeans but not us red-blooded Americans. (Think I'm joking? Check out the level of discourse in this country whenever a subject like national healthcare comes up.) There's a lot of people who wouldn't be happy about all those taxes being handed over for some hippie uber-park damn thing. There'd be all kinds of jockeying for power, lots of petty squabbling between neighboring suburbs, an unprecedented potential opportunity for corruption; maybe it's no coincidence, I guess, that the only times big cities have gone through major transformations have been when natural disasters have forced them to.

Still, though, it's a great thought, isn't it? A way for us as a country to acknowledge the new realities of the world around us, while still respecting the old structure from the Industrial Age and trying to work within it to create something new. Because let me tell ya, the way people are dealing with it these days just isn't cutting it -- between the people left in these cities who keep pretending that they can be brought back to their former glory, and the suburbanites in these areas who pretend the city no longer even exists, all we're accomplishing now is to create these giant ghost towns, literal empty husks in the center of otherwise thriving metropolitan areas. I just hate the idea of our country eventually becoming a series of several dozen abandoned urban wastelands, surrounded on all sides by tens of thousands of fast-food restaurants and strip malls, punctuated with a million miles of gleaming eight-lane elevated highways; that's the America we're rapidly heading towards, the hole we'll be unable to crawl back out of if we're not careful. There are lessons about this all to be learned in Chicago, I'm convinced; examples here that have had an entire century now to mature and prove themselves to be correct, that we as a society could implement on a much larger scale if we wanted, and if we could summon up the collective courage to actually make happen.

Do we live in such an age, I wonder? Is the time of Americans dreaming big and taking chances permanently behind us? Are we in fact in the midst of a long, slow, permanent decline from world power? Or like Europe since World War II, can we as a society transform ourselves over the next half-century, into something radically different and better than what we were before? I don't know, I really don't; the optimist in me says yes, of course, the pessimist says not a chance in hell. As always, it'll be interesting to see what happens.