Rightsizing as Spatial Austerity in the American Rust Belt

Abstract

‘Rightsizing’ is a planning paradigm currently being applied to shrinking cities in North America and Europe. The central idea is to avoid the trap of growth-oriented planning by restructuring the urban landscape around mixed-income, mixed-use clusters. By replacing the current sprawling inefficiency, proponents argue, environmental, equity, and infrastructure efficiency goals can be achieved. Some have worried however, that rightsizing is merely a newly packaged version of urban renewal. I argue that both framings are misplaced. Through a careful consideration of rightsizing plans in five US cities—Detroit, Flint, Rochester, Saginaw, and Youngstown—I argue that austerity urbanism is the more apt way to characterize actualized versions of the idea. Actualized rightsizing lacks the utopian modernism and Keynesian interventionism of urban renewal, and the progressive equity-oriented environmentalism idealized by its proponents.