There’s rusting metal rebar sticking out where the concrete has crumbled from the end of a sewer pipe, spilling dirty water and discarded plastic into an equally crumbled concrete ditch, splashing once as it exits the pipe and again a few meters away as two eight-year olds jump and stomp, playing.
Me, I can remember when the drainage ditch and pipe were built, perfectly formed and invincible, and I overlay that image on top of the real thing, filling the gaps. I added the crystal-clear blue water from the contractor’s concept art on top of that, mentally replacing the current brackish stream. But those kids didn’t know what it was supposed to look like. This was their normal, so it seemed like a fine play to jump and stomp.
It’s a fascinating thing to walk through a city, where you’ve lived your entire life, and know that it is dying.
And that’s the only word for it. I could say that there’s a prolonged economic decline, or that working-age people are moving away faster than they’re moving in, or that the city bureaucracy has been ineffective for so long that there’s an insurmountable governance deficit. And elements of each would be true. But the city’s not dying for those reasons. It’s the other way around.
I should add that the metaphor stops there. It’d be equally inappropriate to say that the city ever had the vibrancy of youth, or the steady industrial nature of middle age, before declining into old age. For as long as it existed, it was pure artefact, no soul. It was concrete, steel, copper, rubber, plastic. It was a machine, and the only time it could ever be said to be alive was when it started dying.
I was elected Mayor almost three years ago. Since, my office has operated like a team of doctors, ordering tests and reports, sending people out to do research, experimenting with treatments, and nothing has taken. I get a monthly report of all of our major indicators - housing starts, business registrations, corporate tax revenue (which lets us know how much money is being spent), traffic in the core. We struck weekly committees to discuss each of those indicators. It all amounts to defibrillation: the heartbeat graph line jumps, but always returns to a flatline.
You could compare our experience to other cities, I suppose. Detroit declined because of the recession, and because its growth over the last four decades had been too sporadic, in fits and starts - entire communities required replacement all at once, instead of constantly flowing new businesses and residents through. Ideally, people would move into the aging buildings as inhabitants became wealthier and moved into new ones, like crabs trading up shells. Simultaneously, the inhabitants moving into those buildings would start naming their children with the popular names of those who’d moved out, who themselves would have to find more pretentious names. And so on. It wasn’t the wealth or pretension that kept cities alive, it was the constant cycle of wealth and pretension. Cities can’t fast like camels then drink their fill.
Chernobyl is an obvious one. A bullet hole in the chest. Case closed.
The two children start splashing off down the canal. In my head, I chasten the kids for missing the point. There are 27 parks in the city to play in. Now alone, I run my finger along the exposed rebar, feeling the ribbing underneath my skin, uneven with specks of rust.
How tragic, that no matter what I do, it can’t live, because it has no will to live. And there is nothing I can do to save it.
