Tearing itself down

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Written By H. Pike Oliver

In the April 12, 2008 issue of The Economist, there is an article about how cities in the eastern part of Germany are managing the consequences of post re-unification demographic decline.  Saxony-Anhalt (see map above) lost a fifth of its 2.9 million people in the 16 years after reunification of Germany in 1990. The article describes what it calls a sort of "zany experimentalism" in cities such as Dessau and Köthen, where Bach composed the Brandenburg Concertos. Perhaps some of these "zany" approaches should be considered for use in areas of USA that are emptying out such as small towns in the Great Plains and metropolitan areas of the industrial "rust belt" of the Midwest.

H. Pike Oliver

Born and raised in the San Francisco Bay Area, H. Pike Oliver has worked on real estate development strategies and master-planned communities since the early 1970s, including nearly eight years at the Irvine Company. He resided in the City of Irvine for five years in the 1980s and nine years in the 1990s.

As the founder and sole proprietor of URBANEXUS, Oliver works on advancing equitable and sustainable real estate development and natural lands management. He is also an affiliate instructor at the Runstad Department of Real Estate at the University of Washington.

Early in his career, Oliver worked for public agencies, including the California Governor’s Office of Planning and Research where he was a principal contributor to An Urban Strategy for California. Prior to relocating to Seattle in 2013, Oliver taught real estate development at Cornell University and directed the undergraduate program in urban and regional studies. He is a member of the Urban Land Institute, the American Planning Association and a founder and emeritus member of the California Planning Roundtable.

Oliver is a graduate of the urban studies and planning program at San Francisco State University and earned a master’s degree in urban planning at UCLA.

https://urbanexus.com
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