US cities may have to be bulldozed in order to survive

Summary

June 12, 2009: Many cities in the United States have gone into stark decline and lost much of their population and economic power. The American government is looking at a plan first pioneered in Flint, Michigan which involves knocking down entire districts of a city and returning them to nature in order to concentrate the population in smaller centers to keep them economically viable (as a spread-out population will increase the price of all services drastically). Possible locations for such a scheme include Detroit, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Baltimore and Memphis, Tennessee.

See Also

• News: In tough times, inventing ways to shrink gracefully - similar efforts exist in Eastern Germany

• Urban Prairie
• Post-Apocalyptic Decay

Source

Bibliography

1. Original article

Game and Story Use

• This is your opportunity to redraw maps of well-known cities to turn them into future Adventure Towns. Remove entire districts and turn them into park lands or even wilderness.
• Demolished neighborhoods might no longer have standing buildings, but they might still have buried secrets of the past…