Tearing itself down

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.