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

H. Pike Oliver focuses on master-planned communities. He is co-author of Transforming the Irvine Ranch: Joan Irvine, William Pereira, Ray Watson, and THE BIG PLAN, published by Routledge in 2022.

Early in his career, Pike 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. For the next three decades, he was involved in master-planned development on the Irvine Ranch in Southern California, as well as other properties in western North America and abroad.

Beginning in 2009, Pike taught real estate development at Cornell University and directed the undergraduate program in Urban and Regional Studies. He relocated to Seattle in 2013 and, from 2016 to 2020, served as a lecturer in the Runstad Department of Real Estate at the University of Washington, where he also served as its chair.

Pike graduated from San Francisco State University's urban studies and planning program and received a master's degree in urban planning from UCLA. He is a member of the American Planning Association and the Urban Land Institute and a founder and emeritus member of the California Planning Roundtable.

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