DESPERATE DESIGN FOR A SHRINKING TOWN

 

This is a preliminary conceptual masterplan for a development block I designed over the summer for a small town in the southeast region of Mississippi. The project was on the border of the downtown area, but what made the town fascinating was the sense of desperation and necessity they exuded for intervention. While they refrained from admitting it, the town is slowly shrinking away both in development and population, and they hired my team to design a masterplan for this block to ideally bring people back to their community. During the 2020 census, the town even decided to start including convicted felons in their census population, assumedly for financial reasons to make the town appear larger than it actually is. To the northwest was one of the largest prisons in Mississippi, so the town took advantage and the huge spike is clearly visible on their census data. 

The town claimed a population of around 3,800, but the actual residential population of free citizens was closer to around 800, but studying the trends before including the prison shows how the community is shrinking at a somewhat alarming rate. For me, this raises the question, what is the solution for helping communities facing similar dissolution? What happens to these communities as the population numbers reach critically low levels? My prediction is that infrastructure will continue to fade away until the town is eventually absorbed by nearby larger towns. I fully expect my design to never be implemented or move forward in any way as the town does not have the resources, personnel, or population to run any kind of dense environment like the proposal. It would require the entire city population to run such a place, and that becomes even less likely by the fact that it's a highly agriculture based community. Furthermore, all of these small towns in Mississippi like to believe they can be hubs for tourism, hence the request for a mid-size boutique hotel, but if there's no one to fill those rooms, the town will continue to decline. Nevertheless, the town provided a requested collection of programs and we provided our service to design it. 
    I would like to learn more about why different communities face decline, how to actually remedy it, what happens to them once they are beyond saving, and how do we help them to go gently into that good night? 









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