Is tearing stuff down creative?

Flint, Mich., which vies with Cleveland for the title of Ground Zero in our current China-Syndrome economy, is apparently getting serious about plowing a lot of itself under.  

The talk of physical downsizing among ailing municipalities is something of a trend now. For cities with no real hope of regaining their lost economic health – cities that have been watching their own decay and impotently wringing their hands for decades -  the idea of deliberately leveling their deserted neighborhoods has begun to sound at least like something active to do. And, in the sudden bubbling of an environmentalism that had never been a burning middle-American passion until climate change literally turned up the heat, the prospect of allowing forest and prairie to bury urban dead zones has, overnight, developed appeal as both solution and absolution for embarrassing urban failures.

It seems more like capitulation than imagination for a city to declare a giant do-over and time-warp back to being a country village.  The kinds of jobs available in such a place may not adequately support even the few remaining residents. And yet returning our metropolises to wilderness has a certain cleansing, Thoreau-like simplicity to it , after all the toxic messes our civilization has gotten us into. 

It’s not creation. It’s not even re-creation. It’s de-creation. But the planet could certainly use the green space.