"Collateral in hand, treuhand and the invisible hand" By Andreas Siekmann

There's a steady parade of bureaucrats and consultants traveling their oval path in Andreas Siekmann's mechanical tabletop theater, which is one of the first works you see in Shrinking Cities, on view now at SPACES. The cut-out foamcore figures ride on little wood block cars with flat washer wheels and bent wire tie-rods that move their arms and bob their heads. Each car is towed around the track by a ribbon, attached to a belt, pulled by a wheel, driven by an electric motor, the whole mechanism grinding and creaking, periodically emitting a low groan, like a single string of a cello slowly bowed as the bureaucrats drag steadfastly onward in their futile, well-worn groove.

Siekmanm's tireless mechanical theater, "Collateral in Hand, Treuhand and the Invisible Hand" doesn't deal directly with the "shrinkage" or depopulation of cities. It's his response to the East German Treuhandanstalt, which he translates "trust agency," which was created to coordinate the privatization of the former communist government's business and real-estate ventures after reunification with Western Germany. Still, there's something about the robotic action of these circling bureaucrats that feels familiar, whether you're watching disinvestment in Cleveland or Detroit or Berlin.

Shrinking Cities — a traveling show curated by the German architect Philipp Oswalt, co-hosted in Cleveland by SPACES and Kent State University's Cleveland Urban Design Center — is a collection of artists' and architects' treatments of how people, from governments to the grassroots, cope with depopulation of cities and the empty buildings that follow. CUDC senior planner Terry Schwarz writes that about 370 major cities in the world have experienced significant population loss. We occasionally reassure ourselves in Cleveland that the challenges we face are also crippling cities across the Rust Belt. Whether it's comforting or depressing, Shrinking Cities documents the problem in cities around the globe.

The concept of "shrinking cities" was illuminated last year by a symposium at Cleveland State University. Implicit was the acceptance of urban depopulation, and the development of strategies not to combat the loss (Remember Jane Campbell's program to boost the population of Cleveland back above 500,000?) but to manage the superfluity of old buildings and other infrastructure that comes with it — to pursue what developers call "adaptive re-use," but on a much more pragmatic and democratized scale. To some, "managing decline" is a blasphemous idea —surrender disguised as strategy. And it probably doesn't play very well to the taxpayers.

So instead the taxpayers — around the world, as we see here — have watched a series of big plans designed to be sold: optimistic public and private partnerships overseen by governments and community development corporations, all of them working earnestly to "solve" the urban problem. As part of this exhibit, some spectacular results are illustrated in a photo essay from Oswalt's office. It's a series of 8 by 10 inch architectural portraits, each of them a "flagship" development of a kind that's plenty familiar in Cleveland. From the $34 million Lego Block-y Rosenthal Contemporary Art Cincinnati, to what looks like an origami cloud floating in Liverpool, England, each picture comes with population statistics from a span of recent decades, each one of them marking substantial decline. As Oswalt narrates the progression, cities built conference centers in the '70s, followed by sports arenas in the '80s, followed by huge temples of culture — like the Bilbao Guggenheim or the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame — in the '90s.

"They function as tourist magnets," Oswalt observes," but the spinoff fails to transpire."

If the efforts of governments and developers gave Oswalt and his research teams material for satire and evidence of spectacular futility, a team of Graduate Design Study students from KSU's College of Architecture and Environmental Design meld adaptive planning concepts with more creative design ideas in "Harvard Junction," which is not part of the traveling Shrinking Cities exhibit, but compliments it nicely as part of the SPACELab program. The students created artwork — some evocative, some purely practical — interpreting issues and solving problems with the adaptive re-use of the Towpath Trail as it enters the industrial flats. On one end of that spectrum is Todd Mayher's proposal to delineate the original route of the canal with rust-brown I-beams, cut to represent topographical changes. On the other end of the spectrum is Peter Mang's "permeable river," an illustrative model of a river bed woven of wavy sheet metal ribbons, with plastic strips pulled through to highlight the river's "give and take" relationship with the landscape and nearby industry.

But the greatest inspiration in the show comes from grassroots re-use of empty urban space.

A couple of German entrepreneurs conceived "Sportification" and show it to Shrinking Cities visitors in a series of videos. They're played on miniature monitors (bigger ones would have served the subject better), which show kids re-purposing bits of the abandoned urban landscape — warehouses, factories, apartment buildings — as sporting facilities. They are action-sport- style documentary evidence that these guys — Andreas Haase and Tore Dobberstein —have filled entire rooms with big foam rubber cubes to make it safe for skater boys and BMXers to launch themselves, wheels and all, off an overhanging loft or a banister. "In cooperation with local youngsters," Haase and Dobberstein write, they "reoccupy space in playful ways and through sport manage to create the strong identification of participants with spaces that are otherwise considered problematic."

It's an entirely different way of looking at vacant warehouses. In a neighborhood of abandoned buildings, artists and adventurers can see buildings as raw material. That idea of vacancy as opportunity is easily forgotten in the barrage of newspaper reports on factory closures, foreclosures and outmigration.

Once you've become willing to re-purpose what planners commonly call "the hardscape," it's a short leap to conceive buildings as art supplies. Detroit artist Tyree Guyton began that kind of adaptive re-use of houses on Heidelberg Street in 1986. He grew up there and watched the neighborhood get left behind by the economy. His response was to decorate the vacant houses — first by painting them all over with polka dots and then using them as a vehicle for assemblage. Photos by Donna Terek and Tom Stoye show several houses almost entirely covered with found objects — bicycle tires, the hoods of cars, toys, old signs — which added color, calling a different kind of attention to the abandoned homes. The city of Detroit treated Guyton like a vandal for years before suddenly embracing the houses' value as a tourist attraction.

If Cleveland has stadiums and museums and other big plans in common with these "shrinking cities," some of the entrepreneurial creativity portrayed here feels familiar, too. German videographer Gitte Villesen tells the story of Chicago artist Dan Peterman's use of abandoned buildings as space for artists and small businesses. The videos give a lot of time to the Blackstone Bicycle Works, a couple of guys who like to fix bikes and want to help people. A bike shop like this wouldn't fly in a high rent neighborhood, but — surrounded by poverty, sustained by idealism — the bicycle mechanics do OK.

Shrinking Cities is a show rooted in documentation, both of the problems that follow depopulation and job loss in central cities, and of the things people and their governments do in response. It's heavy with text and demanding of time to take in the videos, but it's a satisfying and, in the end, heartening investment to make. No matter how bleak the statistics, it's hard to feel defeated when there's someone covering abandoned houses with polka dots or making a building into an extreme sport by filling the lobby with cubes of foam rubber. In many of these, the documentary work is beautiful, but the true art was accomplished by the people who lived it.

mgill@freetimes.com