Socialism vs Capitalism

I just looked over this article http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/financetopics/financialcrisis/5516536... I was lead there by Instapundit (playing catchup since he posted the link on June 13th,)  The gist of the article is that they want to shrink cities in order to concentrate "the dwindling population and local services into a more viable area."  Remember the "Smart Growth" movement several years back.  The idea there was to fill in the cities green spaces to create a compact dense city core in order to combat sprawl and concentrate the population and services into a more viable area.  Now in areas where the population is shrinking rather than growning they want to create little pockets of villages within the city with lots and lots of green space in between. 

Now I don't really object to the idea of clearing out a bunch of deserted, decaying buildings and letting green spaces flourish.  I do think that the controllers of this project will fail to do the one thing that will actually help.  That would be to take the city governments and devolve along with the bulldozing and allow for more local control.  Revoke the city charter of these failed cities and allow for new smaller municipalities to be set up where they used to exist.  Some would be under the control of the old corrupt machine that caused them to decay in the first place (most if not all of which are Democratic machines) and some would come under new reform governments, some Democrat and some Republican with different ideas on how to run city services, attract jobs, run the schools and deal with their citizenry.  And then a grand experiment would really take place and we would see (once again) which methods of governance flourish and which prove once again to be miserable failures.  Then as the successful cities grown and succeed they would reach out to absorb and supplant the failures.  As long as they don't gobble down a huge chunk of new residents that haven't learned their lessons...

Update:  the link above seems to be too long for this website (Plus there seems to be some kind of script that the Telegraph site seems to try to run that slows you.)  You can do a Google search under "

US cities may have to be bulldozed in order to survive" and probably find it...