OUR paradigm for a dying city is Detroit. People built cars there. They also designed cars, made parts for cars, advertised cars and collected scrap left over from the manufacture of cars. That is largely gone, and the city is a shadow of what it was. You could say the same thing about almost any manufacturing-based, rust-belt city: Flint, Buffalo, Erie, Youngstown, Cleveland. I wonder whether this recession may not do something similar, albeit on a smaller scale, to some of the service-based cities whose population boomed in the past 20 or 30 years (nb: when I say "I wonder" here I don't mean it as a pointless puff on my pondering pipe; I mean I actually do wonder, and this is more an unformed thought than a prediction). Like, for instance, my fair city of Atlanta.

Item 1: Between April 1st 2009 and April 1st 2010, metro Atlanta's growth rate was at its lowest level since the 1950s. On an aesthetic level, this is no bad thing: the city grew too quickly for its infrastructure. Fewer people and cars might make the place more pleasant for those of us who live here. But going from a boomtown to a coasting-along city—from New York to Boston, say, or Shanghai to Hong Kong—is a jarring shift, particularly for Atlanta, accustomed as it is to seeing itself as the driving engine of the South.

Item 2: This comes from a story I've been reporting on the water wars in the southeast. They are commonly billed as being between Georgia on one side and Alabama and Florida on the other. In fact they are between metro Atlanta on one side and downstream Georgia, Alabama and Florida on the other (for a good backgrounder see here). It's a long, complicated story, but the salient fact is that for its water the Atlanta area piggybacked on a federal dam and reservoir for which it paid nothing. It has been taking water freely from it since the 1970s. That will likely end soon. If Georgia cannot get congressional authorisation for its water use, or cannot reach a negotiated settlement with Alabama and Florida, then it will be restricted to the amount of water it took from the reservoir in the 1970s, when its population was around half what it is today. In light of that ruling Georgia passed a conservation bill last year. It's a good bill as far as it goes, but it only goes so far. People need water. More people will need more water. If they can't find it in one place, they'll go somewhere else. Here, too, this would be no bad thing: waterwise, Atlanta is in the wrong place, high up in its watershed, and while it might be able to sustain 2m or 3m people, 6m ot 8m is another story.

Item 3: The feds want to build a highway linking Savannah and Knoxville. Currently goods from the booming port of Savannah can go up or down the coast on I-95, or inland on I-16 by way of Atlanta. This proposed highway would let them go straight up toward the midwest or mid-Atlantic without having to go near Atlanta and its rightly reviled traffic. It's not a done deal; one gubernatorial candidate has voiced tentative support, the other tentative opposition. But even if the highway doesn't go clear up to Knoxville, the state will likely go ahead with a route linking Savannah and Augusta, still moving goods further inland while bypassing Atlanta.

All of which makes me wonder whether Atlanta is simply approaching a point beyond which it cannot efficiently grow. And it makes me wonder, too, at what point we will be able to say the same thing about, say, Phoenix, Charlotte, Las Vegas and other late-century boomtowns.

(Photo credit: AFP)