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This study aims to clarify the impact of the urban exodus triggered by the COVID-19 pandemic on shrinking cities in the Osaka metropolitan area, where a declining population is caused by population aging. Analyzing the Osaka metropolitan area enables us to clarify how cities are shrinking due to the urban exodus. This study analyzed the monthly population data of three types of municipalities: ordinance-designed/regional hub cities, ordinary cities, and towns/villages. In conclusion, the study clarified that population change due to the urban exodus occurred in the ordinance-designed/regional hub and ordinary cities from summer to autumn 2020. The most significant population increases occurred in the municipalities in the Osaka metropolitan fringe area, which are located more than 30 km away from the center of the Osaka metropolitan area. The conclusion is important because the population increased not only in the ordinance-designed cities but also in the ordinance-designed/regional hub cities, unlike the rest of the metropolitan area. The result is the new insights unique to the Osaka metropolitan area that this study clarified. The urban exodus contributes to the need for the local governments of shrinking cities to maintain the urban services necessary for people’s daily lives.

At the end of the 20th century, the phenomenon of urban shrinkage received widespread attention, with population decline as its core characteristic. In 2020, the Taiwanese population had negative growth and faced a low fertility rate and an aging population. This study used exploratory spatial data analysis to identify shrinking cities in Taiwan based on census data and population registers. The results indicated that Taiwan has 11 shrinking counties and 202 shrinking towns. Urban shrinkage occurred in the 1980s and continued from the suburbanization stage to the re-urbanization stage. Five types of spatial patterns in the 11 shrinking counties were observed. In the majority of the shrinking counties, towns with high population densities were unable to avoid shrinkage. A global spatial autocorrelation analysis indicated that shrinkage and non-shrinkage have become increasingly apparent at the town level since 2005. A local spatial autocorrelation analysis indicates that the spatial clustering of towns with population growth or decline from 2000 to 2020 has changed. Based on each town’s development, a two-step cluster analysis was conducted in which all towns were divided into four categories. Shrinking towns exist in each category, but with a different proportion. Based on the results of two-step cluster analysis combined with spatial analysis, this study discovered that both urbanization and suburbanization cause shrinkage in Taiwan, but the affected localities are distinct. For most shrinking counties, their spatial model indicates a relationship between shrinking and the urbanization of their towns. Keelung City and Chiayi City have the most potential to reverse the shrinkage. This study helps authorities better manage growth and implement regional revitalization.

Shrinking cities—cities suffering from population and economic decline—has become a pressing societal issue of worldwide concern. While night-time light (NTL) data have been applied as an important tool for the identification of shrinking cities, the current methods are constrained and biased by the lack of using long-term continuous NTL time series and the use of unidimensional indices. In this study, we proposed a novel method to identify and classify shrinking cities by long-term continuous NTL time series and population data, and applied the method in northeastern China (NEC) from 1996 to 2020. First, we established a long-term consistent NTL time series by applying a geographically weighted regression model to two distinct NTL datasets. Then, we generated NTL index (NI) and population index (PI) by random forest model and the slope of population data, respectively. Finally, we developed a shrinking city index (SCI), based on NI and PI to identify and classify city shrinkage. The results showed that the shrinkage pattern of NEC in 1996–2009 (stage 1) and 2010–2020 (stage 2) was quite different. From stage 1 to stage 2, the shrinkage situation worsened as the number of shrinking cities increased from 102 to 162, and the proportion of severe shrinkage increased from 9.2% to 30.3%. In stage 2, 85.4% of the cities exhibited population decline, and 15.7% of the cities displayed an NTL decrease, suggesting that the changes in NTL and population were not synchronized. Our proposed method provides a robust and long-term characterization of city shrinkage and is beneficial to provide valuable information for sustainable urban planning and decision-making.

The effects of shrinkage can be manifold. Vacant green areas are a typical manifestation of shrinkage in deindustrialized cities, such as Heerlen, Netherlands. Such challenges are usually managed by the municipality which, due to financial reasons, often has to turn to citizens to aid in accommodating those effects. The example of Gebrookerbos in Heerlen shows how an adaptation of governance processes can take place in order to facilitate the involvement of citizens in reusing vacant spaces. The introduction of the position of account manager as well as brooker are being regarded as essential for shortening the distance between municipality and citizens as well as contributing to replacing the mistrust towards the municipality, which is in line with existing research on depopulating areas. Further, making a plethora of funding options and projects available for civic initiatives ensures the longevity of civic involvement. Finally, the findings show how working on the “hardware”, the visible vacancy and deterioration of the land—by adapting the “software”, the institutional set up and focusing on civic empowerment—of a shrinking city can go hand in hand.

The accelerated flow of resources and the population has resulted in the coexistence of the expansion and shrinkage of cities. The shrinking city is not a new thing, but it is a new problem that needs to be solved urgently in China. Urban resources reveal the direct cause of the shrinking city: attraction, which reflects the competition for external resources and the endowment of the intrinsic resources of cities. Therefore, this paper established the Urban Resource Degree (URD) model to measure the urban resource degree of the shrinking city. Factors were then selected to analyze the ways in which they influence the shrinking cities. Given the spillover effect and heterogeneity of the influencing factors, a Spatial Durbin Model (SDM) and a Spatiotemporal Geographically Weighted Regression Model (GTWR) were used to conduct a spatial spillover (SSA) and spatial heterogeneity (SHA) analysis of the URD of the shrinking cities in Northeast China. The results show that the ability gap to compete for and control resources between prefecture-level shrinking cities and county-level shrinking cities is narrowed. From the SSA and SHA perspectives, the influence factors can be categorized into three types: “High West–Low East and Negative–Positive Spillover”, “Low West and High East Positive–Negative Spillover”, “Low Northwest and High Southeast Negative Spillover”. Finally, policy implications are proposed to provide support for policy-making.

Academic research on urban shrinkage and depopulation has advanced significantly in recent years, mostly by attributing causality between the reasons and consequences of shrinkage in the positivist tradition of planning research. This paper critically analyzes shrinkage and depopulation as an issue of planning and policymaking in a broader institutional context. By applying a qualitative interpretive policy analysis methodology to planning and policy narratives from Spain, Germany and The Netherlands, this article highlights and scrutinizes how policymakers and planners have framed shrinkage, and how this framing has justified some of the selected planning and policy approaches. It is concluded that framing shrinkage in practice may only partially encompass the scientific definitions. It is also concluded that framing shrinkage and depopulation as a crisis may be determined by locally and temporally important issues as well as differences in planning cultures, which in practice may distance the understanding of the phenomenon from the scientific definitions. Debates on shrinkage conceptualization and the development of new planning concepts can become more applicable in practice by incorporating insights from qualitative investigations. This can bring them closer to planning practice and embed them in a wider planning system context, so as to produce more applicable and contextually sensitive proposals for addressing shrinkage.

Urban shrinkage is becoming a major global challenge and causing a series of challenges to the sustainable urban development. In this study, a system dynamics-based model was proposed and used to dynamically evaluate the sustainability of the urban development under five different policy scenarios in response to population shrinkage. A model was applied to socioeconomic data from eight shrinking cities in Northeast China from 2002 to 2017 to investigate the past and future trends in their urban development sustainability from 2002 to 2035. The results show that the development sustainability indices of the eight cities increased overall up to 2017. However, some then peaked and are now declining. The model predicts that the cities would vary considerably in their development sustainability across the five different scenarios. For example, with smart shrinkage policies, cities are predicted to sustain their current levels of development sustainability, meanwhile, with anti-shrinkage policies, where growth-oriented development is pursued, some cities are also predicted to see improvements in sustainability. The present study provides a technical approach to simulating and investigating the circular feedback mechanism between components of a city system and effectively correlating population shrinkage with urban development sustainability across different policy responses to urban shrinkage.

Previous studies on housing vacancy mostly focused on variables representing regional characteristics while overlooking the characteristics of individual houses. This is due to the limitations of available data. Using the house-level Housing Vacancy Database, this study aims to identify the spatial clustering pattern of vacant houses by examining single-family houses in Daegu, South Korea, and analyze the factors affecting housing vacancy. The Housing Vacancy Database built in this study provides accurate location information of vacant houses, making it possible to analyze the clustering pattern of vacant houses in a more detailed spatial unit. Furthermore, the Housing Vacancy Database considered various physical and neighborhood factors at the house level. The result of hot spot analysis showed that vacant houses were spatially concentrated in the city center. As a result of analyzing the factors affecting housing vacancy at the house level and neighborhood level using a multilevel model, it was found that the physical environment characteristics of individual houses were key factors affecting housing vacancy. Additionally, the probability of housing vacancy tended to increase when the land prices were higher, the houses were located in redevelopment zones, and there were more neighboring vacant houses nearby. Meanwhile, population decline and the ratio of old houses were the only significant variables at the neighborhood level. Thus, this study addresses that policies are needed to improve housing and physical environment characteristics that contribute to housing vacancy.

Population decline is leading to a shrinking city size in industrialized countries. In some developing countries, because majority of the population is concentrated in big cities, the population in undeveloped cities has begun to decline. Japan experienced rapid urban expansion surrounding industrial districts, including steeply sloped areas, between the 1950s and 1970s. In the past forty years, Japan&rsquo, s population has decreased, and the average age of the population is increasing. The reduction in the size of cities, following population decreases is becoming an important issue, and the study of sustainable, concentrated urban planning to cope with shrinking city size is, therefore, necessary. We have conducted a case study using Yahatahigashi-ku to determine its redevelopment potential, based on a combination of urban geographic data. This paper (1) presents a typical case study using Geographic Information System (GIS) data to evaluate an aging and shrinking society, (2) explores the GIS design approaches configured for an aging society, and (3) evaluates the optimization of environmental performance for an urban regeneration plan. The primary factors related to this urban design case study included, a declining population, mixed urban land use, and the placement of public facilities. We developed a method involving the slope degree to evaluate land-use to model the importance of informational evaluation in the urban planning process. This method could contribute to the urban regeneration for an aging society and could also be applied to other aging and shrinking cities, in mountainous regions.

Planning and managing the declining fortunes of shrinking cities are essential in shaping urban policy in post-industrial urban societies, especially in Central and Eastern European states. Many studies emphasize city management and redevelopment as important policy constituencies for driving revitalization. However, there is still a lack of knowledge about policy-making and the underlying political and socio-economic disagreements that impact successful measures to reverse urbanization and regenerate post-industrial cities. This paper provides a case of urban policy-making for Bytom—a severely shrinking city in southern Poland. This article aims to clarify the mismatch between the city’s policy and the socio-economic situation Bytom after 2010. This discrepancy could have weakened effective policy to address shrinkage and revitalization. Statistical and cartographic methods (choropleth maps) helped analyze the socio-economic changes in Bytom and its shrinking. The issues related to the city’s policy were based primarily on free-form interviews and the analysis of municipal and regional documents concerning Bytom. The conducted research shows the need for concerted and coordinated policy direction that considers the real possibilities of implementing pro-development projects. Such expectations also result from the opinions of local communities. Finding a compromise between the idea of active support for projects implemented in a shrinking city and an appropriate urban policy is expected. Such an approach also requires further strengthening of social and economic participation in local and regional governance.

Mid-sized cities are usually considered in the literature to be shrinking cities. Some policies promote right-sizing and others promote revitalization. The relationship between land-use planning and mobility having been established, the present research issue is focused on whether a policy of revitalizing the centers of mid-sized cities is favorable to low-carbon mobility. Our study investigates commuting trips through two indicators: commuting trip distance and car modal share. The increase in total population, the increase in the number of jobs per resident, the decrease in the unemployment rate, the increase in the rate of executives, the increase in the rate of working people in the population and the decrease in the residential vacancy rate all come from the censuses of 2006 and 2016. Statistical models based on individuals in 113 mid-sized cities, in which sociodemographic variables are introduced, show that at the level of agglomerations, no indicator has a simultaneously positive effect in the center and in the urban periphery. No indicator is entirely positive or negative on GHG emissions from commuting trips. While the increase in GHG emissions from commuting trips between 2006 and 2016 is significant in mid-sized cities (18%), a shift toward shrinking city centers is insufficient to change this trajectory.

Since 2014, Japan has implemented a policy for forming a compact urban structure at a national level through an urban planning technique called a location normalization plan. A residence-induced zone included in the location normalization plan is considered as the essence of forming a compact urban structure and can be characterized as a policy that compactifies cities for a long period not only by inducing residence functions into the inside of the zones but also by applying regulations to the outside of the zones. This study examined the status of the dichotomous compact city policy applied in reality by analyzing various cases in Japan that established location normalization plans, and its implications. The conditions commonly observed in the induced zone in model cities indicated that the validity of residence-induced zones&mdash, how and where residence-induced zones had to be designated&mdash, was prioritized in many cases. Some cities, however, designated independent zones that maintained a certain level of residential functions outside the induced zones. Utilizing independent zones in non-induced zones can be assessed not as an act of simply dividing cities by a dichotomous way but as an attempt to reflect the situations and characteristics of individual cities.

In recent years, many cities in developed countries have struggled with housing vacancy. Empty homes are accompanied by social problems such as vandalism, arson, unsanitary environments, and collapse risk. Vacant houses also have negative effects on the value of nearby properties and their local communities. Accordingly, there have been various policy responses to tackle this problem. In spite of these efforts, however, the number of vacant houses continues to increase alongside a population decrease and imprudent developments. In South Korea, the number of vacant houses has increased since the 1990s, and central and local governments started developing plans and policies to resolve the problem from 2010. However, most of these policies have many similarities regardless of their differing regional conditions and contexts. Housing vacancy varies according to regions, its magnitude, surrounding environments or housing types, and thus calls for multilateral approaches. This article, therefore, aims to identify distributional characteristics of vacant houses in South Korea, and categorize them into three groups with regional contexts using cluster analysis. The study further found that there are differences in affecting factors of vacant houses by type through the use of a multiple regression model. Based on the analysis, the ways of managing housing vacancy for sustainable development are discussed.

Can shrinking cities harness population decline to improve their sustainability by repurposing land use, for example, for localizing food production? Whether such a transition is feasible depends on the pre-shrinkage state of urban agricultural land use, including ongoing trends in local land use change. This study examined agricultural land use from 2007–2017 in Kyoto City, Japan. Kyoto is on the brink of a large projected population decline (~190,000 or ~13% until 2040) and serves as a representative for a large number of regional Japanese cities in a similar situation. Analysis was based on a public 2007 land use data set, aerial and satellite imagery and ground truthing. Results showed a decline of 209 ha or 10% in agricultural land use over ten years, but also highlight the diversity of ongoing agricultural land use types not captured by standard categories. The main post-agricultural land uses were residential (40%) and vacant land (28%). These results have implications for planning and policy. Kyoto City is currently not set to benefit from the projected shrinking process through localizing food production, despite a tradition of vegetable production. Future research should analyze drivers of change for observed agricultural land use.

Shrinking cities are widespread throughout the world despite the rapidly increasing global urban population. These cities are attempting to transition to sustainable trajectories to improve the health and well-being of urban residents, to build their capacity to adapt to changing conditions and to cope with major events. The dynamics of shrinking cities are different than the dynamics of growing cities, and therefore intentional research and planning around creating sustainable cities is needed for shrinking cities. We propose research that can be applied to shrinking cities by identifying parallel challenges in growing cities and translating urban research and planning that is specific to each city’s dynamics. In addition, we offer applications of panarchy concepts to this problem. The contributions to this Special Issue take on this forward-looking planning task through drawing lessons for urban sustainability from shrinking cities, or translating general lessons from urban research to the context of shrinking cities.

Eighty-five percent of United States citizens live in urban areas. However, research surrounding the resilience and sustainability of complex urban systems focuses largely on coastal megacities (>1 million people). Midsize cities differ from their larger counterparts due to tight urban-rural feedbacks with their immediate natural environments that result from heavy reliance and close management of local ecosystem services. They also may be less path-dependent than larger cities due to shorter average connection length among system components, contributing to higher responsiveness among social, infrastructural, and ecological feedbacks. These distinct midsize city features call for a framework that organizes information and concepts concerning the sustainability of midsize cities specifically. We argue that an integrative approach is necessary to capture properties emergent from the complex interactions of the social, infrastructural, and ecological subsystems that comprise a city system. We suggest approaches to estimate the relative resilience of midsize cities, and include an example assessment to illustrate one such estimation approach. Resilience assessments of a midsize city can be used to examine why some cities end up on sustainable paths while others diverge to unsustainable paths, and which feedbacks may be partially responsible. They also provide insight into how city planners and decision makers can use information about the resilience of midsize cities undergoing growth or shrinkage relative to their larger and smaller counterparts, to transform them into long-term, sustainable social-ecological systems.

Urban sustainability discourse promotes the increased use of green infrastructure (GI) because of its contribution of important ecosystem services to city dwellers. Under this vision, all urban green spaces, including those at the household scale, are valued for their potential contributions to a city’s social-ecological functioning and associated benefits for human well-being. Understanding how urban residential green spaces have evolved can help improve sustainable urban planning and design, but it requires examining urban processes occurring at multiple scales. The interaction between social structures and ecological structures within the subtropical city of San Juan, the capital and the largest city of Puerto Rico, has been an important focus of study of the San Juan ULTRA (Urban Long-Term Research Area) network, advancing understanding of the city’s vulnerabilities and potential adaptive capacity. Here we provide a synthesis of several social-ecological processes driving residential yard dynamics in the city of San Juan, Puerto Rico, through the evaluation of empirical findings related to yard management decisions, yard area, and yard services. We emphasize the role of factors occurring at the household scale. Results are discussed within the context of shrinking cities using an integrated, multi-scalar, social-ecological systems framework, and consider the implications of household green infrastructure for advancing urban sustainability theory.

Contains fulltext : 165986.pdf (Publisher’s version ) (Open Access) Shrinkage is a relevant phenomenon for many cities and this trend is predicted to continue in the future. Although urban shrinkage is well recognized in academic discourse, little research has been undertaken on its social aspects. This paper explores the concept of social capital in the context of urban shrinkage and elaborates on how it contributes to social sustainability in shrinking cities. After defining the concepts, we identify resources, empowerment, and participation as key indicators of social capital in the context of urban shrinkage. The paper analyzes these indicators in the shrinking, old industrial city of Heerlen, the Netherlands, based on 24 in-depth interviews with citizens, policy-makers, and entrepreneurs, as well as secondary data. The findings reveal the prominence of three interrelated issues: the importance of local culture, subjective experiences of shrinkage, and a lack of trust between citizens and politicians. We conclude that social capital can facilitate social sustainability in the context of urban shrinkage. However, trust and empowerment are not guaranteed in a shrinking context. In shrinking cities more investments should be made to foster cooperation between civil society and politics and the development of mutual trust. 22 p.

As cities shrink, they often leave a patchwork of vacancy on the landscape. The maintenance of vacant lands and eventual transformation to sustainable land uses is a challenge all cities face, but one that is particularly pronounced in shrinking cities. Vacant lands can support sustainability initiatives, specifically the expansion of urban gardens and local food production. However, many shrinking cities are the same aging cities that have experienced the highest soil lead burdens from their industrial past as well as the historic use of lead-based paint and leaded gasoline. Elevated soil lead is often viewed as a barrier to urban agriculture and managing for multiple ecosystem services, including food production and reduced soil lead exposure, remains a challenge. In this paper, we argue that a shift in framing the soil lead and gardening issue from potential conflict to potential solution can advance both urban sustainability goals and support healthy gardening efforts. Urban gardening as a potential solution to the soil lead problem stems from investment in place and is realized through multiple activities, in particular (1) soil management, including soil testing and the addition of amendments, and (2) social network and community building that leverages resources and knowledge.

"Urban environments are in continual transition. Yet, as many cities continue to grow and develop in ways deemed typical or standard, these transitions can be difficult to acknowledge. Narratives of continued growth and permanence become accepted and expected while the understanding of urban dynamics becomes lost. In many parts of the world, the shrinking cities phenomenon has given rise to a new awareness of urban transition that provides a laboratory of new conditions at the intersection of urbanism and ecology. With property vacancy rates easily exceeding 50% in certain locations, cities in the American Rust Belt look more like successional woodlands than bustling metropolises, yet these cities still contain significant numbers of urban residents. A central question that arises from this phenomenon is: how can vacant land, through the provision of ecosystem services, become a resource as opposed to a liability? This paper looks to recent studies in urban ecology as a lens for understanding the land use potential of shrinking cities, while discussing unconventional solutions for sustainable development of urban land."

Every city seeks opportunities to spur economic developments and, depending on its type, vacant land can be seen as a potential threat or an opportunity to achieve these developments. Although vacant land exists in all cities, the causes and effects of changes in vacant land can differ. Growing cities may have more vacant land than shrinking cities because of large scale annexation. Meanwhile, depopulation and economic downturn may increase the total amount of vacant and abandoned properties. Despite various causes of increase and decrease of vacant land, the ability to predict future vacancy patterns—where future vacant parcels may occur—could be a critical test to set up appropriate development strategies and land use policies, especially in shrinking cities, to manage urban decline and regeneration efforts more wisely. This study compares current and future vacancy patterns of a growing city (Fort Worth, TX, USA) and a shrinking city (Chicago, IL, USA), by employing the Land Transformation Model (LTM) to predict for future vacant lands. This research predicts and produces possible vacancy pattern scenarios by 2020 and deciphers the ranking of determinants of vacant land in each city type. The outcomes of this study indicate that the LTM can be useful for simulating vacancy patterns and the causes of vacancy vary in both growing and shrinking cities. Socio-economic factors such as unemployment rate and household income are powerful determinants of vacancy in a growing city, while physical and transportation-related conditions such as proximity to highways, vehicle accessibility, or building conditions show a stronger influence on increasing vacant land in a shrinking city.

Urban residents’ health depends on green infrastructure to cope with climate change. Shrinking cities could utilize vacant land to provide more green space, but declining tax revenues preclude new park development – a situation pronounced in Japan, where some cities are projected to shrink by over ten percent, but lack green space. Could informal urban green spaces (IGS; vacant lots, street verges, brownfields etc.) supplement parks in shrinking cities? This study analyzes residents’ perception, use, and management preferences (management goals, approaches to participatory management, willingness to participate) for IGS using a large, representative online survey (n=1,000) across four major shrinking Japanese cities: Sapporo, Nagano, Kyoto and Kitakyushu. Results show that residents saw IGS as a common element of the urban landscape and their daily lives, but their evaluation was mixed. Recreation and urban agriculture were preferred to redevelopment and non-management. For participative management, residents saw a need for the city administration to mediate usage and liability, and expected an improved appearance, but emphasized the need for financial and non-financial support. A small but significant minority (~10%) were willing to participate in management activities. On this basis, eight principles for participatory informal green space planning are proposed.

In the past two centuries, many American urban areas have experienced significant expansion in both populating and depopulating cities. The pursuit of bigger, faster, and more growth-oriented planning parallels a situation where municipal decline has also been recognized as a global epidemic. In recent decades many older industrial cities have experienced significant depopulation, job loss, economic decline, and massive increases in vacant and abandoned properties due primarily to losses in industry and relocating populations. Despite continuous economic decline and depopulation, many of these so-called ‘shrinking cities’ still chase growth-oriented planning policies, due partially to inabilities to accurately predict future urban growth/decline patterns. This capability is critical to understanding land use alternation patterns and predicting future possible scenarios for the development of more proactive land use policies dealing with urban decline and regeneration. In this research, the city of Chicago, Illinois, USA is used as a case site to test an urban land use change model that predicts urban decline in a shrinking city, using vacant land as a proxy. Our approach employs the Land Transformation Model (LTM), which combines Geographic Information Systems and artificial neural networks to forecast land use change. Results indicate that the LTM is a good resource to simulate urban vacant land changes. Mobility and housing market conditions seem to be the primary variables contributing to decline.

Urban landscapes can be transformed by widespread abandonment from population and economic decline. Ecological assembly, sometimes referred to as “greening”, following abandonment can yield valuable ecosystem services, but also can pose a risk to public health. Abandonment can elevate zoonotic vector-borne disease risk by favoring the hyperabundance of commensal pests and pathogen vectors. Though greater biodiversity in abandoned areas can potentially dilute vector-borne pathogen transmission, “greening” can elevate transmission risk by increasing movement of pathogen vectors between fragmented areas and by giving rise to novel human-wildlife interfaces. Idled and derelict infrastructure can further elevate disease risk from vector-borne and water-borne pathogens, which can build up in stagnant and unprotected water that maintenance and routine use of delivery or sanitation systems would otherwise eliminate. Thus, framing “greening” as inherently positive could result in policies and actions that unintentionally exacerbate inequalities by elevating risks rather than delivering benefits. As counter-urbanism is neither a minor pattern of urban development, nor a short-term departure from urban growth, homeowner and municipal management of abandoned areas should account for potential hazards to reduce health risks. Further socioecological assessments of public health risks following abandonment could better ensure the resilience and well-being of communities in shrinking cities.