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International audience; Shrinking cities have been touted as an opportunity to rethink unsustainable growth-centric policies, but to what extenthave they abdicated from the pro-growth urban agenda? We explore one of the most overtly growth-oriented ‘solutions’to urban shrinkage: housing construction. Our nationwide analysis of Spanish cities illustrates the widespread emergenceof shrinking cities following the Great Recession and the disconnect between population and housing dynamics. Ourfindings highlight the continued demographic decline of Spanish shrinking cities despite considerable spatial growth.This depiction of growing shrinking cities expands conceptualizations of urban shrinkage and advances discussionsregarding the growth imperative in planning cultures.

In shrinking cities, commercial district decline has mirrored other patterns of depopulation and deindustrialization. Uneven development has emerged as the prevailing spatial pattern for shrinking ...

Shrinking cities have spread across the globe in recent decades, characterizing significant population loss, economic decline, and decay in spatial quality. To maintain global economic prosperity in the context of urban shrinkage and support decision making in the direction, it is necessary to accurately identify shrinking cities on a global scale. We utilize redefined natural city boundaries and the LandScan dataset to identify and map shrinking cities experiencing population loss on the globe. As a result, we have identified 5004 shrinking cities worldwide, with a total area of 126,930 km2 during 2000–2019. The ratio of which in number and in area is 27% and 22%, respectively. The shrinking cities are clustered and mainly located in Europe, Eastern Asia, and northeastern United States. There are 41 countries with more than 20 shrinking cities on the globe. The number of shrinking cities in China reached 679, which is the most. Among the 41 countries, the median value of the natural cities’ shrinking ratios of Iraq, Iran, Austria, South Africa, Russia, Georgia, and Belarus is >50%, indicating that the urban population loss in these countries is relatively serious. Our findings can be used to inform decision makers and urban planners to adjust the “growth-oriented” planning paradigm and adopt precise strategies, to form a healthier urban development.

Urban shrinkage has become a global phenomenon. Although China is still experiencing rapid urbanization, population losses arise in an increasing number of cities. As a booming industry, tourism is expected as a mean to create jobs and curb population loss. Can tourism industry contribute to revive the shrinking cities? Based on panel data of 54 shrinking cities in China, this article explores effects of tourism development on shrinking cities. The results show that there is no evidence that tourism has a significant impact on the population of the shrinking cities. However, tourism shows positive effects on these cities in terms of many aspects, including urban economy, employment, investment, and consumption. This indicates that tourism can revive shrinking cities by economic boom, rather than population growth.

As shrinking cities scholarship has matured over the past two decades, the term shrinking cities has evolved into an overarching concept encompassing a broad range of geographic, cultural, and disc...

Addressing the challenges and opportunities in shrinking cities requires approaches and strategies different from those that have been applied under growth conditions. Research on shrinking cities has generated a plethora of approaches and strategies for the shrinkage trajectory and has identified sustainability as a guiding principle. However, shrinking city development in practice either cannot confront the situation of shrinkage, or does so without an integrative, consistent approach, while the concept of sustainability has ambiguous meanings, giving rise to competing or contradicting rationales. This paper identifies the need for clearer directions for a re-orientation away from the growth-oriented approaches, in conjunction with a critical reflection on what sustainability means for different shrinking cities. Towards this end, it first assembles an overview of the strategic framings behind urban development ideas proffered in the shrinking city discourse, with a focus on the temporal, agential and spatial dimensions and the cross-cutting frame of higher-level interdependencies. Secondly, with a deeper reflection on the inner tensions of the sustainability concept, it distils the key rationales and proposes new strategy-making approaches for a development path change towards sustainable development that responds to different local situations.

Planning interventions have been applied to improve the well‐being, hereafter happiness, of residents. The happiness in shrinking cities, in particular, becomes more critical since urban decline tends to induce an unequal and uneven distribution of care under a limited budget and human resources. Using geo‐tagged Twitter, census, and geospatial data on Detroit, Michigan, which is one of the well‐known shrinking cities in the U.S., the spatial distribution of sentiments, topics of tweets appeared, and the association between neighborhood conditions and the level of happiness were examined. The outcomes indicate that people in Detroit are posting happy tweets more than negative tweets. The downtown area holds both positive and negative hotspots, which are clustered around sports arenas and bars, respectively. Neighborhoods with young and well‐educated residents, situated close to amenities (i.e., recreation facilities, colleges, and commercial areas), and less crime tend to be happier. The use of SNS data could serve as a meaningful social listening tool to reconcile the declining urban vitality of neighborhoods since people interact with those spaces. Negative sentiments are attached to specific neighborhoods with certain conditions so that regeneration efforts should take place in neighborhoods with a higher priority.

A growing number of studies have used evictions data as a way to address the methodological challenges to measuring gentrification-induced displacement. The spatial and temporal dimensions of evict...

Human civilization reached a milestone in the first decade of the 21st century, when the global urban population became higher than rural for the first time. However, the process of urbanisation is not uniform across the globe, and striking differences exist in the spatial structure and trends of urbanisation in developed and developing regions because of varying rates of demographic and economic growth. The success of Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) depends on addressing urbanisation challenges with comparative knowledge of the spatial structure and growth pattern of the cities across regions. In this context, the present study examines the spatial structures and urbanisation trends of cities in Asia and Europe through standardised data and visualisation, with particular reference to India and Germany. The results show that ‘shrinking cities’ are more common in Europe and particularly in Germany. In contrast, Indian cities have registered an overall increase in population of cities, although at a slower growth rate. Also, the rate of growth of the built-up areas is relatively higher in India than Europe. However, both these geographies are experiencing higher growth of built-up areas as compared to population. A detailed analysis of the built-up areas in select cities of Europe and India in different time-periods reveals the cities’ growth pattern to be aligned with transport routes. The study concludes that developing a common methodological approach to study the spatial structures and trends of different geographies is a crucial prerequisite for achieving the goals set under SDGs and the New Urban Agenda.

This article outlines the political economy critiques of the shrinking cities literature by answering the following: (1) how does the “shrinking cities” canon define a categorically distinct set of geographies with unique challenges and what solutions are proposed? and (2) how has the urban political economy literature engaged with and critiqued these ways of framing problems and solutions? This analysis finds that the “the shrinking city” is loosely defined and that debates exist around their exceptionalism. Urban political economy scholarship debates whether the solutions provided through shrinking cities literature are innovative alternatives to growth-oriented development or manifestations of austerity urbanism.

Despite a clear association between the most African‐American neighbourhoods and overall population shrinkage in Rust Belt cities, few have explored the theoretical challenges that this poses. First, if racial prejudice is the key ingredient for this relationship, why would this result in overall population loss and not simply a reduction of White residents? Second, why if stigmatisation generates the pre‐conditions for in‐migration and investment – as the gentrification and urban ecologies literatures suggest – why would Black neighbourhoods not be the epicentre of population growth? This paper explores these questions through a theoretical synthesis of the residential choice, shrinking cities, and racial prejudice literatures. I rely on an intra‐city examination of neighbourhood change in Cleveland, Detroit and Pittsburgh. I argue that three factors in shrinking Rust Belt cities limit the application of more general neighbourhood change paradigms: (i) the persistence of racial prejudice; (ii) abundant housing supply; and (iii) housing stock characteristics.

The city of Flint (MI) should have right sized its water infrastructure as part of its response to its water crisis, which was a series of government failures that resulted in lead and other contam...

This article situates school facilities management decisions—specifically school closures and building disposition—in the shrinking cities discourse as a first step toward better understanding and ...

Various institutional and cultural settings have shaped spatial planning systems with comparable features; however, such systems have been adapted to specific cultural, normative and spatial conditions. In line with the growing demand for international knowledge exchange in urban and regional planning, planning cultures have recently come into sharper focus. Moreover, it has become widely acknowledged that many cities in Europe and the USA have to deal with challenges posed by long-term demographic and economic changes. This also holds true for Japan. The objective of the research presented here is to comparatively investigate changes in planning cultures in view of shrinking cities in the USA, Germany and Japan. The findings will allow us to detect interdependencies between changes in planning cultures and societal changes in the wake of shrinkage, and finally to derive hypotheses for both the future-oriented development of shrinking cities, and the development of planning cultures based on the comparison of cultural settings. In this respect the paper concludes with the hypothesis that there might be planning cultures that are not framed by geographic entities (nations, regions, cities), but rather by topics along shrinking cities. This could offer insight into a new research sphere of ‘topical planning cultures’. While lasting effects and successes of policies and strategies applied in shrinking cities remain to be seen, their influence on a broader knowledge exchange, contextualisation and innovation in the sphere of planning cultures is evident.

The approach to the issue of shrinking cities is undergoing constant changes. Originally, this process was referred primarily to the progressing depopulation connected with a deteriorating economic situation. Presently, works on shrinking cities mainly focus on the challenges posed by the problem rather than the delimitation questions. Do the shrinking also apply to the situation of small towns, and if so, to what extent may small towns shrink? Being conscious of the multidimensional nature of the topic discussed, the authors took measures aimed at singling out a group of shrinking towns from the whole set of small towns in Poland. The identification of depopulating centres consisted in pointing to those shrinking both in terms of their demography and economy. This type of research gives rise to all types of methodological problems such as which tools should be used to measure town shrinking or which data should be selected for the research, an issue particularly important for small towns where the range of indicators available is rather limited. What conclusions may be drawn from the conducted analysis? Do small towns in Poland shrink? On the basis of the conducted research the answer is no. With regard to demography, the process of shrinking concerns only 30 towns (4.5%). And this group includes only four which additionally shrink in economic terms.

Right sizing has become an essential talking point in discussing next steps for postindustrial and shrinking cities as they struggle to maintain outdated, outsized infrastructure. Yet the literature has been clear that balancing economic and social objectives must be a key part of the discussion, especially given that historical patterns of disinvestment have disproportionately affected socioeconomically disadvantaged and racial/ethnic minority populations. In this Viewpoint, we illuminate concerns on a recent article published in this journal on right sizing that Flint (MI) should have enacted in the wake of its catastrophic water crisis. We present the nature of decline in Flint, as well as evidence from Flint’s recent master plan and its history with urban renewal that demonstrates why recommending such a policy not only goes against common urban planning practice but misses the local context in Flint, which is marked by deep-seated apprehension of the inequitable underpinnings of historical urban planning practice.

Alors que les espaces vacants, bâtis et non bâtis, sont considérés comme l’une des manifestations urbaines les plus vives des villes en décroissance et participent de la dégradation urbaine, la nature et l’ampleur de la relation entre espaces vacants et cadre de vie sont rarement explorées. L’article propose d’examiner cette relation à partir d’une enquête qualitative auprès d’usagers et d’un relevé de terrains dans deux quartiers d’une ville décroissante française : Roubaix. Il rend compte de la manière dont les espaces vacants génèrent des désordres environnementaux et matériels, touchant fortement la perception du cadre de vie. Il témoigne également d’un ensemble d’effets indirects participant à la dégradation systémique du cadre de vie. Ainsi, il offre une nouvelle perspective à la problématique de la vacance, au-delà des approches courantes des impacts de celle-ci sur la valeur immobilière et le sentiment d’insécurité. While vacant spaces, both built and unbuilt, are considered to be one of the most striking urban manifestations of shrinking cities and participate in urban degradation, the nature and extent of the relationship between vacant spaces and living environment are rarely explored. The article proposes to examine this relationship based on a qualitative survey of users and a land survey in two districts of a shrinking French city : Roubaix. It gives an account of the way in which vacant spaces generate environmental and material disorders, strongly impacting the perception of the living environment. It also testifies to a set of indirect effects participating in the systemic degradation of the living environment. Thus, it goes beyond the conventional debates on the effects of vacant spaces on real estate value and the feeling of insecurity, by showing the existence of multiple effects and significant consequences on the users’ representations. Mientras que los espacios vacíos, construidos y no construidos, son considerados como una de las manifestaciones urbanas más representativas de las ciudades que experimentan un declive demográfico, formando así parte de la degradación urbana, la naturaleza y amplitud de la relación que se construye entre estos espacios y la calidad de vida son poco explorados. Este artículo examina esta relación a partir de una investigación cualitativa mediante entrevistas y trabajo en terreno en dos barrios de la ciudad francesa Roubaix. Los resultados, dan cuenta de la manera en cómo los espacios vacíos generan problemáticas medioambientales y materiales, que impactan fuertemente la percepción que se tiene de la calidad de vida, testimoniando además, un conjunto de efectos indirectos que se desarrollan en la degradación sistemática de esta. Así, se ofrece una nueva perspectiva a la problemática del vacío, más allá de los enfoques corrientes de los impactos de ésta sobre el valor inmobiliario y sentimiento de inseguridad.

Since the beginning of the 21st century, the phenomenon of urban shrinkage, accompanied by symptoms of a structural crisis in urban areas, has spread on a global scale. The recent 2008 glo...

Hamilton, Ontario, like many cities heavily dependent on manufacturing in the 20th century, experienced de-industrialization and associated change in its economic and employment fortunes, as well as comparative weakened fiscal strength. In contrast to cities in the United States though, Hamilton's population kept growing, at least slowly, and its unemployment rate never skyrocketed, even though the proportion of the population earning middle- to high-incomes declined for a time. In urban scholarship, dramatic population loss has attracted researchers to study shrinking cities, however population change fails to tell the entire story of the possible fates of rust-belt cities that also requires the analysis of economic changes. Our aim is to identify Hamilton's challenges and characteristics followed by how current political, financial and regional circumstances shape the city's development and create different circumstances for post-industrial cities. We review this using Hamilton's census data since 1951 and fiscal data, development projects, and interviews with local public officials and private business reveals the significant impact the post-industrial era and the Canadian perspective. Our findings suggest that despite differences between shrinking characteristics in Canadian and US cities, Canadian cities should receive more attention and offer a different perspective on the “rust-belt” literature.

Research background: Adverse demographic changes in many local administration units around the world lead to their shrinkage. These processes are usually accompanied by economic changes. The economic consequences of shrinkage can be assessed based on the budgetary revenues of local units, which are largely dependent on the local population and the demographic structure. Purpose of the article: The aim of this article is to evaluate the shrinkage of Polish municipalities and the effects of population change on the budgetary revenues of local administration units. The analysis was conducted in selected municipalities of the Warmian-Masurian voivodeship, which is the least economically developed region in Poland. The analysis covered the period between 2012 and 2017. Methods: The shrinkage of municipalities was evaluated with the use of the methods proposed by the Shrinking Cities International Research Network (SCIRN). According to this methodology, a local unit shrinks when the annual decrease in population exceeds 0.15% for more than five consecutive years. The influence of demographic changes on the budgetary revenues of municipalities was evaluated with the use of linear correlation analysis (Pearson's r) as well as a survey conducted among municipal treasurers in the Warmian-Masurian voivodeship. Findings & Value added: Symptoms of shrinkage were described in selected municipalities of the Warmian-Masurian voivodeship. The presence of correlations between different categories of budgetary revenues and demographic changes was confirmed. The results of the study and the formulated practical recommendations constitute constructive inputs to the discussion on possible solutions to the analyzed problem. They can also be used in further research to analyze other aspects of municipal budgets (the consequences of depopulation for budgetary expenditures, municipal debt, etc.) or conduct comparisons with other regions in Poland and in the world.

Despite growing signs of urban shrinkage in countries such as Korea, Japan and China, few studies have examined the generalisable pattern of urban shrinkage and its relationship to the characteristics of housing abandonment in the East Asian context. This study explores five major paths that may explain the emergence of vacant houses in declining inner-city areas, based on empirical observations in the city of Incheon, South Korea. The paths are: (1) strong government-led new built-up area development plans (pull factor for population movement); (2) delay and cancellation of indiscriminate redevelopment projects (push factor for population movement); (3) initial poor development and concentration of substandard houses; (4) aging of the elderly population; and (5) the outflow of infrastructure and services. These paths, also found in Japan or China, are expected to be combined in a local context, leading to more serious housing abandonment. This study suggests that it is important to take appropriate countermeasures based on the identification of the paths causing vacant houses.

The problem of population decline, economic activity decrease and deterioration of investment attractiveness has become topical on the agenda of sustainable development of industrial or single-industry cities in most developed countries (uSA, Eu, Australia) during the last century. New urban trends are increasing of the economic efficiency of urban areas usage, encouraging restrain of the population, including youth and employable people, and attracting new ones through the creation of required jobs and the formation of comfortable living conditions. All of these demanded the mechanisms and tools development for the social and economic development of cities. world experience has accumulated various approaches to the transformation of shrinking cities — economic and financial instruments supporting the development and provision of partnership of key stakeholders of cities, integrated urban development programs, tools for optimizing the spatial and territorial structure of cities, etc. The paper analyzes the existing practices of application of administrative and organizational mechanisms for the spatial development of shrinking cities in the united States, Britain, Germany, Spain and Australia. Based on the analysis, key conclusions are drawn about the factors that divide the trajectories from decline to the cities restoration. The practical significance of the conclusions lies in the possibility of using them in the development of strategies and programs for the russian cities development that are experiencing a tendency towards a contraction of economic and territorial space.

The demographic dynamics of urban areas is highly relevant for urban and regional planning, in a global context marked by rapid socioeconomic changes and growing competition between cities....

This research examines the mismatch between the reality of a city’s population loss and the planning strategies they have adopted. Thirty-five depopulating U.S. cities’ comprehensive plans are analyzed to determine whether they are acknowledging past depopulation trends, how they are projecting future population changes, and what planning strategies they are pursuing in light of their depopulation trends. Findings illustrate a majority of cities acknowledge depopulation; however, they rely on optimistic population projections for the future. Despite this, a mix of planning strategies, ranging from smart decline to pro-growth, are used regardless of a city’s acknowledgment/acceptance of population loss.

International audience; This paper examines the techno-environmental urban policy that emerged in Cleveland, Ohio following the financial crisis, consisting primarily of mass demolition and greening programs, we argue this techno-green fix is an urban redevelopment strategy in shrinking cities that reshapes these places into manageable islands of urban development. Demolition and green reuse accelerated displacement without gentrification in long established low-income communities of color while reinforcing the racial hierarchies in US property markets. We demonstrate how the unevenness of the demolition program mirrors earlier racialized practices while adopting the rhetoric and strategy of “smart shrinkage.” We show that behind its neutral and scientific ambition, this strategy targets the most disadvantaged areas of the inner city. The market rational of these programs reproduces old patterns of racial segregation in the city. Finally, we show that the “green” dimension of this strategy is highly ambivalent. If “greening” is publicly presented as a means to benefit marginalized areas and residents, it is also used as a way to transfer the maintenance of urban services to poor residents on the city’s east side, to erase urban spaces, and to foster market dynamics.

Traditional planning practice, in its essence, usually pursues urban growth, and is more comfortable dealing with population increase and other growth dynamics than with population decline and what ensues. The main goal of this article is to assess local planning attitudes in Portugal towards demographic change, and in particular towards population decrease, in terms of housing development. In order to do so, a comparative content analysis of municipal director plans (PDM) – Planos Diretores Municipais – of the fourteen Portuguese cities that shrank prevalently and persistently across both conjoining periods 1991– 2001–2011 was completed using a simple matrix of analysis. The qualitative analysis of the regulations of these PDMs showed that aspects of population decrease and shrinkage in relation to housing development are gradually entering local planning practice, though there is not yet an overall intelligible strategy. In Portugal, demographic change and housing development are only just starting to come together in local spatial planning.

The majority of the shrinking cities literature focuses solely on instances of population loss and economic decline. This article argues that shrinking cities exist on a spectrum between prosperity and decline. Taking a wider view of population loss, I explore the possibility of prosperous shrinking cities: if they exist, where they exist, and under what conditions shrinking cities can thrive. Examining census place data from the 1980 to 2010 U.S. Census and American Community Surveys, 27 percent of 886 shrinking cities were found to have income levels greater than their surrounding regions. Shrinking and prosperous shrinking cities of all sizes were found across the United States. Shrinkage was most prevalent in the Rust Belt region and prosperous shrinkage in coastal regions. Prosperous shrinking cities were overwhelmingly found within megapolitan regions and were rarely principal cities. Multivariate regression analysis found that both population (city size) and the severity of shrinkage (magnitude of population loss) had no effect on economic prosperity. Talent (location quotient of education) was found to be the strongest predictor of prosperous shrinkage.

Despite the fact that China is becoming increasingly urbanised, some Chinese cities have witnessed a loss of urban population. In recent years, with the extensive expansion of the Chinese High-Speed Railway (HSR) network, the reduction in travel time has greatly increased the mobility of people across cities, thus affecting the spatial redistribution of the urban population in China. An important question arises: for cities experiencing population loss, when they were connected to the HSR network, did the HSR further aggravate this urban shrinkage? Using cities experiencing population loss as a sample, the paper provides a quantitative assessment of population loss in HSR-served cities. A Difference-in-Difference (DID) method was adopted to investigate whether the HSR aggravated population loss in shrinking cities. On the whole, empirical results show that the phenomenon of urban shrinkage in China was further aggravated by the HSR. Furthermore, the results unveil the dynamic impact of the HSR on shrinking cities, and multi-stage DID results reveal that the impact of the HSR on urban population may have a certain time lag effect. The HSR has significantly contributed to the population loss of shrinking cities four to five years after it first started operating. The paper highlights that the HSR does not always yield growth opportunities; on the contrary, for cities suffering from population decline, the HSR may bring a serious challenge.

Shrinking cities confront the urban designer with a variety of challenges. Chief among them is the novel physical condition of the shrinking city, a condition in which vacant parcels and abandoned ...

Urban spatial development is a crucial issue for spatial planning and urban governance, ultimately determining cities’ sustainability. While a set of spatial strategies to address urban development are progressively gaining international consensus, their actual applicability is still contested. An interesting test-bed is represented by the European Union (EU), where common spatial strategies have been discussed since 1993. This paper aims to identify the main spatial strategies promoted at the EU-level and to investigate whether the recent spatial development trends of EU cities have been following the directions suggested by the strategies. By analysing 30 policy documents, we identified six main strategies: compact city, urban regeneration, functional mix, no land take, green city, and high density. For each strategy, we selected a set of indicators and applied them to the analysis of 175 cities representative of the variety of conditions across the EU. Most cities progressed towards compact city and functional mix, but almost none halted land take. Urban regeneration was more intense in Northern and Western cities, while Southern cities show the most significant increase in green spaces. Growing cities achieved a higher density, but expanded inefficiently producing abandonment of urbanized areas and fragmentation of agricultural land. Shrinking cities continued in the paradox of contemporary population loss and expansion already observed by previous studies. The results highlight potential conflicts and trade-offs in the implementation of the strategies. Similar analyses can stimulate comparison, exchange, and cooperation among cities, thus supporting the mainstreaming of non-prescriptive strategies formulated at the international level.

While the competitiveness of small and medium sized cities has become important for balanced development at the national scale, they have experienced continuous decline in population and employment, particularly those in non-capital regions. In addition, some of small and medium sized cities have been classified into shrinking cities that have declined due to their long-term structural reasons. To address these issues, a regional approach, by which a hub city and its surrounding small and medium sized cities can collaborate has been suggested. Given this background, the purpose of this study is to identify and delineate hub cities and their impact areas by using travel data as a functional network index. This study uses a centrality index to identify the hub cities of small and medium sized cities and Markov-chain model and cluster analysis to delineate regional boundaries. The mean first passage time (MFPT) generated from the Markov-chain model can be interpreted as functional distance of each region. The study suggests a methodological approach delineating the boundaries of regions incorporating functional relationships of hub cities and their impact areas, and provides 59 hub cities and their impact areas. The results also provide policy implications for regional spatial planning that addresses appropriate planning boundaries of regions for enhancing the economic competitiveness of small and medium sized cities and ensuring services for shrinking cities.

Urban design decisions for shrinking cities need to take into account the quality of daily life of the community alongside with the built environment characteristics. However, little is known about...

After the Great Recession, a historically high level of foreclosures resulted in an accumulation of vacant properties in the USA. However, much of our recent knowledge about vacant housing has focused only on shrinking cities. Using multivariate analyses with vacancy data derived from the US Postal Service, this study examines patterns and factors associated with changes in neighborhood-level, long-term vacancies in three types of metropolitan areas across the nation during the US housing recovery from 2011 to 2014. The findings suggest that neighborhood factors associated with changes in long-term vacant homes vary based on the growth trajectory of metropolitan statistical areas (metros): In weak-growth metros, larger increases in long-term vacancies tended to occur in depressed neighborhoods with high shares of African Americans and single-family home renters. In hard-hit metros, which were hit by a large decline in home values, increasing levels of long-term vacancies were prevalent in neighborhoods with high levels of poverty and higher shares of townhomes and condominiums. Finally, in strong-growth metros, increases in long-term vacancies tended to occur in outlying counties. When comparing one type of metropolitan area to another, researchers and policy makers must acknowledge the limitations of generalizing their findings. With a more thorough understanding of the variations in the neighborhood dynamics of the housing market, they will be more equipped to inform both housing policy and research.

Based on the fundamental concept of sustainable development, this study empirically analyzes the spatio-temporal characteristics, formation mechanisms and obstacle factors of the urban-rural integration of shrinking cities in China, from 2008 to 2018. The conclusions are as follows: the overall level of the urban-rural integration of shrinking cities in China is low, the internal differences of urban-rural integration are also small, and the changes are slow. Next, the space difference is high in the east and low in the west, high in the south and low in the north. Moreover, differences exist among different levels of urban agglomerations. Urban economic efficiency, urban resources and environment, urban social equity and rural economic efficiency are the main factors affecting the urban-rural integration of shrinking cities in China. Urban and rural economic efficiency are the two most prominent shortcomings that restrict the urban-rural integration of shrinking cities. The spatial resistance mode of each city is more than the two-system resistance, the main resistance of shrinking cities with a higher level of urban-rural integration also comes from the non-economic field. This study expands the research scope that up till now has ignored the discussion of urban-rural issues in the research of shrinking cities at home and abroad, and provides practical guidance for the sustainable development of shrinking cities in China.

This paper describes the greening of ash dumps from two thermal power plants located in Romania, in the villages of Mintia and Doicești, two rural areas neighboring middle-sized cities, both with architectural, archaeological and landscape heritage. Currently, the two Romanian villages have different fates in the context of shrinking cities, and solutions from the industrialized country of Germany that are more advanced in closing polluting thermal power plants are examples of this. Thus, the greening of industrial waste is one of the current challenges of the energy shift towards renewable energy. Nature-based solutions such as the proposed use of the biodegradable geo-textile in the greening is one of the current trends. The development of the biodegradable geo-textile was contemporary with the creation of the International Building Exhibition (Internationale Bauaaustellung—IBA) Emscher Park in the ancient industrial coal mining Ruhr area, in Germany, later research, around 10 years ago, explored soil pollution at these two Romanian thermal power plants. A recent research study investigated the conversion of the industrial buildings of the thermal power plant in Doicești, however, these buildings were demolished at the end of last year. Mintia thermal power plant continues to function. This paper explores the current challenges of industrial brownfields, energy shift, ecology, the COP21 in Paris and “Laudato si”, spanning 30 years of history and the legacy of the research over this time.

In this paper, I reflect on regional perspectives on a postgrowth world, taking the case of population loss as my example. Building on existing knowledge and illustrating with descriptive examples, I highlight three aspects of population loss that bear further study-its ubiquity, dynamism, and geography. I close by emphasizing the importance of researching, thinking about, and engaging with population loss, to contribute to our understanding of a world of less, not more.

Two trends are observed in contemporary cities around the world: whereas some urban areas develop rapidly and experience population growth, a steady population decline is noted in other cities. Demographic changes in urban areas are also accompanied by economic changes. These changes constitute a very serious challenge for sustainable regional growth. However, these problems have not been sufficiently investigated to date, including in Poland. The aim of this study was to identify shrinking cities in Poland and the phenomena that are related to the economic aspects of urban shrinkage in Poland. Empirical research relied on analysis of the population growth rate in Polish urban municipalities, and the phenomena related to the economic aspects of urban shrinkage were identified by multiple linear regression analysis. The period of research was 2003–2019. Thirty-three Polish cities experienced a steady population decline. The economic phenomena related to urban shrinkage included changes in own-source revenues, proportions of government transfers in municipal budgets, unemployment, migration, municipal spending on education, transport, communications, and social welfare. Population decline was not related to changes in the age-dependency ratio, public spending on housing, the number of companies, or the number of vacant homes in cities. The research results can be a source of important information for regional sustainable growth policies used not only in cities and regions in Poland, but also in other Central and Eastern European countries where this phenomenon occurs.

Unlike shrinking cities in Western countries enduring prolonged disinvestment due to market liberalism, some of their counterparts in Northeast China are undergoing drastic redevelopment u...

While the world’s total urban population continues to grow, not all cities are witnessing such growth—some are actually shrinking. This shrinkage has caused several problems to emerge, including population loss, economic depression, vacant properties and the contraction of housing markets. Such issues challenge efforts to make cities sustainable. While there is a growing body of work on studying shrinking cities, few explore such a phenomenon from the bottom-up using dynamic computational models. To fill this gap, this paper presents a spatially explicit agent-based model stylized on the Detroit Tri-County area, an area witnessing shrinkage. Specifically, the model demonstrates how the buying and selling of houses can lead to urban shrinkage through a bottom-up approach. The results of the model indicate that, along with the lower level housing transactions being captured, the aggregated level market conditions relating to urban shrinkage are also denoted (i.e., the contraction of housing markets). As such, the paper demonstrates the potential of simulation for exploring urban shrinkage and potentially offers a means to test policies to achieve urban sustainability.

Shrinking cities – places which need to ‘narrow down’ the too spacious settings – pose challenges to the mainstream urban planning which naturalizes growth and direct approaches advocating it. While shrinking cities are located worldwide, responses to the phenomenon are place-specific depending on the knowledge and resources of decision-makers, as well as the discourses of the desired spatial development. In this sense, it is still not precisely clear why and how urban planning changes under conditions of shrinkage. Since the beginning of the 1990s, many Russian cities began to lose population. Excluding the oil and gas provinces, the Russian Arctic has become a ‘showcase’ of the country’s population exodus. Our contribution is based on empirical evidence from Vorkuta (Komi Republic, Russia) an Arctic city with around 54 thousand people which is among the fastest shrinking cities of the country. Due to the simultaneous need for improving housing conditions, dealing with negative physical effects of shrinkage, and high maintenance costs of housing and infrastructure the local stakeholders had to come up with a new approach toward planning – the so-called ‘controlled shrinkage’ that helped reduce sprawl and fragmentation. Les villes en décroissance – soit des lieux qui nécessitent de ‘réduire’ leur vaste cadre - posent des défis à l'urbanisme général qui vise normalement à la croissance, et aux approches directes qui la préconisent. Bien que les villes en déclin se trouvent dans le monde entier, les réponses à ce phénomène sont spécifiques à chaque lieu en fonction des connaissances et des ressources des décideurs, ainsi que des discours sur le développement spatial souhaité. En ce sens, on ne sait pas encore exactement pourquoi et comment l'urbanisme évolue dans des conditions de rétrécissement. Depuis le début des années 1990, de nombreuses villes russes ont commencé à perdre de la population. À l'exception des provinces pétrolières et gazières, l'Arctique russe est devenu une ‘vitrine’ de l'exode de la population du pays. Notre contribution se fonde sur des données empiriques provenant de Vorkouta (République des Komis, Russie), une ville arctique d'environ 54 000 habitants qui fait partie de celles qui connaissent le déclin le plus rapide. En raison du besoin simultané d'améliorer les conditions de logement et de faire face aux effets physiques négatifs du rétrécissement, ainsi qu’aux coûts élevés d'entretien des logements et des infrastructures, les acteurs locaux ont dû trouver une nouvelle approche de la planification - la ‘décroissance contrôlée’, qui a permis d'éviter l'étalement et la fragmentation.

This paper undertakes a comparison of two regrowing and two shrinking European cities in order to identify the factors driving demographic regrowth and economic recovery of cities and how and why those factors are at work in some cities that turned from population decline towards new growth while others did not. Our objectives are to systematically elaborate the factors that are influencing urban regrowth, explain how these factors interact and are mutually dependent and to discuss how these factors relate to contextual conditions at different scales. For our contrasting analysis, we selected Liverpool and Leipzig, two cities that have seen regrowth after shrinkage and Lodz and Ostrava, two cities that continue to shrink. As a result of this comparison, we identify general local and contextual factors driving regrowth and discuss their interaction and what we learn from this for the wider urbanisation debate.

There are two opposing trends in urban development: one is the exponential growth of cities and the other is shrinking cities,” which are characterized by a decrease in number of residents...

Urban population decline has been extensively described as a triggering factor for community segregation and fragmentation, and for land use vacancy and house/flat vacancies, resulting in rising interest in strategies of green infrastructure expansion aimed at citizens&rsquo, wellbeing and urban ecosystems. However, city-scaled green infrastructures can be formed by different typologies of outdoor spaces, providing diverse social affordances that can impact community cohesion and resilience differently. This study focuses on the relationship between preferences for particular outdoor space typologies and for community friendliness, under contexts of urban population decline as a migratory process. In the context of Lisbon, a European capital-city experiencing migration and immigration but also urban population shrinkage in some areas of its metropolitan region, the study used conjoint analysis to test participants&rsquo, preference for different attributes of their urban environment. The results showed a significant positive correlation, in the sample living in depopulating neighbourhoods, between preferences for friendlier communities and for outdoor spaces of an enclosed and protected character (r = 0.34), compared with no significant correlation in the non-depopulating neighbourhoods studied. These results do not deny the importance of public parks of wide dimensions as a strategy for shrinking cities&rsquo, green infrastructures but suggest that urban citizens living in depopulating neighbourhoods have a higher awareness of the importance of small-scale, enclosed outdoor/green spaces to give a stronger sense of social connectedness. This study contributes to the general literature on urban shrinkage by showing that these sensitive conditions can potentially change behaviour and use of public spaces in urban contexts.

The growing market demand for pedestrian and transit-oriented communities can be capitalized into higher housing values and can generate much-needed revenue for shrinking cities. Few studi...

Most of the shrinking cities experience an unbalanced deurbanization across different urban areas in cities. However, traditional ways of measuring urban shrinkage are focused on tracking population loss at the city level and are unable to capture the spatially heterogeneous shrinking patterns inside a city. Consequently, the spatial mechanism and patterns of urban shrinkage inside a city remain less understood, which is unhelpful for developing accommodation strategies for shrinkage. The smart city initiatives and practices have provided a rich pool of geospatial big data resources and technologies to tackle the complexity of urban systems. Given this context, we propose a new measure for the delineation of shrinking areas within cities by introducing a new concept of functional urban shrinkage, which aims to capture the mismatch between urban built-up areas and the areas where significantly intensive human activities take place. Taking advantage of a data fusion approach to integrating multi-source geospatial big data and survey data, a general analytical framework is developed to construct functional shrinkage measures. Specifically, Landsat-8 remote sensing images were used for extracting urban built-up areas by supervised neural network classifications and Geographic Information System tools, while cellular signaling data from China Unicom Inc. was used to depict human activity areas generated by spatial clustering methods. Combining geospatial big data with urban land-use functions obtained from land surveys and Points-Of-Interests data, the framework further enables the comparison between cities from dimensions characterized by indices of spatial and urban functional characteristics and the landscape fragmentation; thus, it has the capacity to facilitate an in-depth investigation of fundamental causes and internal mechanisms of urban shrinkage. With a case study of the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei megaregion using data from various sources collected for the year of 2018, we demonstrate the validity of this approach and its potential generalizability for other spatial contexts in facilitating timely and better-informed planning decision support.

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the empirical-theoretical approaches to shrinking cities in Mexico. The study of tendencies in economic and environmental shrinkage is tied to the expressions of substantive changes in the complexity of determinant contexts of internal and migration flows. The analysis intents to answer the challenges posed by the economic and demographic tendencies according to the economic changes, using the theories and models and no to fall down victim of simplistic projections and conjectures and theories based more in speculation than in facts. The method used is the critical analysis of economic, social and political tendencies in relation to the situation of shrinking cities in Mexico. The results of this analysis lead to the finding that the shrinkage process in Mexico, as a developing and emerging economy does not follow the same patterns of well developed countries, where an increase in shrinking cities occurs since the middle of the 1950s and the use of incentives in some localities to attract economic growth have had modest success to turn around the shrinking process. Further research on shrinking cities should be done in Mexico. Finally, this paper analyzes some of the important issues and problems which are important to set an agenda for future research in Mexico.

Several factors have been identified by literature as the cause of shrink- age. These factors are often closely linked to spatial features. There are some contexts in which various causes overlap and amplify as in the case of the mountain or foothill areas of Central Italy, which is the case study of this work. The areas of the Marche region in Central Italy, affected by the severe earthquake of 2016, actually feature multiple shrinking causes. In this region, small and medium-sized towns play a determinant role in structuring urban systems with their influence over local communities and organizations.

The ability of local planners and decision-makers to effectively manage population loss and economic decline has been limited by the availability of shrinkage strategies in the planning toolbox and the stigma of shrinkage within the growth-oriented culture of planning. This paper assesses the applicability of a service rightsizing strategy in two shrinking Canadian municipalities in order to ascertain how local perception facilitates or impedes action. Although deemed theoretically applicable by the six key informants, the strategy was ultimately considered practically infeasible in both cities due to governance barriers. Despite similar conclusions, the local perception of shrinkage and response strategies was found to be influenced by the geographic location and longevity of shrinkage. The paper postulates that the duration of shrinkage processes and local perceptions are tied to the stage of deindustrialization and the changing demographic makeup of the city.

In the last decade, shrinking cities have begun to gentrify, leading to optimistic narratives about their recovery. Redevelopment policies, however, can exacerbate social and spatial inequities if ...

Valga is a small shrinking town in Estonia where the heritage conservation area acts as the business, administrative and cultural centre of the town. Compared to the overall socio-economic situatio...