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Many American and European cities have to deal with demographic and economic trajectories leading to urban shrinkage. According to official data, 13% of urban regions in the US and 54% of those in the EU have lost population in recent years. However, the extent and spatial distribution of declining populations differ significantly between Europe and the US. In Germany, the situation is driven by falling birth rates and the effects of German reunification. In the US, shrinkage is basically related to long-term industrial transformation. But the challenges of shrinking cities seldom appeared on the agendas of politicians and urban planners until recently. This article provides a critical overview of the development paths and local strategies of four shrinking cities: Schwedt and Dresden in eastern Germany; Youngstown and Pittsburgh in the US. A typology of urban growth and shrinkage, from economic and demographic perspectives, enables four types of city to be differentiated and the differences between the US and eastern Germany to be discussed. The article suggests that a new transatlantic debate on policy and planning strategies for restructuring shrinking cities is needed to overcome the dominant growth orientation that in most cases intensifies the negative consequences of shrinkage.

Urban shrinkage is not a new phenomenon. It has been documented in a large literature analyzing the social and economic issues that have led to population flight, resulting, in the worse cases, in the eventual abandonment of blocks of housing and neighbourhoods. Analysis of urban shrinkage should take into account the new realization that this phenomenon is now global and multidimensional — but also little understood in all its manifestations. Thus, as the world's population increasingly becomes urban, orthodox views of urban decline need redefinition. The symposium includes articles from 10 urban analysts working on 30 cities around the globe. These analysts belong to the Shrinking Cities International Research Network (SCIRN), whose collaborative work aims to understand different types of city shrinkage and the role that different approaches, policies and strategies have played in the regeneration of these cities. In this way the symposium will inform both a rich diversity of analytical perspectives and country-based studies of the challenges faced by shrinking cities. It will also disseminate SCIRN's research results from the last 3 years.

Shrinking mining cities — once prosperous settlements servicing a mining site or a system of mining sites — are characterized by long-term population and/or economic decline. Many of these towns experience periods of growth and shrinkage, mirroring the ebbs and flows of international mineral markets which determine the fortunes of the dominant mining corporation upon which each of these towns heavily depends. This dependence on one main industry produces a parallel development in the fluctuations of both workforce and population. Thus, the strategies of the main company in these towns can, to a great extent, determine future developments and have a great impact on urban management plans. Climate conditions, knowledge, education and health services, as well as transportation links, are important factors that have impacted on lifestyles in mining cities, but it is the parallel development with the private sector operators (often a single corporation) that constitutes the distinctive feature of these cities and that ultimately defines their shrinkage. This article discusses shrinking mining cities in capitalist economies, the factors underpinning their development, and some of the planning and community challenges faced by these cities in Australia, Canada, Japan and Mexico.

Suburban shrinkage, understood as a degenerative urban process stemming from the demise of the Fordist mode of urbanism, is generally manifested in a decline in population, industry and employment. It is also intimately linked to the global restructuring of industrial organization associated with the rise of the post-Fordist mode of urbanism and, more recently, the thrust of Asian industrialization. Framed in the discourse of industrial urbanism, this article examines the first ring of industrial suburbs that developed around large cities in their most rapid Fordist urbanization phase. These industrial suburbs, although they were formed at different times, are today experiencing specific mutations and undergoing profound restructuring on account of their particular spatial position between the central area and the expanding peripheries of the post-Fordist metropolis. This article describes and compares suburban decline in two European cities (Glasgow and Paris) and two Latin American Cities (São Paulo, Brazil and Guadalajara, Mexico), as different instances of places asymmetrically and fragmentarily integrated into the geography of globalization.

This essay on Shenzhen, China, presents three vignettes addressing the question of home in a city of migrants. The first section explores the ubiquitous narratives of success forming the city's foundational myth. The second follows this myth into the world of a Shenzhen filmmaker and his characters, as they navigate the tension between the idea of home and the urge to start anew, resulting in the suspended possibility of the title. The last section looks at young architects who hope to preserve the city's heterotopic sites of migrants and original villagers through architectural innovations. The cases show how an economy of desire supplements the political economy of this export-driven city. The city appears as an urban desiring machine that produces itself as an object of desire for the migrants of all classes who flock to its factories, "urban villages", white-collar jobs, luxury villas and underground economy. The essay is an encounter with the mythology of success and failure, the intertwining of home as an end and home as the beginning, and with the manipulation of space that allows residents to control their own subjectivity.

This essay examines the ongoing process of postsocialist transformation at the intersection of cultural and economic forces in an urban environment through the example of the so-called "urban villages"(chengzhongcun) in Shenzhen, China, a booming southern Chinese city and former Special Economic Zone next to Hong Kong. This essay ethnographically examines the role of former rural collectives encircled by a city that has exploded from farmland to an export-driven city of over 14 million people in little over one generation. These villages form an internal other that is both the antithesis and the condition of possibility for Shenzhen city. By co-opting the market economy in ways that weave them into the fabric of the contemporary global city, the villages become as much an experiment as the Special Economic Zone itself. This essay analyzes the urban-rural divide as complicit in each other's continued production and effacement and explores how village and city exploit the ambiguities of their juxtaposition in the making of Shenzhen.

In this study, migration data compiled by the Internal Revenue Serve (IRS) and the US Census Bureau for 2006-07 were used to analyse internal migration patterns using migration and income effectiveness for the counties containing the 25 most populous cities in the United States. The results indicated that both large metropolitan and rural counties have lost population and income due to migration. Small metropolitan and non-metropolitan counties closer to cities gained population and income. Counties in South Florida attracted a large number of higher-income migrants from the largest cities in the US. In the last 13 years, New York, Los Angeles and Chicago, the three most populous cities in the US, had negative migration effectiveness. Suburban areas and second-tier cities continued to attract people from large metropolitan areas.

It is recognised that people movement can increase potential risk of HIV transmission. In recent years, mobile populations moving across national borders have become a focus for HIV/AIDS prevention campaigns. These programs generally target border "hot zones" that produce high levels of HIV vulnerability due to the degree of mobility and the risk behaviours fostered by these marginal environments. However, high degrees of movement and social exploitation need not be the only criteria for borders to exacerbate HIV vulnerability. The types of social interactions promoted by mobility take many forms. In this paper we consider a border zone between Thailand and Laos to show that the links between movement and HIV vulnerability are not confined to stereotypical instances of coercion and exploitation. Rather we demonstrate that HIV risk in this area is a product of both a sense of community and a sense of difference that together foster a range of interactions based on mobility back and forth across the border. As HIV/AIDS prevention programs increasingly control forms of sexual interaction, the border provides a practical and symbolic opportunity to establish new forms of sexual relationship falling outside these constraints. This tendency to move outside bounds is not limited to border areas but has implications for prevention programs everywhere.