Guest Editorial/EditorialIntroduction: Shrinking Cities from marginal to mainstream: Views from North America and Europe
Introduction
At the turn of the century and at the beginning of the new millennium, Shrinking Cities emerge as one of the most under-theorized and neglected urban development occurrences and yet one of the most challenging urban planning and public policy issues. Shrinking Cities represent a fin-de-siècle realization that modernity's optimistic engagement with urban decline, as a reversible and episodic misfortune praying on good-planning-deprived cities, was after all, a chimera. Not only the usual suspects of de-industrialization (e.g., Detroit, Youngstown, Manchester, Liverpool, Leipzig, etc.), but also global-recession victims (e.g., Stockton, Modesto, Sacramento, Las Vegas, and Phoenix, in the U.S., Valencia, Lisbon, Naples and Athens in Europe) defied modern urban planning and urban development orthodoxies.
In our current global modernity characterized by rising world inequality (Piketty, 2014), growing network power (Castells, 2013) and global predatory financing resulting in brutal processes of social expulsion, exclusion, and displacement (Sassen, 2014), shrinking cities may represent the canary in the coal mine of global systemic transformations (Audirac, Fol, & Martinez-Fernandez, 2010). This includes the Trump presidency delivered, among other things, by votes of discontent with long-term urban decline, de-industrialization and free trade (McQuarrie, 2016). They also represent an inside-out challenge to traditional planning and public policy approaches to neighborhood abandonment, vacancy and concentrated poverty, amid new waves of gentrification resulting from a global urban redevelopment boom dominated by internationally financialized real-estate development processes (Guironnet & Halbert, 2015).
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Internationalization of Shrinking Cities research
Since the year 2000 several independent initiatives, including the German Federal Cultural Foundation sponsored exhibition and research on Shrinking Cities (Oswalt, 2005), and the Shrinking Cities International Research Network (SCIRN)—whose members contributed to this Cities' volume—have sought to raise awareness of shrinking cities. The first emphasized shrinking cities as an international phenomenon, the second cast shrinking cities as a glocal phenomenon (Pallagst et al., 2009,
Resilience planning in Shrinking Cities
Shrinking-Cities scholarly research and media reportage has increased dramatically. While an Internet search of “shrinking city” produced close to 1000 hits in 2004, by 2017 the number has grown to 34.1 million results. This surge in public interest and research, undoubtedly helped by the Great Recession of 2008, marks a turning point for Shrinking Cites—from a marginal topic to a mainstream concern. Urban resilience has become a central planning theme and shrinking cities the “natural”
Cyclical models of growth and decline in the European systems of cities
Amid a bevy of inquiry examining European cities in distress (e.g., European Planning Studies, 2015), in this volume, Manuel Wolff () examines the role of centralization and decentralization processes in European cities to understand the evolution of shrinking and growing cities. He uses 5692 urban cores and 2733 urban regions (hinterlands) across Europe to test an influential life-cycle model (van den Berg, Drewett, Klaassen, Rossi, & Vijverberg, 1982) of urban systems' evolution. The cycle
Symbolic discourses of marginality and shrinking city branding
Shrinking cities have become the locus for a new discourse on “do-it-yourself” (DIY) temporary land uses (Oswalt et al., 2013)—from guerilla and community gardening to provisional art galleries, pop-up bars and recreational facilities—in the U.S., Europe and Australia. Initially deemed a new source of creative use of vacant and marginal spaces (Oswalt et al., 2013), with lessons for planners and the real-estate market for producing a vibrant public sphere, these micro-spatial urban practices
Conclusion
Individually and collectively, the articles in this section contribute to “ discovering what lies behind the plurality of shrinking cities” (Großmann et al., 2013, 222). Through inter-urban and international studies examining the processes and drivers of shrinking cities in Europe and North America, these studies provide a glimpse of the complex interdependencies of growth and decline at different scales from the neighborhood and the region to the cross-national scene. They also further our
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Cited by (31)
Urban shrinkage in the regional multiscale context: Spatial divergence and interaction
2024, Sustainable Cities and SocietyCharacterising population spatial structure change in Chinese cities
2022, CitiesCitation Excerpt :For example, many growing cities have experienced densification of their population, and this may aggravate problems such as traffic congestion, high housing prices, and environmental pollution (Broitman & Koomen, 2015; Li et al., 2019). However, many shrinking cities have experienced decentralisation, resulting in a decline in employment and an increase in abandoned structures, urban sprawl, and underused infrastructure (Audirac, 2018; Long & Gao, 2019). These problems can be managed with effective urban planning and management.
Spatiotemporal pattern evolution and influencing factors of shrinking cities: Evidence from China
2021, CitiesCitation Excerpt :Since the 1960s, developed countries in Europe and the United States have experienced bouts of recession, industrial transformation, and the transformation of their economic development mode. Problems such as rising urban unemployment rates, slow economic development, traffic congestion and urban environmental deterioration have emerged, and city shrinkage has occurred in some old industrial cities in Europe and the United States (Hartt, 2018; Xie et al., 2018), such as the rust belt area in the northeastern United States (Audirac, 2018), and the northeast of the United Kingdom (Wolff & Wiechmann, 2017). From 1960 to 2003, more than 50% of Europe's large and medium-sized cities experienced different degrees of population loss (Wiechmann & Bontje, 2015).
Quantifying spatiotemporal patterns of shrinking cities in urbanizing China: A novel approach based on time-series nighttime light data
2021, CitiesCitation Excerpt :Interest in shrinking cities has steadily grown among scholars during recent years, and there is an extensive planning debate about shrinking cities. However, most focus remains on Europe and North America (Audirac, 2018; Haase et al., 2016; Hospers, 2014; Mallach, 2017; Schilling & Logan, 2008; Wiechmann & Pallagst, 2012), and relatively little attention has been paid to the East Asia (Jeon & Kim, 2020), especially the urbanizing China (Deng et al., 2019). China has witnessed urbanization at unprecedented rates during the last four decades (Bai et al., 2014; Wu et al., 2014; Yang, 2013).
Quantitative identification and evolution trend simulation of shrinking cities at the county scale, China
2021, Sustainable Cities and SocietyCitation Excerpt :However, not until the 1990s did shrinking cities become the focus of attention, which was the result of a series of social problems caused by the population decline that occurred during the de-industrialization process in Germany, including a reduction in municipal budgets and significant infrastructure sitting idle, such as underutilized public sewerage systems; transportation systems; housing, education, and healthcare systems; and a rising crime rate (Bartholomae, Woon Nam, & Schoenberg, 2016). Since then, a series of negative effects of shrinking cities have been confirmed in different regions (Blanco et al., 2009) and have become an unavoidable problem for urban planners (Audirac, 2018; Haase, Haase, Kabisch, Kabisch, & Rink, 2012; Martinez-Fernandez et al., 2016). Under the premise of promoting sustainable development, understanding the phenomenon of urban shrinkage, measuring the degree of shrinkage, and explaining the mechanisms of shrinkage have gradually become the key topics of current studies.