Shrinking Cities

This study considers the effects of location on farmers’ market success using the relocation of the farmers’ market in Flint, Michigan, as a case study. It examines whether relocating the market benefitted vendors;
whether the direct economic impact (DEI) of the market increased post-relocation; whether spending patterns vary by day of the week and season; and whether different estimates of DEI are obtained when accounting for seasonal variations in spending rates. The results indicate that the relocation increased vendors’ profits and satisfaction, the DEI of the new market was much higher than the old, there are
daily and seasonal differences in spending rates, and accounting for season resulted in an estimated DEI that was higher than would have been obtained otherwise. Overall, the study demonstrates that location matters – the market’s economic outcomes greatly improved
by moving from an isolated location on the outskirts of downtown to the city’s core.

Vacant land presents many challenges for older financially distressed cities. Community engagement is a very important element to solve the urban vacant land problem and assist in long term regeneration. This paper reviews what plans, policies, implementation methods, and community engagement process were developed to overcome barriers and challenges to vacant land projects. Most studies reveal that the importance of community engagement process in terms of understanding the problems and potential value of vacant land, redevelopment process, financial support, regulation, and neighborhood organizations participation for vacant land projects. To encourage community engagement to repurpose vacant land, municipalities should have to provide adequate information about vacant land conditions and their potentials in terms of ecological and social value. Code enforcement and tax foreclosure are efficient ways to control vacant land and the abandoned building problem. Tax incentive systems, such as high taxation rates on land but a low rate or no tax at all on infill development on vacant land, tax credits on vacant land forest structure, and rehabilitation abatement on abandoned buildings can increase public investment in vacant land. Local governments should support such efforts by creating community involvement groups, such as neighborhood coordinators, civic leaders, CDCs (Community Development Corporations), and other community-based nonprofit organizations. Community engagement is not specific planning, but it is part of an ongoing process in planning strategies to urban regeneration and renewal vacant land.

Structural housing vacancy and abandonment occur in many circumstances and are phenomena that generally happen when something disturbs the overall ‘equilibrium’of a given area. Urban scholarship has often considered these forms of housing emptiness in relationship to processes of urban decline, suburbanisation, deindustrialisation, financial crises and the collapse of local housing markets (Keenan et al, 1999; Glock and Haussermann, 2004; O’Callaghan et al, 2018). Indeed, in certain contexts, processes of economic and social restructuring have led to declining or collapsing demand, resulting in housing underuse, disuse and eventual abandonment (Power and Mumford, 1999; Couch and Cocks, 2013; Wang and Immergluck, 2019). Far from being natural, these processes are often closely linked to the political economy of uneven development and to the action of discrete actors in the realms of the state, the real estate industry and finance (Coppola, 2019).

The entry begins with a definition of geography and with a description of what the discipline shares with the other social sciences and what makes it distinctive among them. Terminological clarifications are provided with regard to the relationship between human geography and physical geography, and between human geography and urban geography. After a brief history and overview of human geography’s engagement with social theory, the entry offers a discussion of the politicization of contemporary human geography and of how this phenomenon is reflected in theory building and concept development.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1002/9781118430873.est0464

In the last two decades, critical urban studies has paid a great deal of attention to contemporary “neoliberal urbanism”, but very little to its historical and urban roots. This chapter discusses the use of neighbourhood typologies and mapping in the United States by looking at government redlining maps from the 1930s until the 1970s, and “planned shrinkage”, “urban triage” and “benign neglect” in late 1960s and 1970s New York City as well as in early 2000s New Orleans and Cleveland. A map or ranking indicating declining or shrinking neighbourhoods may lead to the withholding of not only city services, but also mortgage loans. The ranking and mapping of neighbourhoods excludes and impoverishes those places deemed racially infiltrated, declining, and dying. It could be argued that this is a form of “neoliberal urbanism”, but these policies had a pre-cursor in the ideas of the Chicago School of Sociology, Babcock, Hoyt, the HOLC and the FHA in the 1920s and 1930s, and Hoover and Vernon, Downs sr. and jr., Starr and Moynihan in the post-war years. The “old urban right” had already won several significant victories in the war of ideologies, hinting at a neoliberalism avant la lettre.

This dissertation contributes to the literatures on post-2007 urban governance and urban greening by drawing novel connections between vacant land reuse, including urban agriculture, and the structures of urban governance. Through a historical analysis of housing vacancy, an institutional analysis of Cleveland’s community development industry’s response to the 2008 foreclosure crisis, and a case study of a vacant land reuse project, I argue that Cleveland’s community development industry shifted towards vacant land reuse and intervention to stabilize property values in response to the foreclosure crisis. This shift reveals a temporary resolution of the failure of subsidized housing construction following the crisis, but does not represent a significant departure from neoliberal community development. While the City has been effective in fostering certain forms of reuse, the heavy involvement of the community development industry and community foundations, combined with a local government facing fiscal pressure, has resulted in a constrained political field of opportunity for vacant land reuse. By devolving the labor of lot maintenance onto residents and continuing to prioritize traditional economic development, many of the possibilities for using vacant land reuse for social and environmental justice have been limited. However, I also show that the incorporation of vacant land reuse within the community development industry in Cleveland was the outcome of a process of weak contestation, negotiation, and path dependency, not a simple imposition of neoliberal ideology. Additionally, my findings concerning reuse projects on the ground reveals the shortcomings of relying on under-resourced resident labor and shows cracks in the hegemony of private property and market logics in high-abandonment neighborhoods. My findings point to the importance of studying how greening projects are interacting with preexisting structures of urban governance. It suggests that the commodification of land and market-based community development places limits on vacant land reuse that directly benefits residents and works towards environmental and food justice.

Eco-city projects are becoming increasingly prevalent throughout the globe and are often marketed as ‘new’ urban environments focused on achieving sustainable urban living while promoting environmental–economic transitions towards a low-carbon technological and industrial base. The article argues for the need to consider the thermal aspects of urban metabolism, while at the same time focusing on the link between individual buildings and eco-city master plans and wider economic development strategies at a state level. In so doing, the article encourages critical analysis of eco-city design and planning, while keeping a focus on the role of specific building structures within eco-cities as examples of the intermeshing of what can be termed a ‘political ecology of scale’ which stretches from specific buildings' climatic characteristics, to the metabolic master plan for eco-cities, to provincial, regional and state-level plans for the integration of eco-cities within wider economic and political development trajectories. The article focuses on Masdar, in Abu Dhabi, an eco-city under construction at the time of writing.

Abstract:

Urban shrinkage, and more recently the rise of right-sizing and smart-shrinkage as responses to its challenges, have attracted attention among scholars and policy-makers while igniting controversy on how to interpret them. The paper argues that while recognizing the relevance of cross-scale patterns of uneven development in the determination of of urban shrinkage, research has to focus on the ways localized networks of actors respond through the mobilization of concrete policy situations and trajectories. Object of the study is the case of urban planning and policy experiments in land management and reuse, food production and local procurement in the city of Cleveland. Drawing from post-capitalism and social-innovation theories, the author posits that such experiments can represent as many “projects of becoming” towards a new community economy and concludes that right-sizing and smart-shrinkage are open, contested, fields of policy experimentation whose transformative potential has to be closely investigated by critical geographers, planners and policy-makers.

KEYWORDS: Urban shrinkage, right-sizing, smart-shrinkage, community economies, urban transitions

Scholars and practitioners have argued that authentic public participation is crucial in developing strategic plans for so-called shrinking cities, not only for informing the content of the resulting plans but also for fostering public support, civic capacity, and equitable outcomes. The Detroit Works Project, launched in 2010, provided an opportunity to examine the crafting of a high-profile strategic plan for a major U.S. city challenged by decades of population loss and disinvestment. We find that the project was yet another instance of urban planning that began with an assurance that public involvement would play a central role but then failed to fulfill that promise. Transparency and accountability were compromised as a result of the privatization of public responsibilities. The resulting plan did not reflect the priorities, insights, or needs of most Detroiters. Justice was subordinated to the perceived imperative of the market within an ideological frame of neoliberal austerity.

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.

Magyarország népessége 1980 óta csökken, 2001 és 2011 között pedig a magyar városok 75%-ában regisztráltak demográfiai zsugorodást. Közép-Kelet-Európában hasonló folyamatokat figyelhetünk meg. Annak ellenére, hogy az 1970-es évektől egyes egyesült államokbeli, majd 1989 után a kelet-né-met régiók és városok esetében a "hanyatló" és "zsugorodó" városok társadalomtudományos vizsgálatával több szerző foglalkozott, Magyarországon ezek a fogalmak nem váltak a társadalomtudományos elemzés integráns részévé. Jelen tematikus lapszám bevezetőjeként azt a kérdést járjuk körül, hogy a "városi zsugorodás" hogyan befolyásolja az érintett helyi társadalmak esetében a térbeli-társadalmi egyenlőtlenségeket. A cikk a városi zsugorodást mint empirikus folyamatot tárgyalja, amelyhez a periferializálódással kapcso-latos kritikai irodalmat választja elméleti keretéül. A cikk első felében röviden bemutatjuk a zsugorodással kapcsolatos nemzetközi irodalom egyes főbb állításai...

The former industrial districts are often places of experimentation, addressing questions of territorial innovation and city making. Their geographical position within or on the outskirts of cities shows the dynamics of the future territorial development of cities. The reappropriation of these neighborhoods after the period of deindustrialization and the creative activities offered by local authorities and developers can contribute to the economic and demographic growth of deindustrialized shrinking cities. In the research creativity is defined as a process to recover from social and economic recession which are usually linked to deindustrialization. The main goal is to survey how urban spaces with absence of functional use, terrain vague, contribute to explore alternative ways of urban dwelling (sustainable, participatory) as well as the differences observed in the implementation of creative strategies in central districts and peripheral areas. The research method is descriptive-analytic. The descriptive is used in order to define creativity and relate it to previous studies in terrain vague. The analytic is used in order to identify the reasons that led to population decline and the correlations between sustainable urban development, citizen engagement and demographic evolution. The performed analyses included a combination of statistics techniques (diagrams of demographic evolution) and qualitative methods (interviews with local authorities, inhabitants and the teams of architects and urban planners of the projects studied in the research). The outcome revealed that the political, economic and social context plays a major role in the strategies of creativity in a city by promoting several times gentrification, especially in peripheral areas. The final conclusion is that the system of traditional actors in the development of urban projects has to redefine the roles of each one, in order to promote innovation, by establishing the inhabitants as real social actors.

Urban shrinkage, provoked by the combination of long-term depopulation and economic decline, is an emerging challenge now facing most Russian cities, which appears to be the largest shrinking urban system in the world. Shrinking cities have attracted the attention of scientists, policymakers, and planners throughout the world due to the inadequacy of the available planning and policy approaches and tools that have been developed for growth scenarios. However, in Russia, the long-term population decline is still viewed by most as a temporary phenomenon provoked by the dramatic socioeconomic transition and, accordingly, spatial planning remains growth-oriented. The PhD thesis is motivated by the contradiction between the current demographic development in Russian cities and the obsolete planning approaches and methods being used. The study aims at discovering evidence of population decline as an important trend in the development of Russian cities and to then identify which opportunities exist for the transformation of municipal and regional spatial development policies in order to appropriately address this urgent challenge.
The research pursues two main lines of investigation: the urban shrinkage phenomenon itself (its definitions, causes, consequences, threats and opportunities) and the spatial planning of cities experiencing shrinkage conditions. Within this logic, several levels of research have been developed: 1) analysis of the global discussion of the topic through the literature review; 2) confirmation or applicability of the aspects discussed in the literature to the Russian context (at the national and regional levels) as a verification for the necessity of a deeper analysis; 3) testing the developed hypothesis at the city level through multiple case studies; 4) integration of the results obtained through the case studies into the general view; 5) evaluation of the findings.
The thesis provides empirical evidence drawn from cities located in southern Russia, which statistically represents the most favourable part of the country in terms of its demographic development. The intention was to show that even in an area where depopulation is not considered an issue; many cities are shrinking and experience a lack of demographic resources that could compensate for their depopulation. The research focuses on both shrinking and growing small to medium-sized cities in southern Russia, investigating through the comparative analysis the drivers and consequences of population change, but also how existing policies reflect upon demographic issues.
Based on a mix of quantitative and qualitative data, I have found that population decline is a new reality for most Russian cities, where the current and future depopulation trends are an unavoidable process. The consequences are especially notable in small and medium-sized cities, which are more vulnerable and often lack development resources. However, the current negative transformations in both shrinking and growing cities result from a combination of complex factors, the influence of which should be deeper analysed through further research. Due to such discreet effects of depopulation, planners and policy-makers are largely ignorant of these processes, not only because of a lack of “awareness”, but also due to institutional, managerial, professional, and educational issues, which must yet be solved in order to provide a professional approach to spatial planning. Another discovery of the research is of a specific pattern of urban shrinkage in the cities of southern Russia where depopulation happens over the background of a growing need for housing and infrastructure construction and an extensive ongoing urban development. Moreover, growth-oriented urban planning itself, which ignores demographic factors, creates conditions for the appearance of negative consequences of shrinkage in the future, such as abandonment, vacancy or infrastructure surplus, instead of using planning as an opportunity to prevent these effets.
This thesis therefore contributes to the general discussion on urban shrinkage. While the existing literature on the topic is mainly dedicated to various contexts that differ significantly from the Russian situation, this research helps to fill in the important missing element of the Russian experience in the global puzzle of urban shrinkage.

This book examines Warren, a suburb of Detroit, Michigan, as a shrinking city facing a crisis of economic downturn, automotive restructuring, high unemployment, and real estate foreclosures. The author explores Warren’s attempt to develop planning strategies, culturally-based initiatives, community design projects, and creative partnerships in the region in order to address the challenges of shrinkage and foreclosures at multiple scales. Global urban development is currently characterized by varied combination of metropolitan growth and urban core shrinkage. While much of the shrinkage is concentrated in central cities, first suburbs are now facing the same problem. The Warren case illustrates opportunities for flexible policies combining rightsizing, shared maintenance, and incremental development in struggling first suburban communities, which are less studied and often ignored.

This landmark study builds on international practice and knowledge in urban revitalisation, city competitiveness, place branding and marketing, urban regeneration, tourism, retail and town centre management, among others to offer a multidisciplinary assessment of how town and city centres can compete and prosper sustainably by positioning themselves strategically on the basis of their 'DNA' or 'personality'.

The report offers a simple town centre 'personality' test linked to a typology of town and city centres. It also offers, for the first time ever in the UK, a national town centre performance framework linked to a do-it-yourself set of key performance indicators that anybody can use straight from the box without any previous knowledge of market research or statistical analysis.

This article presents an invitation in summer 2004 of the former architects and planners of a socialist estate to discuss the necessity to reduce the house stock of their realised urban planning project. For them it was an unusual reunion after 14 years lost contact...

Nowadays, some areas of Southern Italy appear to be «resistant to development». They are complex realities, which have also been affected by the current economic crisis: an example is Taranto, a city that has been «declining» for many years. The aim of this paper is to identify the narratives that underlie the policies implemented in the city, trying to highlight their ideological character as it emerges from the press and the discourse of citizens. These narratives speak about pollution, demographic shrinkage, the industrial crisis, social distress, urban decay and political corruption. The challenge, therefore, is to deconstruct the decline in order to build new narratives, changing the way to approach the critical issues, and trying to reconstruct «development needs» from the bottom, in this way contributing to an improvement of the quality of the urban environment.

[English]

Through continuous negative media reports, shrinking cities are frequently stigmatized, which a priori increases the importance of territorial marketing. This article is interested in their media representation and in how these cities represent themselves through their institutional websites at the city and inter-municipal levels. We look at three French cities in order to understand the extent to which media and institutional discourses are interrelated, and what they reveal about the role of territorial marketing as their strategy to tackle shrinkage. We find that whereas Saint-Étienne and Guéret strive to transform negative elements of their image (industrial decline and geographical remoteness respectively) into potential strengths for attractiveness, Nevers’ discourse is not as distinctive. Despite these differences, aspiration to growth rather than acceptance of shrinkage prevails in the territorial marketing strategies of the three cases examined.

[Français] Du fait de la couverture médiatique négative qu'elles subissent, les villes en décroissance sont fréquemment stigmatisées, ce qui augmente a priori l'importance du marketing territorial. Cet article s'intéresse à leur représentation médiatique et aux politiques d'image qu'elles développent via leurs sites web à l'échelle communale et intercommunale. Nous étudions trois villes françaises afin de comprendre si et en quoi ces discours médiatiques et institutionnels sont liés, et ce que cela révèle du rôle du marketing territorial dans leur stratégies face à la décroissance. Nous constatons que si Saint-Étienne et Guéret s'efforcent de transformer les éléments négatifs de leur image (respectivement déclin industriel et éloignement géographique) en atouts potentiels d'attractivité, Nevers développe un discours plus mimétique. Malgré cette diversité, dans les trois cas analysés, la croissance plutôt que l'acceptation de la décroissance reste le paradigme dominant dans les stratégies de marketing territorial des villes étudiées. Abstract Through continuous negative media reports, shrinking cities are frequently stigmatized, which a priori increases the importance of territorial marketing. This article is interested in their media representation and in how these cities represent themselves through their institutional websites at the city and inter-municipal levels. We look at three French cities in order to understand the extent to which media and institutional discourses are interrelated, and what they reveal about the role of territorial marketing as their strategy to tackle shrinkage. We find that whereas Saint-Étienne and Guéret strive to transform negative elements of their image (industrial decline and geographical remoteness respectively) into potential strengths for attractiveness, Nevers' discourse is not as distinctive. Despite these differences, aspiration to growth rather than acceptance of shrinkage prevails in the territorial marketing strategies of the three cases examined.

Dentro de las indagaciones del grupo de investigación CSIC – UDELAR 1703 “Acondicionamiento urbano del suelo” del ITU-FADU, los estudios sobre el Uruguay Urbano se habían focalizado en las transformaciones recientes (1985- 2011) del Área Metropolitana de Montevideo (AMM) y las Ciudades intermedias (CIU, mayores a 5000 habitantes).
Se propuso un acercamiento al restante grupo de localidades del país, las menores a 5000 habitantes, a las que denominamos Pequeñas Localidades del Uruguay (PLU).
En un país cuyos ciclos territoriales destacan -con leves alternaciones- la persistencia del modelo urbano y macrocefálico, la actual etapa de desarrollo del país, muestra a las pequeñas localidades urbanas como universo de escaso peso demográfico, pero escenario de significativas transformaciones. Ahí convergen aspectos inerciales de nuestro territorio como el despoblamiento rural, la desafectación del transporte ferroviario de pasajeros a escala nacional, con otros contemporáneos como la irrupción de la globalización y los nuevos modelos de gestión de negocios agropecuarios, el dinamismo del fraccionamiento balneario costero, el protagonismo de los conjuntos MEVIR (Movimiento de Erradicación de la Vivienda Insalubre Rural), y la reciente creación del tercer nivel de gobierno. El conjunto de estos centros pequeños, de diverso origen y escala, conforman un heterogéneo conjunto de 407 núcleos urbanos, según el Censo INE  2011, fue tomado como objeto de estudio. ¿Es posible identificar diferentes modalidades de urbanización, asociables a categorías, en las PLU? ¿Qué antecedentes se han manejado para categorizarlas legalmente? ¿Cuáles destacaron demográficamente en el último cuarto de siglo y por qué motivos? ¿Qué papel juegan en el Sistema Urbano Nacional, en sus vínculos con las Ciudades intermedias y el Montevideo metropolitano?

Population decline in former industrial cities is an undeniable fact, and preparing to respond to it in the context of sustainable urban development is a necessity. In my research urban sustainability is defined as a process to recover from social and economic recession which are usually linked to deindustrialization. The main goal is to survey how Nantes and Saint-Ouen became resilient, in environmental, economic and social terms, after the period of deindustrialization and if they have the needed capacities of urban sustainability in dealing with population decline. The two main questions raised in the research are: - Are the two study areas considered sustainable in terms of the criteria adopted in the present paper? - Are the social, economic and environmental capacities of the two study areas in accordance with the needs of the local communities in order to achieve population increase? The research method is descriptive-analytic. The descriptive method is used in order to define urban sustainability and relate it to previous studies in shrinking cities. The analytic method is used in order to identify the reasons that led to the population decline and the correlations between sustainable urban development and demographic evolution. The performed analyses included a combination of statistics techniques (diagrams of demographic evolution) and qualitative methods (interviews with local authorities, inhabitants and the teams of architects and urban planners that participated in the projects of urban renewal of the two cities). The outcome revealed that Nantes and Saint-Ouen have reached the goal of sustainable urban development as they almost doubled their population since 2000. The final conclusion of the research is that the urban policies implemented by local authorities as long as the economic decisions taken by local enterprises can assist Nantes and Saint-Ouen inhabitants to encounter to social and economic recession resulting from deindustrialization. Keywords: shrinking city, population decline, sustainable urban development, urban resilience, citizen engagement