Compelling and engaging, this Handbook on Shrinking Cities addresses the fundamentals of shrinkage, exploring its causal factors, the ways in which planning strategies and policies are steered, and innovative solutions for revitalising shrinking cities. Chapters cover topics of governance, ‘greening’ and ‘right-sizing’, and regrowth, laying the relevant groundwork for the Handbook’s proposals for dealing with shrinkage in the age of COVID-19 and beyond.

This book examines a rapidly emerging new topic in urban settlement patterns: the role of shrinking cities. Much coverage is given to declining fertility rates, ageing populations and economic restructuring as the factors behind shrinking cities, but there is also reference to resource depletion, the demise of single-company towns and the micro-location of environmental hazards. The contributions show that shrinkage can occur at any scale – from neighbourhood to macro-region - and they consider whether shrinkage of metropolitan areas as a whole may be a future trend. Also addressed in this volume is the question of whether urban shrinkage policies are necessary or effective. The book comprises four parts: world or regional issues (with reference to the European Union and Latin America); national case studies (the United States, India, China, Korea, Taiwan, Germany, Romania and Estonia); city case studies (Detroit, Buffalo, Cleveland, Naples, Belfast and Halle); and broad issues such as the environmental consequences of shrinking cities. This book will be of interest to scholars and practitioners working in the fields of urban studies, economic geography and public policy.

This prescient book presents the intellectual terrain of shrinking cities while exploring the key research questions in each of the field’s sub-domains and reviewing the range of methodologies within these topics.

Shrinking Cities: Understanding Shrinkage and Decline in the United States offers a contemporary look at patterns of shrinkage and decline in the United States. The book juxtaposes the complex and numerous processes that contribute to these patterns with broader policy frameworks that have been under consideration to address shrinkage in U.S. cities. A range of methods are employed to answer theoretically-grounded questions about patterns of shrinkage and decline, the relationships between the two, and the empirical associations among shrinkage, decline, and several socio-economic variables. In doing so, the book examines new spaces of shrinkage in the United States. The book also explores pro-growth and decline-centered governance, which has important implications for questions of sustainability and resilience in U.S. cities. Finally, the book draws attention to U.S.-wide demographic shifts and argues for further research on socio-economic pathways of various groups of population, contextualized within population trends at various geographic scales. This timely contribution contends that an understanding of what the city has become, as it faces shrinkage, is essential toward a critical analysis of development both within and beyond city boundaries. The book will appeal to urban and regional studies scholars from a variety of disciplinary backgrounds, as well as practitioners and policymakers.

The shrinking city phenomenon is a multidimensional process that affects cities, parts of cities or metropolitan areas around the world that have experienced dramatic decline in their economic and social bases. Shrinkage is not a new phenomenon in the study of cities. However, shrinking cities lack the precision of systemic analysis where other factors now at work are analyzed: the new economy, globalization, aging population (a new population transition) and other factors related to the search for quality of life or a safer environment. This volume places shrinking cities in a global perspective, setting the context for in-depth case studies of cities within Mexico, Brazil, Indonesia, Germany, France, Great Britain, South Korea, Australia, and the USA, which consider specific economic, social, environmental, cultural and land-use issues.

This book provides a comparative analysis of shrinking cities in a broad range of postsocialist countries within the so-called Global East, a liminal space between North and South. While shrinking cities have received increased scholarly attention in the past decades, theoretical, and empirical research has remained predominantly centered on the Global North. This volume brings to the fore a range of new perspectives on urban shrinkage, identifying commonalities, differences, and policy experiences across a very diverse and vivid region with its various legacies and contemporary controversial developments. With chapters written by leading experts in the field, insider views assist in decolonizing urban theory. Specifically, the book includes chapters on shrinking cities in China, Russia, and postsocialist Europe, presenting comparative discussions within countries and crossnational cases on theoretical and policy implications. The book will be of interest to students and scholars researching urban studies, urban geography, urban planning, urban politics and policy, urban sociology, and urban development.