Urban Decline and Shrinking Cities: A Critical Assessment of Approaches to Urban Shrinkage

Abstract

Urban shrinkage is not a recent phenomenon. Many studies have analyzed the causes and examples of this process, which is inseparable from the history of cities. While urban decline was observed almost exclusively in the developed countries until the 1970s, since the 1980s the process impacts more than a quarter of cities worldwide with populations greater than 100,000, evidence of an international model of shrinking cities. As processes of urban shrinkage have both expanded in scope and taken on new forms, placing this phenomenon in an increasingly global context, their study can be the opportunity for a change of paradigm compared with traditional analyses of urban growth and change. The contemporary globalization context is accompanied by the accentuation and renewal of forms of deindustrialization and suburbanization, as well as profound demographic change in the developed countries; however, urban growth should in no way be assumed, while urban decline, rather than being an exception or an aberration, could be analyzed as a global phenomenon.

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