Shrinking Cities

A Global Perspective

Harry W. Richardson, Chang Woon Nam

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781136162091
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Betriebswirtschaft
• Subtopic: Business allgemein

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:

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• world or regional issues (with reference to the European Union and Latin America);

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• national case studies (the United States, India, China, Korea, Taiwan, Germany, Romania and Estonia);

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• city case studies (Detroit, Buffalo, Cleveland, Naples, Belfast and Halle);

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• 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.

1 Shrinking cities

Harry W. Richardson and Chang Woon Nam

DOI: 10.4324/9780203079768-1

Introduction

The urban shrinkage characterised by economic decline and population loss has been increasingly becoming a rather normal phenomenon of urban development worldwide. For example, one in six cities worldwide was shrinking even before the US subprime mortgage crisis in 2007 which led to the ongoing international economic recession. ¹ The estimates of the US Census of 2006 show that sixteen of the twenty largest cities of 1950 have seriously shrunk since the 1950s (Hollander et al., 2009), while around one-third of all European cities (with more than 200,000 inhabitants) have suffered at least once from a ten-year population decline in the period between 1960 and 2005 (Turok and Mykhnrnko, 2007). The failure of the timely and smooth post-industrial shift from manufacturing to modern service industries in a global context, with the resulting unemployment and outmigration, has often led to the increases in shrinking cites worldwide. ² Some additional factors that further trigger urban declines include: suburbanisation, war, natural or human-induced disasters, an aging or low-fertility rate population and the dissolution of socialist systems (in the eastern part of Europe including the former GDR and Russia). ³ All these negative developments have also significantly deteriorated the fiscal base of cities, which in turn disturbs the maintenance of local infrastructure levels as well as the quality of life: consequently shrinking cities are suffering from the problems related to vacant and underutilised housing, uncompetitive local business firms, as well as derelict communication and transportation system including streets, and other utility infrastructure such as schools, waste disposal facilities, etc. (Hollander et al., 2009).

Economic shrinking in large cities: some basic theoretical aspects

The theories aimed at investigating development appear to mostly deal with growth, while economic decline and those factors limiting economic development have not yet been examined thoroughly. Economic shrinkage has recently been recorded not only in several poor countries such as Cuba, North Korea and many African states, etc. but also in some advanced European countries such as Greece and Spain. Although a country continues to grow, those less-competitive rural regions and some old industrial cities tend to suffer from decline that is triggered by structural changes and emigration.

A number of ‘decline’ factors can be identified from several development theories, which can also be (at least partly) applied to explain the urban shrinkage. The neo-classical growth theories say that decline occurs either if one of the major production factors (such as labour, capital and technical progress) fails to expand and cannot be compensated by the growth of the other input factor, or if the endowment of all these factors become scarce at the same time because of, for example, wars, natural catastrophes, etc. If those factors stressed in the new growth theory – infrastructure-related increasing returns to scale, synergy effects, learning by production activities, etc. – are neglected, the decline process can also be accelerated.

Malthus (1798) explains that the mismatch between the increase in production volume and population size occurring beyond equilibrium also initiates economic decline. Moreover, some demographic and economic factors like aging, stagnating or declining population, a slower expansion of the market areas and lower demand as a consequence of higher savings are likely to discourage economic activities, entrepreneurship, private and public investments, and innovation and technology development – all leading to economic decline (Friedrich, 1987). On the other hand, economic growth can only be sustainable when the production process does not excessively destroy the environmental basis and natural capital otherwise decline follows (Pike et al., 2007).

These structural problems including insufficient large-scale investment in strategic sectors, the dominance of old industrial and agricultural sectors and weak entrepreneurship are often responsible for the economic shrinkage. The evolutionary theories demonstrate how the life-cycle of products and sectors could well lead to overspecialisation, backwardness and difficulties to adopt changes at the saturation stage (Kaniss, 1981). The way that this process gives rise to the regional and urban distinction of located firms, sectors, etc. is shown in the so-called regional and urban competition theories (Batey and Friedrich, 2000). Furthermore, decline can be led by a less-competitive, conventional educational system, improper knowledge transfers and lack of qualified human capital, a slow restructuring process from agricultural to modern industrial and service society, etc.

Central places theories show how the economic decline of cities emerges if the delivery distances become larger and/or if shipping and transport costs increase. Urban shrinkage can be initiated when agglomeration advantages such as cost savings, central locations endowed with specialised infrastructure, specific labour and entrepreneurship experiences, better access to innovations and the synergy effects created by industrial clusters start to disappear (Beckmann, 1981). Growth poles can also turn into the declining poles, if most local industries age or close down, their products become obsolete but future-oriented innovation activities are neglected. The existing social, political and economic network quite often impedes the timely reaction to new challenges (‘path dependence’).

Economic decline can also be the consequence of government failures, corruption and political instability. A one-party political system and/or a dictatorship have often been based on religious or socialistic beliefs in recent years (Szirmai, 2005). Previous experiences in many European transition countries show that factors like inefficient planning systems, lack of market-oriented policy coordination and poor quality-oriented production, accompanied by suppression of individual wants and needs, primary orientation of military production and weak entrepreneurship, for example, have played a significant role for the breakdown of their economies.

In recent years, there have been various approaches to the analysis of shrinking cities. Most of them are discussed in this book. They are often related to spatial scale. At the upper end, it is global and multiregional (e.g. the European Union and Latin America). It is difficult to develop strategies at this level. The United Nations Population Fund spent about half a century pushing fertility decline policies but has not yet readjusted to promoting population expansion. At the next spatial level, there are national issues, some that are universal (e.g. national population decline), others that are interregional (e.g. economic restructuring with gainers and losers). If we descend to regions, it is a little more complicated, with contracting core cities and expanding suburban and exurban areas with growing small towns. Then there is the core city level, with the focus on the need for shrinking city policies or not. Much of the attention is on environmental costs and benefits or on the search for fiscal resources. At the lowest spatial level (barely commented on in this book) is that of neighbourhoods. The more common illustration is industrial neighbourhoods when the large company shifts production to other countries, often China. These examples suggest that shrinking cities analysis is becoming a much more complex set of issues with an expanding research agenda to come.

Scope of the book

When we began this book there was already a worldwide stirring of interest in the shrinking cities issue, but as we continued research on the topic (and publications) ballooned, we became concerned that by the time of publication there might be a serious overlap between our work and other simultaneous and very recent research. Fortunately, that turns out not to be the case.

The book is divided into four distinct parts dealing with a wide range of themes. The first part consists of one global chapter and two regional (multinational) chapters, one on the European Union, the other on Latin America. The second part is a medley of countries from all over the world (except from Africa, where either urban populations continue to grow rapidly or shrinking cities are rare anomalies perhaps because of resource depletion or HIV pandemics). This contains two papers on the United States while the European national case studies are all from Central or Eastern Europe (Germany, Estonia and Romania). The sample countries from Asia are South Korea, Taiwan, China and India. There is no chapter dealing solely with Japan, but there is some discussion of Japan in the global chapter. China and India are very interesting cases. We very much wanted to include these countries because they account for two-fifths of the world’s population, but we had doubts in the early stages of the project whether we could because they were experiencing rapid urbanization in many of their regions and cities. Our contributors were able to find sound grounds for their inclusion. The Chinese chapter compares the economic performance (current or future shrinkage) of resource-deficient cities with other cities, while the Indian chapter focuses on the shrinkage of many small cities and towns (with populations of less than 50,000).

The case study cities are a very mixed group; there are many more that could have been included but book length limitations excluded them. There are three cities in the United States that are analysed (Detroit, Buffalo and Cleveland), but not Pittsburgh. Three cities are examined in Europe (Halle – a declining industrial city in East Germany, Naples and Belfast [Northern Ireland is in the United Kingdom not Great Britain]), but none in Great Britain (not even Glasgow) nor France. The exclusion of Pittsburgh and Glasgow is a little odd, given that one of the co-editors taught as a professor in both cities, albeit a few decades ago. There are no Asian case study cities, although several of them (e.g. Seoul, Busan, Taipei) feature prominently in their respective national case studies.

The fourth part of the book looks at two general issues: the environmental benefits (and costs) of shrinking cities and whether compact or sprawling cities are a better antidote to urban shrinkage. The second of the two chapters focuses considerably on the environmental benefits associated with shrinking cities while the first, reflecting a widely known position of the authors, extols the advantages of compact cities although their analysis refers only to the United States.

As already suggested, athough they are not the sole factors at work, there are two dominating forces behind the shrinking cities phenomenon: declining fertility rates and economic restructuring. These have quite different effects. A sharp decline in fertility rates implies a drop in the national population and its substantial aging. This may impact the urban settlement pattern by population decline in all cities, although there may be exceptions in a very few cities (e.g. a rapidly growing one or the primate city). In most economic restructuring cases, some cities will decline while others may continue to grow. The differentials may occur on a regional basis (e.g. the Rustbelt–Sunbelt division in the United States) or the locations of decline may be random, such as the closure of firms in company towns where the initial location was determined on personal grounds. There can be many other sources of urban shrinkage such as resource depletion in boom-and-bust mining cities or hazardous waste problems and other health issues limited to individual cities.

Policies to restrain or reverse urban shrinkage will vary according to its causes. For example, a national approach such as offering incentives for people to have more children is the obvious strategy. It has been tried in many countries over time going back to Western Europe in the 1930s, but has rarely worked. A way to combat the economic restructuring cases is to target individual cities affected and offer methods (such as capital grants or subsidies) to promote new industries.

Another solution is to develop and implement programmes and policies to revive individual shrinking cities overall. There are two examples in this book, Buffalo and Naples. In both cases there are several programmes in place (some of them complementary), but they have not yet reaped significant rewards. Another problem is that most policies are limited to core cities and are financed either by local governments or via subsidies from the federal or state government. While it is true that most current or future shrinking cities are core cities, solutions are more viable if they are metropolitan wide. Some countries around the world have regional governments, but not the United States (Portland Metro is only a partial exception). This might explain why shrinking city policies have not been very successful in the United States.

Another strategy receiving much attention between 2002 and about 2007 was that of ‘creative cities’ based on a book and a subsequent consultancy company run by Richard Florida (Florida, 2002). The underling idea was that cities that had or could attract ‘creative’ populations would thrive and grow faster than others. Creative populations were not merely college graduates, but a broader group including artists, architects, urban designers, small business entrepreneurs, software engineers, scientific innovators, gays and lesbians and others. Several cities hired the Florida team but the results were not very good. Some more successful cases were based more on market forces than government. For example, the Seattle area with an economy based upon Microsoft, Amazon and Boeing has a thriving creative population. The attractions were not only the high-income jobs, but a dynamic night time downtown, strong cultural interests, environmental activism and superior open air recreation (skiing, mountain climbing, biking, hiking, sailing, swimming, etc.). Another example is Pittsburgh. Its reputation as a steel capital has disappeared and its population continues to shrink. However, the quality of life has dramatically improved. It has a base of several universities (at least two of them with high national standing) and several important research institutions. However, it has risen up the national hierarchy because of the influx of small businesses consisting of specialty stores, restaurants, bars and entertainment establishments. A third example is Newcastle in North-East England and its twin city of Gateshead. Once a shipbuilding city in a stagnant region, it is now completely different. It is a major museum and art centre, with significant public art, and a thriving downtown entertainment centre which led one ranking scheme to list it as #8 in the w...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half-Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• Contributors
• 1 Shrinking cities
• Part I Global and regional
• Part II National issues
• Part III Case study cities
• Part IV General issues
• Index