Policy Responses to Urban Shrinkage: From Growth Thinking to Civic Engagement

Abstract

More and more European cities are confronted with population decline in a structural sense. This development of “urban shrinkage” has different causes, but similar effects: the city's hardware, software and mindware deteriorate. In this paper, we explore and assess policy strategies to respond to urban shrinkage in a European context. Four strategies are identified: (1) trivializing shrinkage, (2) countering shrinkage, (3) accepting shrinkage and (4) utilizing shrinkage. We suggest that accepting shrinkage by improving the quality of life for the city's existing residents is the most suitable and sustainable strategy. Dealing with shrinkage is a complex urban governance process that asks for a mental transformation from growth to shrinkage as well as regional rather than local thinking. Moreover, due to the fiscal burden of shrinkage, city governments will be increasingly dependent on the willingness of citizens to help. Civic engagement, however, is not something that can be simply dictated. Therefore we conclude that the authorities of Europe's shrinking cities should first enable their citizens to care for their community before asking them to do so.

Acknowledgements

The author is grateful to two anonymous reviewers who made useful comments on an earlier version. This research has been partly funded by the European Urban Knowledge Network.

Notes

In this article, we focus on shrinking cities in the current member states of the European Union. For reasons of readability, however, the terms “European Union”, “EU” and “Europe” will be used interchangeably.

Defining shrinkage as “population decline in a structural sense” excludes short-term, seasonal or even daily shrinkage which can be observed in many European urban seaside resorts or popular tourist cities like Venice.

As Cocks and Couch (2012) note, the academic literature on the link between urban shrinkage and urban governance is scarce. In a European context, only East German cities (Bontje, 2004; Glock & Häussermann, 2004; Bernt, 2009) and Liverpool (Cocks & Couch, 2012) have been explicitly studied from this perspective.