Planning to grow, planning to rock on – infrastructure management and development in shrinking municipalities

ABSTRACT

Previous work on shrinking cities has mainly addressed shrinkage and its effects in large and former industrial cities and not as much in municipalities in rural areas. In this paper, we focus on infrastructure challenges, responsibilities, and growth strategies in Swedish municipalities. We argue that there is a tension between the responsibilities connected to the municipal operations and infrastructure challenges posed by being a shrinking municipality on the one hand, and the ways the municipalities are planning for growth on the other hand. The municipalities are all struggling with the effects of population decline, leading to economic strains in all areas, including infrastructure management and development, but investments in infrastructure are many times directed towards the establishment of specific industries such as the tourism or mining industry with the belief of attracting new inhabitants, visitors, firms and industry. In addition, many of the municipalities lack the capacity and jurisdiction needed to manage the infrastructure development in some areas such as fibre optics, district heating, and electricity grids. Also, in some municipalities, the populations are spread over large geographical areas but must still provide infrastructure services to all inhabitants.

KEYWORDS:

• Depopulation
• infrastructure systems
• shrinking municipalities
• planning strategies

Acknowledgements

In developing the ideas presented here, we especially thank Salvador Perez and fellow researchers and colleagues in Stripe/TEVS for their valuable comments on the text. The authors would like to thank the two anonymous reviewers for their input and suggestions.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Areas identified by municipalities for development of residential buildings close to water and to allow exemptions from the shoreline protection rules.

2 Starting year 1968 is based on the first year with comparable statistics from Statistics Sweden. This was due to the municipal mergers taking place around these years (Statistics Sweden, 2021).

Additional information

Funding

The research for this article was made possible by and financially supported by the Swedish Energy Agency (45960-1).