Shrinking cities: rethinking landscape in depopulating urban contexts

Abstract

This paper presents a general introduction to the role that landscape as a concept, and landscape architecture as a discipline, can have in the academic discussion on Shrinking Cities. This editorial explores and presents a general overview of the causes and impacts of urban depopulation in different world contexts, presenting a brief literature review on this topic. Moreover, it also explores recent population trends around the world and their expected evolution in the next decades, confirming that urban depopulation is worth exploring, especially in certain macro regions such as Europe, North America, and Japan. The paper concludes by focusing on the multiple roles that landscape can have under such pressured urban conditions. The collection of research papers presented in this special issue are the result of a conference that took place at the University of Edinburgh in November 2013, co-chaired by the guest-editors of this special issue.

Keywords:

• Shrinking cities
• depopulation
• landscape

Population growth and predicted future trends

The world’s population has been growing exponentially for the last two hundred years, and this growth has been focused in cities. For many, it is almost anachronistic to discuss population shrinkage, or declining urban contexts. However, the worldwide population growth rate is not homogeneously distributed, and has decreased overall since it peaked in about 1960.

In 1800, the world’s population reached 1 billion after centuries of extremely slow growth rates. In the next 125 years, it grew by another billion, and in only the subsequent 35 years, by yet another billion, reaching a total of 3 billion by 1960. Since the beginning of this increased rate of population growth, economists have been particularly interested in the balance between population and the management of resources. Mainly triggered by Thomas Malthus’s An Essay on the Principle of Population (1798), scholars have adopted two opposite perspectives: a pessimistic perspective, declaring ‘poverty and misery’ for future generations, as resources become depleted by an ever-growing population; and an optimistic perspective, predicting technological advancements towards more efficient use of the same resources, or towards the discovery of potential new ones, that would allow continued growth and a healthier society (Bloom, 2011; Dorling, 2013; Lam, 2011).

Optimists seem to have been more accurate in their predictions in face of the 60% increase in population numbers from 1800 to 1960. Although impacted by two world wars, epidemics, and severe economic downturns, population continued to rise, especially in the ‘baby boom’ decades of the 1950s and 1960s after World War II. New concerns were raised, namely in Paul Ehrlich’s Population Bomb (1968) where, yet again, starvation across the world was forecasted for the following decades, just as Malthus had predicted. The predictions, however, did not prove correct as new advancements in agriculture (‘the green revolution’) and birth control counteracted both the predicted decrease in resources and the continued increased rate of population growth (Dorling, 2013; Goldstone, 2010).

Although the absolute size of the population continues to grow, the speed with which that growth occurs has become slower, with some authors affirming that the previous scale of accelerated population growth will not be witnessed again (Lam, 2011). In 2011, the United Nations (UN) published a report predicting that the growth rate of the world’s population would slow dramatically over the next 100 years. In the high variant prediction for 2000–2100, the average annual growth rate will decrease by 47% compared to the growth rate for the period 1960–2000 (United Nations, 2010). Based on the UN data, Goldstone (2010) predicted that this future deceleration will not happen homogeneously; what he coined as ‘The New Population Bomb’ will be defined by geographical shifts in economic growth rather than by periods of major overall population growth or decline. Goldstone foresees four changes for the next few decades: (1) the developed countries of the northern hemisphere will lose 25% of their relative demographic weight by 2050 compared to the world population; (2) the labour force of the developed countries will both shrink and age, destabilising the economy and raising the need for a larger immigrant work force; (3) most population growth will be concentrated in poorer Muslim countries with a higher proportion of youth; and, (4) the majority of the world’s population will increasingly be living in cities (Goldstone, 2010). Furthermore, most predictions concerning urban population growth are based on the continuation of strong migratory phenomena in developing countries, where citizens are moving from the countryside to cities (World Bank, 2013).

According to the UN report titled World Urbanisation Prospects (United Nations, 2014), all cities are expected to continue to attract large numbers of residents. However, this trend is not equally distributed across different city-types and geographical regions. For example, whereas the number of megacities (defined as more than 10 million inhabitants), which are largely concentrated in Asia and Latin America, is expected to grow by a factor of four, and the number of large cities (defined as 5–10 million inhabitants) is expected to grow by a factor of three, the number of medium cities (defined as 1–5 million inhabitants) is expected to grow only by a factor of two. The fastest growing cities worldwide are located in Asia and Africa. Moreover, almost 40% of the projected growth in urban population worldwide is concentrated in only three countries: India, China, and Nigeria. It therefore seems relevant and pertinent to continue to discuss future possible stagnation in the population of cities in developed countries and the role that landscape might have in their future.

Causes and impacts of depopulation on the urban landscape

In the early half of the twentieth century, depopulation of many urban contexts in the northern hemisphere—either through formal initiatives that relieved overcrowding in city centres or through informal emigration to early suburbs—was considered a positive phenomenon in cities that improved the living conditions of those who had relocated. However, over the last few decades, the consequences of sharp and prolonged population losses have become a subject of concern. Since 1950, the shift of industrial power from developed to developing countries, plus a constant decrease in birth rates in the developed world, high levels of suburbanisation, and peripherisation, have led to a rise in the number of cities and/or urban neighbourhoods with sharp negative population growth rates, especially in the northern hemisphere (Fritsche et al., 2007; Oswalt, 2005; Reckien & Martinez-Fernandez, 2011; Rink, Haase, et al., 2012; Rink, Rumpel, et al., 2012). These drivers of depopulation, and their consequences in the urban landscape, have led to a scholarly focus on what are now called ‘shrinking cities’.

The Shrinking Cities International Research Network, established in 2004 as a consortium of 30 international scholars, developed the following definition of a shrinking city:

a densely populated urban area with a minimum population of 10,000 residents that has faced population losses in large parts for more than two years and is undergoing economic transformations with some symptoms of a structural crisis. (Wiechmann, 2007, quoted in Hollander, Pallagst, Schwarz, & Popper, 2009, p. 6)

Cities characterised as such are evident in Europe, for example, where many peripheral cities along the London-Milan axis are experiencing some degree of economic decline and population contraction. Also, the nations that have been transitioning from socialist to democratic political regimes have witnessed a slow adaptation, occasionally paralysed by the legacies of old institutions hesitant to adopt a free market paradigm. This hesitancy, in the context of economic growth elsewhere in Europe, has led to increasing emigration, especially from Eastern European countries (Grabher & Stark, 1996).

Suburbanisation—or the dislocation of urban inhabitants from inner cities to suburbs—is also considered an important initiating factor by many other authors, such as Oswalt (2005), Hollander et al. (2009), Audirac, Fol, and Martinez-Fernandez (2011), and Bini, Cortese, & Violante (2011). This internal and selective migration process can occur when there is a demographic contraction as a consequence of one of these drivers, or even during economic growth, when there is a demand for better housing conditions. In fact, in most declining cities, land consumption and urban sprawl remain a prevalent means of land use change (European Environmental Agency, 2009; Kroll & Haase, 2010; Reckien & Martinez-Fernandez, 2011). Environmentally, this process of continued suburbanisation—even in demographically-contracting contexts—has high costs, such as an increase in long-term housing vacancies. The resilience to these vacancies does, however, vary from one city to the next. The work of Brent Ryan is particularly illuminating, demonstrating that cities dominated by single-family houses are particularly fragile to demographic contraction while cities dominated by tenements or multi-family buildings are more resistant (Ryan, 2012). When urban resilience to demographic shrinkage is low, political actors often opt for extensive demolitions, increasing the number of urban voids and often creating an identity and image problem for the city (Haase & Seppelt, 2008). The city becomes less and less desirable, which further reinforces the negative feedback cycle of additional out-migration. An increase in housing vacancies also leads to the under-utilisation of infrastructure, including water, sewage, transport, education, and health systems (European Environmental Agency, 2009; Reckien & Martinez-Fernandez, 2011; Rink, Haase, et al., 2012).

Regardless of the macro-economic factors initiating depopulation, there is usually a consequential decline in the job market, resulting in out-migration of young and qualified people to other regions or countries where job availability is higher. The absence of young and educated urban dwellers has various consequences, but three are of special interest: (1) shrinking public revenue, which lowers public investment capacity and consequently prompts private disinvestment (Fritsche et al., 2007); (2) diminished capacity of the affected cities to counteract decline by discouraging inhabitants with political and financial resources from initiating socially and economically profitable enterprises that create jobs (Florida, 2002); and, (3) declining birth rates, which broadly have been dropping in all developed countries, but have been declining more sharply in shrinking cities due to a predominant out-migration of younger women and young couples (Sinn, Haase, & Walde, 2010). All three of these factors further diminish job opportunities, reinforcing the main trigger fuelling depopulation, and thereby creating a negative feedback cycle.

Urban decline: forgotten but not new

Although urban decline might seem to be a new process, it has happened before. In Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, Diamond (2005) explores the processes, symptoms, and consequences of the decline of various societies in different historical and geographical contexts. Diamond defines collapse as ‘a drastic decrease in human population size and/or political/economic/social complexity, over a considerable area, for an extended time’ (Diamond, 2005, p. 12).

Based on examples such as the Viking, Easter Island, and Mayan societies, Diamond (2005) identifies five factors that lead to collapse: (1) ‘environmental damage’, such as deforestation, soil destruction, and overfishing; (2) the effects of ‘climate change’, such as the retreat of the ice sheets after the Ice Ages, prolonged droughts, or contemporary global warming; (3) ‘hostile neighbours’ who can overcome and conquer a weakened opponent, as in the case of the barbarian invasions throughout the Roman Empire; (4) ‘decreased support of allies’, especially when trading relationships are no longer advantageous; and, (5) ‘societal responses to stress’, such as social and political responses to decline, or the development of dominant cultural beliefs or technological frameworks that inadvertently reinforce decline, or on the contrary, reverse it. Diamond’s conceptualisation is particularly disturbing when confronted with the world’s current reality. Environmental damage throughout the globe ranges from over-exploitation of resources (e.g. tropical forests, minerals, fossil fuels, and metals), to animal decimation and extinction, and to unprecedented environmental disasters, such as the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010. As documented by consistent scientific research, contemporary climate change has led to an increase in global temperatures (Gregory, Lowe, & Tett, 2006; Hegerl et al., 2006; Stott et al., 2000, 2001), causing polar ice sheets to melt and consequently leading to rising sea water levels. These environmental stresses are exacerbated by social and political conflict, such as the various conflicts in the Middle East, which threaten the availability of crucial global resources.

So the question arises: are we initialising the most appropriate societal responses to these challenges? Can we reposition key trajectories to ensure a better and more stable future? Optimists argue that our technological capacities are more than enough to address these challenges. However, the demise of the Mayan and Roman civilisations reminds us that societies with higher levels of technological, artistic, architectural, cultural, and linguistic sophistication did not find the tools to prevent their collapse, a downfall that was followed by long-lasting periods of decline. Moreover, in both cases, their resource-rich geographical locations, aided by mild climate, were advantageous. These two examples show that it is not only small scale and undifferentiated societies—which are culturally vulnerable, technologically underdeveloped, and geographically isolated—that are prone to decline (Diamond, 2005).

Archaeological explorations of ancient societies in their period of decline have revealed interesting adaptations to, at that time, new shrinking urban realities. For example, during the decline of Ancient Rome there is evidence of the following adaptations: massive abandonment of urban properties, mainly by the elite; reduction of infrastructure, such as water and sewage networks, as a natural consequence of the population decline; rebirth of subsistence agriculture inside the city walls; and, at later stages, the reconcentration of population around the two remaining underground aqueducts in operation (Christie, 2000). Other relevant symptoms of the decline process revealed in Ancient Rome include the co-option of massive quantities of materials—spolia—and spaces or structures into new purposes and built structures (especially for defensive purposes), and higher levels of suspicion towards strangers and outside cultures, as exemplified in the decline of the Islamic Empire or Roman Empire (Jacobs, 2005). In the case of Rome, this fear was physically transposed onto the urban morphology by means of fortified buildings and walls (Christie, 2000), some of which were quickly constructed using sub-standard methods due to the panic concerning imminent invasions.

Similar symptoms are exhibited today in the declining cities of Western societies: (1) massive abandonment, occasionally resulting in demolition, as in Detroit (Michigan, USA), Ivanovo (Russia), and St. Louis (Missouri, USA) (Oswalt, 2005); (2) infrastructural downsizing, as in Youngstown (Ohio, USA; Schatz, 2010); (3) a rebirth of urban subsistence agriculture, such as the ‘Sisters of the Soil’ project in Detroit (White, 2011), and others around the developed world (Adams & Hardman, 2013; Barthel & Isendahl, 2013; Mikadze, 2015; Patel et al., 2011); and (4) processes of re-concentration, as in cities such as Léon (Spain; Bouzarovski et al., 2010).

To counteract these trends, different cities have adopted various strategies, such as: enacting urban sprawl restrictions (e.g. Liverpool, see Rink, Haase, et al., 2012); regulating demolition plans for health and safety control (e.g. Detroit, see Neill, 1995; St. Louis, see Moutaud, 2010; Leipzig, see Schetke & Haase, 2008); reinforcing green infrastructure (Leipzig, see Schetke & Haase, 2008); establishing urban agriculture in vacant sites (e.g. Detroit, see White, 2011); rightsizing infrastructure (e.g. Detroit, see Detroit Future City Implementation Office, 2012); creating land banks (e.g. Ohio, see Weiland, 2011); and exploring long-term voids as biodiversity sanctuaries (e.g. Berlin, see Langer, 2012).

Urban landscapes in depopulating contexts

The papers presented in this special issue explore the implicitly optimistic perspective of the balanced management of population and resources, whereby the consequences of urban depopulation are addressed through creative and innovative approaches that encourage the efficient use of the urban landscape and the development of a healthy society.

The processes of urban depopulation ‘produce’ wasteland—unclaimed, or unwanted land—such as abandoned housing and unused industrial areas, closed railway stations, and demolition sites. As elements of urban disruption, these spaces present a major challenge to the constructive health of the urban landscape. Most of the time, vacant lots are multiple, small in scale, and widespread (Zakirova, 2010), presenting a unique challenge for their incorporation into the urban fabric. Galen Newman and Boah Kim’s (Texas A&M University, USA) ‘Urban shrapnel: spatial distribution of non-productive space’ analyses the distribution of abandoned patches, or ‘non-productive spaces’, in the sprawling city of Fort Worth (Texas, USA) between 1990 and 2010. As the population has shifted to the suburbs, the concentration of smaller non-productive spaces has shifted towards the urban core. Newman and Kim suggest that while these non-productive spaces may have poor redevelopment potential in traditionally economic terms, they can be repurposed for ecological and/or cultural benefits.

Cities like Leipzig have embraced their shrinking cities status and the presence of ‘non-productive spaces’ by focusing on the benefits of green infrastructure and developing a green management plan that takes into consideration future demolition sites and preferred spaces for ecological reinforcement. Corridors of deeper ecological value were identified, where future construction was prohibited and demolitions were encouraged. Over the long term, these actions can achieve two non-exclusive realities: an ecological reinforcement intertwined with more compact urban spaces, which can save energy, promote social inclusion, and create healthier cities. The results have been particularly positive, not only in ecological terms, but also in social terms, where increasing numbers of new and young families have chosen to settle in urban centres (Banzhaf, Richert, & Zabojnik, 2012). Karina Pallagst (University of Kaiserslautern, Germany), who has studied shrinking cities in a number of contexts (Hollander et al., 2009; Pallagst, 2005; Pallagst et al., 2009; Wiechmann & Pallagst, 2012), along with Rene Fleschurz (University of Kaiserslautern, Germany) and Franziska Trapp (Kernplan mbh, Germany), explore how depopulation can create similar opportunities in urban landscapes of other cultural contexts by presenting the case of Flint (USA) in their paper titled, ‘Greening the shrinking city – policies and planning approaches in the USA with the example of Flint, Michigan.’ In his paper ‘Vacancy as a laboratory: design criteria for reimagining social-ecological systems on vacant urban lands’, Kees Lokman (University of British Columbia, Canada) presents four criteria for evaluating opportunities in shrinking urban landscapes, and reviews four projects in the USA and Europe (New York City, St. Louis, Amsterdam, and Arnhem) that explore how vacancy can serve as a catalyst for new social-ecological systems. Sandra Albro, Sean Burkholder, and Joseph Koonce’s paper (Cleveland Botanical Garden, University at Buffalo, and Case Western Reserve University, respectively, USA) ‘Mind the gap: tools for a parcel-based storm water management approach’ addresses the stormwater management opportunities provided by small-scale and dispersed vacant sites in American Rust Belt cities and offers methods for optimal site selection. This paper suggests how small ‘non-productive spaces’—which can often be overlooked by developers and investors, or prove difficult to incorporate and aggregate into large green infrastructure projects—can be valuable assets for urban stormwater management.

While citizens, planners, and politicians try to maximise opportunities under these adverse conditions, artists are also exploring the consequences of abandonment. Since the Renaissance, ruins have been represented in Western literature, painting, and poetry to extol the glories of past civilisations as well as to warn of the vanity of human endeavour and the possible collapse of future civilisations (Diamond, 2005; Jorgensen, 2012; see also Woodward, 2001). Although some artists today are interested in the theme of contemporary ruins—such as Alexandre Farto, Philip Gowman, and Yves Marchand & Romain Meffre—the feelings that their works convey are divergent to the ones portraying ancient constructions. The ancient ruins have gained a certain cachet by dint of temporal and physical distance, whereas contemporary ruins remind us that decline can be closer than expected, putting at risk the qualities of the environments in which we all seek to live. Filipe Condado, a Portuguese photographer interested in the histories of sites of demolition, addresses this theme in a photographic essay. His photographs urge us to imagine the lives of the former inhabitants of these buildings that have disappeared from the landscape, and to recognise the physical and emotional loss of such urban fragments. While Condado is interrogating the consequences of abandonment through photography, Lisa Moffitt (University of Edinburgh, UK) explores the opportunities of abandonment through process-based design experiments. Her paper ‘Sand, silt, salt, water: entropy as a lens for design in post-industrial landscapes’ adopts entropy as a conceptual framework for understanding the phenomenon of, and response to, depopulation. Moffitt reviews post-industrial projects by Robert Smithson and Gilles Clément, and the writing of Matthew Gandy and John Beardsley on entropy, before reporting on her small-scaled experiments that suggest the role that entropy can have in the design process.

Besides long-term, top-down, infrastructural responses to depopulation such as those discussed by Pallagst, Fleschurz, Trapp, Lokman, Albro, Burkholder, and Koonce, the temporary and spontaneous use of urban spaces has been an increasing field of interest for scholars of the city (Kuhoutek & Kamleithner, 2003; Németh & Langhorst, 2014; Oswalt, Overmeyer, & Misselwitz, 2013). In many declining contexts, socio-political decisions may be derived from bottom-up strategies and embrace spontaneous citizen actions or temporary uses of public spaces. Evangelia Athanassiou (Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece) presents such an example of the role of urban agriculture in shrinking contexts. Her paper, titled ‘The hybrid landscape of public space in Thessaloniki in the context of crisis’, explores the spontaneous appropriation by citizens of an old military camp in Thessaloniki as an informal public park and productive landscape. This example shows how these open and abandoned spaces are being reclaimed not only for food production but also as an expression of citizens’ rights. In his paper ‘Ephemeral landscape and urban shrinkage’, Ali Madanipour (Newcastle University, UK), explores two types of temporary landscapes—garden festivals and parks—across five case studies in Liverpool, Glasgow, London, Paris, and Brussels. These case studies allow Madanipour to present not only the original expectations for short-term change by various stakeholders, but also to assess the durability of that change. In doing so, he describes ephemeral interventions that are subject to economic forces and therefore as dynamic as the shrinkage they aim to address.

Conclusion

The seven papers and one photographic essay presented in this special issue present a sampling of the breadth of research being conducted on shrinking cities, with this issue’s theme focusing on the opportunities that a landscape way-of-thinking provides. As this introduction describes, urban depopulation is not a new phenomenon: it has happened before, and it is happening now. We cannot predict whether or how it will happen again, but we can certainly explore its characteristics, its impact on the urban landscape, and its opportunities in order to better understand current and future challenges.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Funding

This work was supported by the Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia (Portugal) [grant number SFRH/BD/72394/2010, Lima].

Acknowledgements

This special issue presents papers developed from selected presentations given at the Shrinking Cities | Expanding Landscapes conference co-chaired by the special issue guest editors in November 2013 at the University of Edinburgh. The work presented in this special issue by Filipe Condado was part of a group exhibition held in the Sculpture Court at the Edinburgh College of Art during the conference. The special issue guest editors wish to thank Landscape Research Editor Anna Jorgensen for her tireless direction and guidance in helping to compile this special issue, as well as Landscape Research Editorial Assistant Crista Walshaw for her solid and steady support.