Twenty years of research on shrinking cities: a focus on keywords and authors

Abstract

Most scholarly attention to vanishing cities is fairly recent so, to guide future research, a comprehensive evaluation of prior findings is required. This study is a network analysis of 333 publications authored in English, published over the last two decades. The findings are as follows: (1) shrinking city research has increased significantly since 2016; (2) the key themes are planning, decline, depopulation, policy, regeneration, vacant land, green infrastructure, and case studies such as Detroit; and (3) major academic groups have not yet collaborated effectively on the subject.

Keywords:

• Urban shrinkage
• research trend
• keywords burst detection
• network analysis
• author cluster

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank the peer reviewers for their thoughtful and detailed comments toward strengthening the final manuscript.

Disclosure statement

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

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Ministry of Education of the Republic of Korea and the National Research Foundation of Korea under Grant 2021S1A5A2A03061484.

Notes on contributors

Jung-Eun Lee

Jung-Eun Lee is a graduate student in the Department of Architectural and Urban Systems Engineering at Ewha Womans University in South Korea. Her research interests include urban planning, urban shrinkage, urban regeneration, and spatial analytics. She is focuses particularly on the causes and countermeasures of the shrinking cities.

Yunmi Park

Yunmi Park holds a Ph.D. in Urban and Regional Science from Texas A&M University, and is a certified planner in both Korea and the United States (AICP), with professional planning experience in South Korea. Prior to joining Seoul National University, she worked at Auburn University and Ewha Womans University. Her areas of expertise and research interests include smart city planning and policy, urban shrinkage and regeneration, and spatial analytics.

Galen D. Newman

Galen D. Newman is an associate professor in the Department of Landscape Architecture and Urban Planning at Texas A&M University. His research interests include urban regeneration, land use science, spatial analytics, urban resilience, and community/urban-scaled design. His research focuses on the integration of urban regeneration and urban flood resilience.