Why Do Cities Shrink?

Abstract

Cities and regions in different political contexts might play different roles in building communities, but when the cities shrink, they share common elements of what can be characterized as a “shrinkage identity”. One well-documented element is the independence from the country political context and a certain dependence on the effects of globalization on local industries. It can be described as economic structural dependency. Two other potential elements received very little attention: social structural dependency (so-called instituted behaviour) and urban sprawl. Case studies from Germany and England and observations in Australia witness that these three elements are specifications of the same analogue on different levels: spatial mismatches of needs and urban functions. This paper poses questions related to the role of the spatial mismatch concept and particularly interrogates social structural dependencies and urban sprawl as examples. It suggests that the latter are certainly contributing to long-term urban shrinkage (as cause and effect) and that spatial mismatches in general are hardly discussed as reasons for it.

Acknowledgements

The authors thank two anonymous reviewers for their very thoughtful comments. Additionally, we would like to thank Chris Couch and Jay Karecha for their cooperation in sharing some of their data analyzed here, inter alia. This research was partly funded by the EU grant EVK-CT-2001-0052.

Notes

The SMH goes back to the work of Kain (1968) and the Kerner commission, who investigated the sources of the adverse labour market outcomes of Blacks after riots broke out in several US cities in the mid-1960s. High unemployment and poor access to public services were given as reasons for the riots in Black neighbourhoods.