Exploring residential satisfaction in shrinking cities: a decision-tree approach

Abstract

The number of cities experiencing population decline has been increasing worldwide. Despite the existence of theoretical propositions of shrinkage as an opportunity to increase levels of residential satisfaction, the issue has not been addressed empirically. This article contributes to fill this gap by assessing, through survey, the residential satisfaction of inhabitants of four shrinking Portuguese cities.

Data were analysed by means of a tree-decision approach: the Chi-squared Automatic Interaction Detection analysis. A sense of safety is the feature that best discriminates inhabitants’ level of residential satisfaction. The results show that shrinkage due to deindustrialisation processes is detrimental to residential satisfaction.

Keywords:

• residential satisfaction
• population decline
• shrinking cities
• city features
• tree-based approach

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Details can be found in Panagopoulos, Guimarães, and Barreira (2015).

Additional information

Funding

This work was funded by the European Regional Development Fund through the Operational Programme for Competitiveness Factors and by national funding from the Foundation for Science and Technology under the project ‘EXPL/ATP-EUR/0464/2013 – ‘Policy guidelines for regeneration in shrinking cities’.