Shrinking Cities: A Global Perspective

Much research into urban development has focused on the problems associated with rapidly expanding cities. However, in recent years and looking ahead into the future some cities in many parts of the world have been shrinking. A major objective of the book is to examine why? Strong reasons in many cities include demographic decline and economic restructuring, but there are other forces at work so a goal is to identify policy interventions that might reverse or at least mitigate the problem not least in order to examine areas of the world where the phenomenon is yet to take shape such as China and India. The book contains several themes: national analyses of population and economic data (e.g. the United States, Germany, South Korea and Japan); case studies of individual cities (e.g. Detroit, Buffalo, Cleveland, Halle, Naples, Belfast); at least one chapter on the policy implications for shrinking cities from the success of selected expanding cities; and discussions of some general issues such as planning for "smart decline" and the environmental repercussions (both costs and benefits) of shrinking cities.