The Limits of Shrinkage: Conceptual Pitfalls and Alternatives in the Discussion of Urban Population Loss

This essay reflects on the conceptual underpinnings of research on ‘shrinking cities' over the last decade. It criticizes the definition of shrinkage in terms of urban population losses and argues that the state‐of‐the art research on ‘shrinking cities' suffers from a misleading conceptualization of shrinkage which forces essentially different urban constellations into a universal model of ‘shrinkage'. Four problems of this procrustean bed are discussed in detail: methodological pitfalls of threshold definitions of urban shrinkage; empirical contradictions; an absence of attention to scalar interrelations; and insufficient understanding of cities as historical processes. The essay ends with suggestions for a widened conceptualization of shrinkage and a new research agenda.     

湖北省人口收缩城市的空间格局与类型识别

通过对湖北省82个县(市、区)的常住人口变化率和人口净流量进行交互分析,引入城乡建设用地脱钩模型和人口—土地城镇化协调指数,分析了人口收缩区域建设用地结构和城镇化协调类型。结果显示,湖北省存在37个人口持续流出、规模减少的区域,这些区域不仅在总量上表现为人口收缩与建设用地扩张的悖论关系,而且在城镇化方面也多表现为人口城镇化与土地城镇化不协调的状态,而从城乡建设用地结构的角度表现为不同的脱钩类型,其中仅有少数收缩区域是强脱钩的合理利用状态。从不同表现特征可将收缩城市类型分为空间无序扩张型、工业衰退型、资源枯竭型以及中心袭夺型四个类别,并概括为人口资源与土地资源、经济发展等在时空上的不匹配。最后,结合资源禀赋、经济结构变化等特征对人口收缩区域类别进行了归纳,并提出了针对性的城市规划和发展建议。     

Cities,Creativities and Urban Creative Economies: Re-descriptions and Make+Shifts from Sub-Saharan Africa

The aim of this symposium is to examine the situation of the creative economy in cities—specifically cities of sub-Saharan Africa. In this introduction we set out the case for the need to ‘re-describe’ the (much derided) phenomenon of the creative city. This task requires clarification of what is understood in academe and policy communities by the term ‘creative economy’, the pronounced growth of this sector, particularly in the global South, and its particular urban character. Secondly, in the face of conceptual and policy confusion we argue for the actually existing, and growing, importance of the urban creative economy. Thirdly, with this ground clearing achieved, we seek to frame, and focus on, the emergence of new research on the urban creative economy. Finally, we use the evidence from the symposium contributions to argue for a reformulation of the creative economy within African sub-Saharan urbanization.     

Urban shrinkage in Germany and the USA: a comparison of transformation patterns and local strategies

Many American and European cities have to deal with demographic and economic trajectories leading to urban shrinkage. According to official data, 13% of urban regions in the US and 54% of those in the EU have lost population in recent years. However, the extent and spatial distribution of declining populations differ significantly between Europe and the US. In Germany, the situation is driven by falling birth rates and the effects of German reunification. In the US, shrinkage is basically related to long-term industrial transformation. But the challenges of shrinking cities seldom appeared on the agendas of politicians and urban planners until recently. This article provides a critical overview of the development paths and local strategies of four shrinking cities: Schwedt and Dresden in eastern Germany; Youngstown and Pittsburgh in the US. A typology of urban growth and shrinkage, from economic and demographic perspectives, enables four types of city to be differentiated and the differences between the US and eastern Germany to be discussed. The article suggests that a new transatlantic debate on policy and planning strategies for restructuring shrinking cities is needed to overcome the dominant growth orientation that in most cases intensifies the negative consequences of shrinkage.     

Engineering Cities: Mediating Materialities,Infrastructural Imaginaries and Shifting Regimes of Urban Expertise

This symposium opens up new critical insights and analytical perspectives into the relationships between power, politics, materiality and urban engineering. In so doing it demonstrates the central role of engineers in the production and negotiation of everyday life in the city. In contrast to the technocratic exercise engineering often professes to be, the contributors to this symposium argue that the assembling and choreography of cities through the myriad techniques, routines, standards and visions of engineers is inextricably bound up with broader socio‐cultural, material and political urban dynamics and processes. This necessitates investigating the multiple and competing social imaginations, forms of knowledge and regimes of expertise associated with urban engineering. The symposium's five articles, straddling disciplinary backgrounds in geography, anthropology, engineering and history, focus analytical and empirical attention on the figure of the engineer and on the work of engineering in the cities of Paris, Mumbai, Singapore and London. Engineering, we suggest, is a diagnostic for probing the shifting forms of mediation that animate and inhabit contemporary dynamics of urban change. The symposium thus opens up a new avenue for cross‐disciplinary and transregional research for urban studies while also suggesting innovative ways of conceptualizing urban transformation and contestation.     

中国大城市发展和都市区的形成

改革开放以来,我国大城市发展迅速,出现了都市区这种新的城市空间形态.都市区将成为新世纪我国经济和城市化发展的重要地域空间形式,同时也对传统的城市发展战略、城市规划和管理提出了新的要求和挑战.分析了中国大城市的发展趋势和空间演变特征,阐述了中国都市区现象的出现及其发展前景,并对中国都市区的概念、界定标准以及都市区规划等问题进行了探讨.     

How does(n't) Urban Shrinkage get onto the Agenda? Experiences from Leipzig,Liverpool, Genoa and Bytom

This article discusses the question of how urban shrinkage gets onto the agenda of public‐policy agencies. It is based on a comparison of the agenda‐setting histories of four European cities, Liverpool (UK), Leipzig (Germany), Genoa (Italy) and Bytom (Poland), which have all experienced severe population losses but show very different histories with respect to how local governments reacted to them. We use the political‐science concepts of ‘systemic vs. institutional agendas’ and ‘policy windows’ as a conceptual frame to compare these experiences. The article demonstrates that shrinkage is hardly ever responded to in a comprehensive manner but rather that policies are only implemented in a piecemeal way in selected fields. Moreover, it is argued that variations in institutional contexts and political dynamics lead to considerable differences with regard to the chances of making shrinkage a matter of public intervention. Against this background, the article takes issue with the idea that urban shrinkage only needs to be ‘accepted’ by policymakers who would need to overcome their growth‐oriented cultural perceptions, as has been suggested in a number of recent writings, and calls for a more differentiated, context‐sensitive view.     

绿色城市:城市发展与环境的动态关系

不久的将来,世界上大多数的人都将在商业化的城市中生活和工作。数十亿人的生活质量将取决于自由市场经济的发展与绿色城市的关系。有的城市在增长时环境会恶化,而有的城市却可以保护甚至提高环境的质量,这个问题得到了众多研究者来自不同角度的关注。论文在大量文献与数据的基础上探讨了城市发展与环境之间的动态关系,介绍了经典的环境库兹涅茨曲线假说,并从人口增长、城市空间蔓延以及外部性等方面对环境库兹涅茨曲线假说进行了补充与完善。     

Urban Responses to Climate Change: Theories and Governance Practice in Cities of the Global South

Cities around the world have recently started to become ‘proactive’ initiators of climate strategies containing both mitigation and adaptation elements. The experience of these first movers has been studied and documented both empirically and, to a lesser extent, theoretically, primarily for cities in the global North. This symposium addresses related knowledge gaps by exploring case studies of urban regions in the global South confronting their projected climate change challenges, showcasing the experiences of Delhi, Santiago de Chile and Bogotá. Its specific aim is to explore the urban social response to nature change, the adaptation challenges faced by cities across the world and current practices of urban adaptation. Further, the symposium seeks to understand to what extent and in what respect current conceptual frameworks — which highlight urban ecological security and vulnerability — provide a useful context/framing to assist cities in confronting their challenges and to explain their actions. This introductory article examines current knowledge of the theory and practice of urban climate response. It introduces the concepts of ecological security and vulnerability and discusses the adaptive capacity of cities and how they are starting to respond to the emerging challenges of climate change. It concludes with a synthesis of the case articles and highlights some of the findings.     

Declining suburbs in Europe and Latin America

Suburban shrinkage, understood as a degenerative urban process stemming from the demise of the Fordist mode of urbanism, is generally manifested in a decline in population, industry and employment. It is also intimately linked to the global restructuring of industrial organization associated with the rise of the post-Fordist mode of urbanism and, more recently, the thrust of Asian industrialization. Framed in the discourse of industrial urbanism, this article examines the first ring of industrial suburbs that developed around large cities in their most rapid Fordist urbanization phase. These industrial suburbs, although they were formed at different times, are today experiencing specific mutations and undergoing profound restructuring on account of their particular spatial position between the central area and the expanding peripheries of the post-Fordist metropolis. This article describes and compares suburban decline in two European cities (Glasgow and Paris) and two Latin American Cities (S?o Paulo, Brazil and Guadalajara, Mexico), as different instances of places asymmetrically and fragmentarily integrated into the geography of globalization.     

Planning Histories and Practices of Circulating Urban Knowledge

This symposium creates and stimulates new dialogue and cross‐disciplinary exchange between planning theorists and geographers in researching the transfer of urban policy and planning models, ideas and techniques. The symposium challenges a restricted historical focus in much of the emerging geographical literature on urban policy mobilities by drawing on a rich tradition within planning history of exploring and documenting the trans‐urban travel of planning ideas and models over the last 150 years. It is argued that this longer‐term perspective is required to highlight important historical continuities and institutional legacies to contemporary urban policy circuits and pathways and to question what is particularly new, distinct and innovative about an intensification in the travel of urban ideas, plans and policies over the past decade — and the accompanying scholarly interest in them. The symposium also uses the emphasis on particular details and specific experiences within planning histories to foreground and develop approaches, particularly from recent geographical scholarship, that investigate the contingent and embodied practices and wider epistemic contexts that enable — or hinder — contemporary policy transfer.     

The shrinking mining city: urban dynamics and contested territory

Shrinking mining cities — once prosperous settlements servicing a mining site or a system of mining sites — are characterized by long-term population and/or economic decline. Many of these towns experience periods of growth and shrinkage, mirroring the ebbs and flows of international mineral markets which determine the fortunes of the dominant mining corporation upon which each of these towns heavily depends. This dependence on one main industry produces a parallel development in the fluctuations of both workforce and population. Thus, the strategies of the main company in these towns can, to a great extent, determine future developments and have a great impact on urban management plans. Climate conditions, knowledge, education and health services, as well as transportation links, are important factors that have impacted on lifestyles in mining cities, but it is the parallel development with the private sector operators (often a single corporation) that constitutes the distinctive feature of these cities and that ultimately defines their shrinkage. This article discusses shrinking mining cities in capitalist economies, the factors underpinning their development, and some of the planning and community challenges faced by these cities in Australia, Canada, Japan and Mexico.     

开发区城市管理的问题及解决途径

通过案例研究、实地调研等方法获取开发区城市管理研究的相关资料,从转型期开发区城市管理问题的现状与特征、产生原因、涉及范围、解决对策等层面展开分析。认为,当开发区城市管理的需求层面即人口规模和增速、产业多样性、区域分工的地位和作用等方面已经出现城市新区或新兴城市的特征时,原有的城市管理供给层面即城市管理模式必将受到来自经济、社会方面的矛盾冲击,以致产生相应层面的城市管理问题。开发区的转型亟待城市管理的适应性转型,具体可以从城市管理的目标、过程、手段、对象等方面实现。     

Entrepreneurial Religion in the Age of Neoliberal Urbanism

The introduction to this symposium on entrepreneurial religion and neoliberal urbanism discusses leading scholarly approaches to religion and urban theory, arguing that, despite their merits, these approaches are in need of refinement. Theories on religion and urban theory too often describe religion as a reactionary phenomenon. Religious movements and spaces are generally defined as pockets of resistance and shelter against retreating or failing states under neoliberal restructuring programmes in the shadow of consumption dreams. Although religious actors and ideologies unquestionably form part of urban groups that are denied access to public and private means to wealth and security, the contributors to this symposium argue that within a global, comparative perspective, the entwinement of religion, state and market reveal more complicated configurations. Through a comparison of Islamic gated communities in Istanbul, Pentecostal prayer camps in Lagos and Pentecostal grassroots movements in the favelas of Rio de Janeiro, this symposium demonstrates that urban religion should also be regarded as a constitutive force of contemporary capitalism and should therefore be placed at the heart of the neoliberal construction of urban space instead of at its margins.     

Recentering Southeast Asian Cities

For nearly two decades now, scholars have been heralding the arrival of new urbanisms. One debate in rapidly urbanizing Southeast Asia concerns the convergence of Western and Asian urban processes, and the riposte that interaction between globalizing processes and the historical momentum of local and regional forces make for complex Asian urbanisms. In recent years, attention has been drawn to the impact of decentralization, with consequences for the reorganization of the developmental state and the growing importance of private capital and urban social movements in driving urban processes and politics. This symposium offers the fresh lens of ‘recentering’ to discuss the urbanisms emerging from decentralization and the triangulating state–capital–social movement politics of the new urbanisms. Drawing on recent discussions of Manuel Castells' (1983) The City and the Grassroots, we seek to expand the conception of urban activism not just by considering non‐Western cases in the newly democratizing states of Southeast Asia, but also by considering cities as co‐agents of activism. We see the recentering of Southeast Asian cities as referring to political actions that take the city not only as site and repository, but also reflexively as identity in itself to be fought with, for and over.     

中国城市创新空间溢出及其影响因素——基于行政边界效应的视角

在城市创新空间溢出效应的研究中,空间计量对于空间权重的选择具有敏感性。基于2003—2018年我国271个主要城市的面板数据,通过引入强、弱行政调节因子构建改进的空间权重,对创新空间自相关性进行比较。进一步引入杜宾模型实证分析了城市人口规模、产业集聚等因素对城市之间创新溢出的影响,并对创新空间关联进行分解,以探讨行政调节对各个城市创新溢出影响因素的差异性。研究发现,在考察期内中国城市创新存在空间依赖性和相互促进作用,城市创新空间溢出也会受到行政边界效应的影响;在地理距离空间上,城市人口规模能够促进城市间的创新溢出,但行政调节会减弱其影响。产业专业化集聚和多样化集聚抑制了创新溢出,但行政调节可以削弱这种不利影响;在经济距离空间上,城市人口规模、产业专业化集聚和人力资本等因素能显著促进城市间的创新溢出,行政调节产生的作用不大。各个城市各创新影响因素表现出的差异性为我国各级政府制定创新政策与协调实践提供理论和经验依据。     

Spatial Spillovers Revisited: Innovation,Human Capital and Local Dynamics

This symposium focuses on understanding key territorial‐level innovation trends and processes by country, region and technology. It questions various widely accepted assumptions, offers fresh perspectives, both conceptually and methodologically, and challenges a paradigm shift in the field of innovation and spatial dynamics. It consists of three articles analysing at different scales (urban, regional and national) the territorial dynamics of innovation and their determinants. The innovation process, with local symbiosis and spatial spillovers at its core, is analysed within the conceptual framework of national and regional innovation systems and regional economic development. Based on a discussion of spatial spillovers and the way they shape the evolutionary and symbiotic relationships between local agents and actors, including university, industry and local development agencies, the symposium highlights the relevance of this framework for a better understanding of the transformation of local economic development processes. It investigates the differences in the geography of innovation regarding different institutional settings, different systems of innovation, and different national innovation strategies. While addressing mainly the EU, the US, and emerging countries such as China and India, the contributions also highlight the critical role of current innovation policies from a general perspective. In so doing, the symposium recognizes a contrarian perspective that argues that contemporary information and communication technologies (ICTs) provide a way to leapfrog the dominant role of proximity in innovation processes, creating a complimentary rather than a substitution effect for more remote and peripheral places. That said, this symposium focuses primarily on an urban network view of the innovation process and proximal effects in this context.     

IMAGINING A DECOLONIZED CITY IN AND FROM AOTEAROA NEW ZEALAND

Imagining decolonized cities creates space to explore how urban places could strip away colonial dominance and restore the ability of Indigenous people to live, know and be. In this essay, we describe one attempt to create such space. While working in Porirua in Aotearoa New Zealand, we ran an urban design competition, hosted workshops with young people and held a symposium. Through all three phases we drew on utopian thinking to imagine beyond the current constraints of urban form in Aotearoa New Zealand to consider how cities might reflect the diverse realities of Māori. While this approach is an attempt at generating hopeful geographies, it also sat in tension with (post)colonial realities, such as racist attempts by white people to claim Indigeneity, and the ongoing need for land to be returned to Indigenous people. We argue that envisioning how cities might be decolonized is useful and needs to be rooted in the particular politics of place, but this imagining needs to be paired with action to confront persistent colonialism.     

城市道路和绿色环境的可持续发展问题研究

随着当前经济的不断发展,城市化建设不断深入,城市人口也随之不断增加和居民出行逐渐频繁,这势必会对我国的城市环境以及城市道路建设提出要求。目前,我国的大部分城市普遍存在的问题是城市生活环境差,人均绿化程度低,道路拥挤严重,堵车成为人们必须面对出行问题,道路的建设速度远远跟不上车辆的增长速度等等。这些问题不但给居民的正常生活带来影响,也给政府增加了压力,影响了城市经济化建设的前进步伐。     

Where is Urban Politics?

We outline the rationale for reopening the issue of the spatiality of the ‘urban’ in urban politics. There is a long tradition of arguing about the distinctive political qualities of urban sites, practices and processes. Recent work often relies on spatial concepts or metaphors that anchor various political phenomena to cities while simultaneously putting the specificity of the urban itself in question. This symposium seeks to extend debates about the relationship between the urban and the political. Instead of asking ‘what is urban politics?’, seeking a definition of the urban as a starting point we begin by asking ‘where is urban politics?’. This question orients all of the contributions to this symposium, and it allows each to trace diverse political dimensions of urban life and living beyond the confines of ‘the city’ as classically conceived. The symposium engages with ‘the urban question’ through diverse settings and objects, including infrastructures, in‐between spaces, professional cultures, transnational and postcolonial spaces and spaces of sovereignty. Contributions draw on a range of intellectual perspectives, including geography, urban studies, political science and political theory, anthropology, cultural studies, sociology, planning and environmental studies — indicating the range of intellectual traditions that can and do inform the investigation of the urban/political nexus.