Shrinking Cities ― Understanding Urban Decline

Shrinking Cities explores the varied places and spaces in which urban decline occurs.This book argues that no single approach is sufficiently capable of explaining, predicting, and controlling the causes and consequences of urban decline in diverse spatial sites and situations. Instead, the book explores shrinking cities within the context of the local, highlighting the need to couple generalizable theoretical approaches with localized frameworks and geospatial methods to understand and manage urban decline.

The book focuses on particular phenomenon in shrinking cities, such as segregation, and outcomes, such as wage inequality, and asks: where does this happen? How does it happen? And how are the outcomes in one place or space connected to those in another? A range of theoretical and methodological perspectives are explored to highlight the intellectual, cultural, political, and economic forces at play in shrinking cities. The book also considers questions surrounding policy and planning and the need for decline-centred governance, central to understanding questions of sustainability and resilience.

This timely contribution argues that an understanding of what the city has become, as it faces shrinkage, is essential toward a critical analysis of theories, methods, and policies. It will appeal to geographers, planners, urban designers and policy makers alike.

Sharmistha Bagchi-Sen is a Professor of Geography at the State University of New York at Buffalo, USA.

Amy E. Frazier is an Assistant Professor of Geography at Oklahoma State University, USA.

Jason Knight is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Geography and Planning at SUNY Buffalo State, USA.

Russell Weaver is a Visiting Professor in the MS GIS Program and Department of Environmental Studies at the University of Redlands, USA.