Shrinking Cities

de Sharmistha Bagchi-Sen, Jason Knight, Amy E. Frazier, Russell Weaver

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.