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Sustainability of Cities under Population Decline

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  • Tomoya MORI
  • Miki OGAWA

Abstract

The world is undeniably facing trends of aging, declining birth rates and shrinking populations. As a result, rural economies are shrinking rapidly while large cities are absorbing their populations. Each country must make difficult decisions about which cities to preserve in order to sustain the country as a whole. Japan is at the forefront of rapid economic contraction, and we propose a systematic method for assessing the sustainability of cities as living communities. This method is based on the hierarchy property that holds between a larger and smaller city in the composition of tertiary industries. This property allows us to identify the threshold population size of a city for a given set of industries to be able to operate in the city. In particular, by defining the sets of essential industries for modern life, one can identify the population size of a sustainable city. Combined with a separately conducted future projection of individual city sizes, this represents a guideline for a strategic reduction of the country's economic geography by identifying the future spatial distribution of focal cities. This will allow for the reorganization of functional regions around focal cities to ensure that the country can adapt to its declining population.

Suggested Citation

  • Tomoya MORI & Miki OGAWA, 2025. "Sustainability of Cities under Population Decline," Policy Discussion Papers 25006, Research Institute of Economy, Trade and Industry (RIETI).
    • Handle: RePEc:eti:polidp:25006
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    References listed on IDEAS

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    5. Mori, Tomoya & Wrona, Jens, 2024. "Centrality bias in inter-city trade," Regional Science and Urban Economics, Elsevier, vol. 109(C).
    6. Tomoya Mori & Takashi Akamatsu & Yuki Takayama & Minoru Osawa, 2022. "Origin of power laws and their spatial fractal structure for city-size distributions," Papers 2207.05346, arXiv.org, revised Apr 2023.
    7. Wen‐Tai Hsu, 2012. "Central Place Theory and City Size Distribution," Economic Journal, Royal Economic Society, vol. 122(563), pages 903-932, September.
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