IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/wiw/wiwrsa/ersa14p94.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Being on the Losing Side of Global Urban Development ? The Limits to Managing Urban Decline

Author

Listed:
  • René Kreichauf

Abstract

At the beginning of the 21st century, the phenomena of shrinking cities spread widely over Europe. Cities shrank in peripheral, sparsely populated areas in Northern Europe, in Western European industrial agglomerations in economic decline, and in rural areas in Southern Europe suffering from emigration and a rapid decrease in birth rates. City shrinkage is the result of the on-going relocation of industry and metropolisation in a globalizing world. In the era of Post-Fordism, the transformation of local productive systems resulted in a polarisation of regional spaces and a growing imbalance among urban territories. The Post-Fordist economy in Europe has led to agglomerations of economic activity and urban growth while other regions have suffered a decline that reinforces prior trends toward an uneven economic and urban development. Today, European city planners have to deal with both the regulation of urban growth and the planning and management of urban decline. However, being a child of capitalistic logic and development, urban planning and its theories and guidelines are fundamentally linked to socio-spatial and economic growth. Using theories on uneven urban development and the case studies of Bitterfeld (Germany) and Detroit (USA), this paper illustrates that strategies following a "departure of the growth path" reach limits as, within the context of capitalism and its logic, these strategies are contradicting the nature of the politico-economic system. In the long run, even declining cities are forced to generate (economic) growth to further compete in the global economy. Strategies such as "regeneration", "re-imagining", "redevelopment", and "renewal" are ultimately an alibi to justify a "re-growing" of economic activity and performance in declining cities rather than increasing their population.

Suggested Citation

  • René Kreichauf, 2014. "Being on the Losing Side of Global Urban Development ? The Limits to Managing Urban Decline," ERSA conference papers ersa14p94, European Regional Science Association.
  • Handle: RePEc:wiw:wiwrsa:ersa14p94
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://www-sre.wu.ac.at/ersa/ersaconfs/ersa14/e140826aFinal00094.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Brenner, Neil, 2004. "New State Spaces: Urban Governance and the Rescaling of Statehood," OUP Catalogue, Oxford University Press, number 9780199270064.
    2. Franz, Peter, 2003. "Sind schrumpfende Städte gleichbedeutend mit einer schrumpfenden Wirtschaft? Der Fall Ostdeutschland," IWH Discussion Papers 175/2003, Halle Institute for Economic Research (IWH).
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Ruiying Liu, 2022. "Long-Term Development Perspectives in the Slow Crisis of Shrinkage: Strategies of Coping and Exiting," Sustainability, MDPI, vol. 14(16), pages 1-30, August.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Geneviève Zembri-Mary & Virginie Engrand-Linder, 2023. "Urban planning law in the face of the Olympic challenge: Between innovation and criticism of exceptional urban regeneration," Local Economy, London South Bank University, vol. 38(4), pages 369-388, June.
    2. Steven Tufts, 2007. "Emerging Labour Strategies in Toronto's Hotel Sector: Toward a Spatial Circuit of Union Renewal," Environment and Planning A, , vol. 39(10), pages 2383-2404, October.
    3. Navé Wald & Douglas P. Hill, 2016. "‘Rescaling’ alternative food systems: from food security to food sovereignty," Agriculture and Human Values, Springer;The Agriculture, Food, & Human Values Society (AFHVS), vol. 33(1), pages 203-213, March.
    4. Kevin Fox Gotham, 2014. "Racialization and Rescaling: Post-Katrina Rebuilding and the Louisiana Road Home Program," International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 38(3), pages 773-790, May.
    5. Simin Yan & Anna Growe, 2022. "Regional Planning, Land-Use Management, and Governance in German Metropolitan Regions—The Case of Rhine–Neckar Metropolitan Region," Land, MDPI, vol. 11(11), pages 1-24, November.
    6. Andrew Clarke & Lynda Cheshire, 2018. "The post-political state? The role of administrative reform in managing tensions between urban growth and liveability in Brisbane, Australia," Urban Studies, Urban Studies Journal Limited, vol. 55(16), pages 3545-3562, December.
    7. Federico Savini, 2013. "The Governability of National Spatial Planning: Light Instruments and Logics of Governmental Action in Strategic Urban Development," Urban Studies, Urban Studies Journal Limited, vol. 50(8), pages 1592-1607, June.
    8. Le Galès, Patrick & Vitale, Tommaso Prof, 2013. "Governing the large metropolis. A research agenda," SocArXiv 95zsc, Center for Open Science.
    9. Juliana Hurtado Rassi, 2020. "Gestión conjunta de ecosistemas transfronterizos: la importancia del trabajo articulado entre los Estados para la conservación de los recursos naturales. Análisis del caso particular de la “Reserva de," Books, Universidad Externado de Colombia, Facultad de Derecho, number 1241.
    10. Xiaobo Su, 2013. "From Frontier to Bridgehead: Cross-border Regions and the Experience of Yunnan, China," International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 37(4), pages 1213-1232, July.
    11. Bernard Jouve, 2007. "Urban Societies and Dominant Political Coalitions in the Internationalization of Cities," Environment and Planning C, , vol. 25(3), pages 374-390, June.
    12. Natalie Papanastasiou, 2017. "The practice of scalecraft: Scale, policy and the politics of the market in England’s academy schools," Environment and Planning A, , vol. 49(5), pages 1060-1079, May.
    13. Fricke, Carola, 2014. "Grenzüberschreitende Governance in der Raumplanung: Organisations- und Kooperationsformen in Basel und Lille," Arbeitsberichte der ARL: Aufsätze, in: Grotheer, Swantje & Schwöbel, Arne & Stepper, Martina (ed.), Nimm's sportlich - Planung als Hindernislauf, volume 10, pages 62-78, ARL – Akademie für Raumentwicklung in der Leibniz-Gemeinschaft.
    14. Naomi Prachi Hazarika, 2020. "Spaces of Intermediation and Political Participation: a Study of KuSumpur pahadI redevelopment project," CSH-IFP Working Papers 0016, Centre de Sciences Humaines, New Delhi, revised Jul 2020.
    15. Cavicchia, Rebecca, 2023. "Housing accessibility in densifying cities: Entangled housing and land use policy limitations and insights from Oslo," Land Use Policy, Elsevier, vol. 127(C).
    16. Jacob Salder, 2020. "Spaces of regional governance: A periodisation approach," Environment and Planning C, , vol. 38(6), pages 1036-1054, September.
    17. Sjur Kasa & Anders Underthun, 2010. "Navigation in New Terrain with Familiar Maps: Masterminding Sociospatial Equality through Resource-Oriented Innovation Policy," Environment and Planning A, , vol. 42(6), pages 1328-1345, June.
    18. Justus Uitermark, 2014. "Integration and Control: The Governing of Urban Marginality in Western Europe," International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 38(4), pages 1418-1436, July.
    19. Zeynep Ceren Henriques Correia, 2018. "Air Maidans, Can It Be?," Societies, MDPI, vol. 8(3), pages 1-6, September.
    20. Matthias Bernt, 2009. "Partnerships for Demolition: The Governance of Urban Renewal in East Germany's Shrinking Cities," International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 33(3), pages 754-769, September.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    urban decline; shrinkage; growth; Fordism; post-Fordism; Globalisation;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • O - Economic Development, Innovation, Technological Change, and Growth

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:wiw:wiwrsa:ersa14p94. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Gunther Maier (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.ersa.org .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.