What is urban shrinkage?
Urban shrinkage is a phenomenon that occurs when cities face a significant drop in population, and is often indicative of a larger structural crisis.
It results from a decline in the success of a city’s industries, which makes them less affluent in the global economy.
Why do planners dislike urban shrinkage?
Urban planners typically hold a growth-oriented lens of development, which means that they view growth in Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and productivity as the best sign of development. Additionally, the immediate impacts of urban shrinkage include increased unemployment rates, population loss as workers follow job opportunities and move elsewhere, and sometimes even an economic crisis.
Urban shrinkage also leads to vacant built land (such as offices or houses) and vacant open land (such as fields). Initially, urban planners only see this newly-vacant land as an indicator of urban shrinkage, rather than the benefits of building new urban ecosystems and green space. Because of this, planners often think that urban shrinkage is a bad thing and means that cities can no longer be successful — it takes a shift in perspective for them to actually realise how they can use urban shrinkage to make cities more environmentally friendly.
The case of Leipzig
Despite its immediate negative impacts, urban shrinkage can actually give planners the opportunity to redevelop cities sustainably. Let’s look at Leipzig, a city in Germany: Leipzig, a previously compact city with a fertile agrarian and riparian landscape, faced environmental degradation when their use of soft-coal mining destroyed natural areas and polluted their environment.
As its urban areas became abandoned when their newly unemployed workers left Leipzig for better job opportunities, the city capitalised on these vacant areas by increasing greenery, expanding parks, and creating community gardens.
On a broader scale, Leipzig also helped with renaturation efforts, which means that they worked to return their natural ecosystems and habitats to their original structure and species composition. This, as a whole, was seen as a good thing — especially through their creation of community gardens. Access to green spaces and improved mental health are linked, and Leipzig used this to not only sustainably redevelop their cities, but to also improve the quality of life for their citizens. Community gardens are just one example of this, and Leipzig used them to provide green spaces while empowering both individuals and communities.
How can planners use urban shrinkage to their advantage?
As planners recognise the potential of urban shrinkage to introduce sustainable redevelopment schemes, it is possible to reuse newly-vacant space to create positive social and environmental impacts. In urban cities and ecosystems, green space can provide fresh air, improve biodiversity, provide trees that help with carbon storage, and even help aesthetically improve urban areas that can further empower those who live in them.
While Leipzig used these areas to provide more of a social benefit to citizens by creating more urban green space, other cities can also focus on more environmentally-focused impacts. Some opportunities include regulating the local climate and air quality and improving carbon sequestration through planting vegetation on vacant land, and the enlargement of parks to provide urban green space and facilitate connections with the natural environment. Even in those impacts, there are social benefits that follow (such as letting people connect with their natural environment), so environmental benefits and social benefits are actually hand-in-hand!
The downside
When urban shrinkage first occurs and different buildings are abandoned, property value and prices decrease. While some people may think that cheaper houses are a good thing because some citizens might be able to move into better houses or neighbourhoods, this can actually contribute to social turbulence.
In Leipzig, citizens felt that the “poor, unemployed, and uneducated” were left behind while more “skilled” workers moved elsewhere, which made the decline of Leipzig even worse. Additionally, Leipzig found that the abandonment of infrastructure led to social conflict unrelated to the environment: in neighbourhoods with vacancy rates of 25-50%, they saw that there was less of an acceptance of “non-German immigrants,” which shows how there is a relationship between decreasing property value and social turbulence.
Leipzig addressed this problem by reusing vacant areas to give citizens more opportunities to connect with nature through urban green space.
But even when cities do this, there are still factors to consider - community gardens and redeveloping infrastructure can also sometimes increase housing prices and limit new developments to wealthier citizens, so this shows how there are tradeoffs to everything. Even when creating more gardens and parks, urban planners must thus be conscious of developmental consequences in order to make these benefits accessible to everyone.
Lessons from Leipzig and urban shrinkage
It makes sense why urban planners might not think urban shrinkage is good for cities. From the perspective of planners who view GDP as the biggest indicator of growth, urban shrinkage is bad — after all, it does immediately lead to higher rates of unemployment, population decline, and abandoned spaces!
However, this also gives planners the opportunity to redevelop cities in a more environmentally-friendly way by creating more urban green spaces.
As the climate crisis becomes even more urgent, this could be a key strategy to making cities more sustainable, as any wide-spread fight against climate change could be essential to combating the climate crisis.
