A Note About the Cover Art

Give Us Opportunities, 2016 Artist: Tee Digital Print Performing Statistics is a cultural organizing project that uses art to model, imagine, and advocate for alternatives to youth incarceration. Every summer, the project creates art with a group of teens in the Richmond Juvenile Detention Center’s post-dispositional program about their experiences navigating the justice system and their vision for a world without youth prisons. The artwork is then produced in a number of ways in order to reach decision-makers in the education, law enforcement, and juvenile justice systems. The project’s ethos looks to young people impacted by the juvenile justice system as experts society should listen to when considering policies that most impact them. Give Us Opportunities was created in the summer of 2016 and speaks to the kinds of investments young people would like to see to keep them out of the system. Jobs, credible messenger mentors, culturally competent after-school programming, more supportive educational environments, and stable housing are just a few examples of the kinds of investments that come up regularly in the project’s programming. In 2020, Performing Statistics will premier No Kids in Prison, a national touring exhibition that will amplify youth justice movements across the country and weave a national narrative of youth stories, dreams, and demands. More information about the project can be found at www.performingstatistics.org. The cover art is used with permission from ART 180

The prevalence of prosperous shrinking cities.

The majority of the shrinking cities literature focuses solely on instances of population loss and economic decline. This article argues that shrinking cities exist on a spectrum between prosperity and decline. Taking a wider view of population loss, I explore the possibility of prosperous shrinking cities: if they exist, where they exist, and under what conditions shrinking cities can thrive. Examining census place data from the 1980 to 2010 U.S. Census and American Community Surveys, 27 percent of 886 shrinking cities were found to have income levels greater than their surrounding regions. Shrinking and prosperous shrinking cities of all sizes were found across the United States. Shrinkage was most prevalent in the Rust Belt region and prosperous shrinkage in coastal regions. Prosperous shrinking cities were overwhelmingly found within megapolitan regions and were rarely principal cities. Multivariate regression analysis found that both population (city size) and the severity of shrinkage (magnitude of population loss) had no effect on economic prosperity. Talent (location quotient of education) was found to be the strongest predictor of prosperous shrinkage

Remaking the Rust Belt: The Postindustrial Transformation of North America

Book review by Maxwell Hartt of Remaking the Rust Belt: The Postindustrial Transformation of North America, Tracy Neumann author

A Note About the Cover Art

Artwork: Displayed with Permission from Performing Statistics Artist: Chanya Performing Statistics is a national cultural organizing project based in Richmond, Virginia that uses art to model, imagine, and advocate for alternatives to youth incarceration. They work directly with youth impacted by the juvenile justice system to make art about their vision for a world without youth prisons and connect that to youth justice organizing across the country. www.performingstatistics.or

The diversity of North American shrinking cities

Demographically and economically, there is an ongoing global shift that has resulted in the uneven development and distribution of monetary, human and knowledge capital. This paper first examines and consolidates economic, social and urban theories of growth and decline and demonstrates how globalisation has conceptually shifted the spatial scale and trajectory of urban change theories. The examination of the population trajectories of the 100 largest American cities from 1980 to 2010 demonstrates that the majority either grew or shrank continuously. This trend counters early cyclical models and supports the argument that globalisation has altered population trajectories. Second, conceptualisations of urban shrinkage trajectories are reviewed and a two-dimensional trajectory typology encompassing both economic and demographic change is presented. The diversity of urban shrinkage experiences is demonstrated through the application of the typology to the 20 largest shrinking American cities, 12 of which experienced overall population loss and simultaneous economic growth

Local Scale Population Projection Methods: Shrinking and Aging Communities

Poster Presentation The emergence of a globalized economy has given rise to ‘global cities’ where knowledge, resource and human capital conglomerate – often at the cost of outmigration of resources in smaller cities. In the Canadian context, the growth of a few major centers is contrasted with many smaller and peripheral cities that may be coping with shrinking populations and economic decline. These effects are increasingly compounded by a second demographic transition, which is characterized by falling birth rates and an aging population. Continued loss of population, changing demographic structure, and economic decline can lead to a myriad of challenges, including underused infrastructure, high vacancy rates, and socio-economic inequality. As Statistics Canada’s population projections are limited to the provincial, territorial and national level, individual municipalities are left to calculate their own projections, which could be hindered by a lack of resources, the complexity of calculating local-scale migration rates, or simply may not be done. This paper reviews the methodological differences reflected in the approaches taken by various levels of government and concludes that more complex, time consuming and expensive models are used at higher levels of governance and in larger cities and are more likely to provide more accurate and precise results. Smaller and peripheral cities tend to use simpler, less time- and resource-intensive methods. An assessment framework of nine criteria concluded that the share capture method is the best methodological alternative for local scale population projection. The share capture model is applied to every municipality (with population above 10,000) in Ontario and projected dependency ratios are calculated to ascertain the future distribution of aging communities in Ontario

Urban Transformations: Centres, Peripheries and Systems

Book review by Maxwell Hartt of Urban Transformations: Centres, Peripheries and Systems, Daniel P. O'Donoghue, editor