What makes people stay in or leave shrinking cities? An empirical study from Portugal

The attractiveness of cities as places to live determines population movements into or out of them. Understanding the appealing features is fundamental to local governments, particularly for cities facing population decline. Pull and push attributes can include economic aspects, the availability of amenities and psychological constructs, initiating a discussion around which factors are more relevant for migration. However, such discussion has been underexplored in studies of shrinking cities. In the present study, we contribute to the discussion by identifying pull and push factors in Portuguese shrinking cities. Data were collected using a face-to-face questionnaire of 701 residents in four shrinking cities: Oporto, Barreiro, Peso da Regua and Moura. Factor analysis and automatic linear modelling were used to analyse the data. Our results show that the economic activity is the most relevant feature for retaining residents. However, characteristics specific to each city, related to heritage and natural beauty, are also shown to influence a city's attractiveness. The cause of population shrinkage was also found to influence residents' assessments of the pull and push attributes of each city. Furthermore, the results show the relevance of social ties and of place attachment to inhabitants' intention to continue living in their city of residence

Urbanization and its implications for food and farming

This paper discusses the influences on food and farming of an increasingly urbanized world and a declining ratio of food producers to food consumers. Urbanization has been underpinned by the rapid growth in the world economy and in the proportion of gross world product and of workers in industrial and service enterprises. Globally, agriculture has met the demands from this rapidly growing urban population, including food that is more energy-, land-, water- and greenhouse gas emission-intensive. But hundreds of millions of urban dwellers suffer under-nutrition. So the key issues with regard to agriculture and urbanization are whether the growing and changing demands for agricultural products from growing urban populations can be sustained while at the same time underpinning agricultural prosperity and reducing rural and urban poverty. To this are added the need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and to build resilience in agriculture and urban development to climate change impacts. The paper gives particular attention to low- and middle-income nations since these have more than three-quarters of the world's urban population and most of its largest cities and these include nations where issues of food security are most pressing

Does urban shrinkage require urban policy? The case of a post-industrial region in Poland

The problem of depopulation in towns is present in most European countries. In Central and Eastern Europe it emerged primarily after the political transformation at the turn of the 1980s and 1990s. Despite the often-significant demographic decline, the problem did not immediately become part of agenda-setting in towns’ local strategies. This paper discusses the above topics, focusing on the principal reasons for trivialization of depopulation in local policies of towns in the Silesian Voivodeship, Poland. In the discussion an emphasis is placed on the fact that in this region the issue of depopulation and urban shrinkage ‘vied’ with another consequence of transformation: unemployment. Because the Silesian Voivodeship is one of the largest regional labour markets in Europe, the confrontation of the two phenomena in local and regional policy took an original course characterized by phenomena such as policy taboo, trivialization, informal agenda-setting and mismatch strategies. The paper shows that while all the mentioned attributes of urban policy with respect to depopulation may be regarded as negative, considering the gigantic scale of the unemployment and depopulation phenomena and lack of experience in urban governance, they were a ‘natural’ reaction of the local authorities to the accumulated problems. It also indicates that in the studied region issues such as strongly marked morphological polycentricity and its (post)mining and (post)industrial nature were also not without significance

Foreword

Compelling and engaging, this Handbook on Shrinking Cities addresses the fundamentals of shrinkage, exploring its causal factors, the ways in which planning strategies and policies are steered, and innovative solutions for revitalising shrinking cities. Chapters cover topics of governance, ‘greening’ and ‘right-sizing’, and regrowth, laying the relevant groundwork for the Handbook’s proposals for dealing with shrinkage in the age of COVID-19 and beyond

Foreword

Compelling and engaging, this Handbook on Shrinking Cities addresses the fundamentals of shrinkage, exploring its causal factors, the ways in which planning strategies and policies are steered, and innovative solutions for revitalising shrinking cities. Chapters cover topics of governance, ‘greening’ and ‘right-sizing’, and regrowth, laying the relevant groundwork for the Handbook’s proposals for dealing with shrinkage in the age of COVID-19 and beyond

Umweltbelange in raum- und stadtentwicklungspolitischen Instrumenten auf europaeischer Ebene

Available from TIB Hannover: RN 8908(2000,231) / FIZ - Fachinformationszzentrum Karlsruhe / TIB - Technische InformationsbibliothekSIGLEBundesministerium fuer Umwelt, Naturschutz und Reaktorsicherheit, Berlin (Germany)DEGerman

Towards brighter futures for European small and medium-sized towns: What can social innovation contribute?

Social innovation has gained prominence in academic and societal debates recently, but its roots can be traced back much further back in time. Social innovation can mean different things in different contexts, ranging from small grassroots initiatives to systemic changes. So far, most social innovation projects, strategies and research take place either in large cities or in rural areas. There is much less attention for small and medium-sized towns, a settlement category often overlooked in urban and regional research more in general. However, a large share of Europe's urban settlements are small or medium-sized towns, and many of them are facing an uncertain future. Social innovation may offer good chances to improve the social sustainability and future perspectives of such places. In this chapter we support our argument with examples from the 'Bright Future for Black Towns' project about the future perspectives of small and medium-sized (post-)industrial towns in Europe