Shrinking Cities
The world is growing by 2 urban residents per second. Not all cities however are experiencing rapid growth, some are going through a different phenomenon; they are shrinking. What effect do these demographic revolutions have on our cities?
Tim Rieniets & Philipp Oswalt, Shrinking Cities Project (Berlin)
photo ©Nickolaus Brade, courtesy Shrinking Cities
6.1 billion people currently live on the earth, 3 billion of them in cities. By 2030, the the world population will have increased by 2 billion (+33%). This increase will stem almost exclusively from the growth in urban population. Every day, 190,000 new city-dwellers are added all over the world, 2 city-dwellers per second. In the year 2030, 4.9 billion people will live in cities. But not all cities are taking part in this competition for fast growth. Whether in Germany or the USA, in Russia or China, in South Africa or Iran, everywhere there are also shrinking cities that are too easily overlooked by the media obsession with boomtowns and megacities.
Today the world population is facing two major changes: The United Nations Population Division has projected, that shortly after the turn of the millennium the world urban population will for the first time represent the biggest share of the world population. From now on cities will be the major human habitat on earth with an ongoing population increase.
Today more than 500 major cities are losing population; more than every fourth city is a shrinking city
A second projection indicates another revolutionary change in world population development: in the first half of the 21st century 43 countries will experience population decline. For the first time in history national populations are facing significant population losses in the long term, even if their economies are growing and their political situation stays stable. Although the world population is increasing – with slightly decreasing growth rates – the 21st century will be the first period in history of sustainable population decline for some regions.
What impact do these demographic revolutions have on cities? Focusing on urban populations we can find similar demographic developments, yet the decline of urban populations during periods of economic and political stability occurred already one century before national population started to decrease.
In the annals of history, we find many declining cities, usually depicted as catastrophic, exceptional events, such as Atlantis, Troy or Pompeii. Yet in the 20th century the number and the geographic distribution of shrinking cities changed significantly. A growing number of cities lost population not because of disaster, but in the context of prosperous national economies, a high standard of living and political stability. Shrinking cities are no longer the exception but have become a lasting phenomenon of global dimensions.
After World War II the number of shrinking cities with more than 100,000 inhabitants rose to 80, 38 of them in the USA. Later shrinking cities occurred in South European countries, Japan, South Africa and other regions. In the 1970s the phenomenon of shrinking cities reached its preliminary peak. About every sixth city with more than 100,000 inhabitants was a shrinking city.
In the 1990s the political changes in East European countries caused an additional increase in the number of shrinking cities. Post-socialist transformations suddenly withdrew sources of urban growth and triggered a dramatic urban decline. Today more than 500 major cities are losing population; more than every fourth city is a shrinking city.
The modern phenomenon of shrinking cities is caused by global processes of demographic significance, such as deindustrialization, suburbanization and demographic transformation. The following examples illustrate some major developments regarding shrinking cities in the 20th
century.
Shrinking Cities 1950 – 2000, courtesy Shrinking Cities
Manchester and Liverpool: Pioneers of deindustrialization
Manchester and Liverpool in the North-West of England, pioneers of industrialization and rapid urbanization, were among the first shrinking cities of the 20th century. Manchester was a prominent centre of world trade, whilst Liverpool, with its docks, was the logistical centre for the region’s textile factories. With the disintegration of the textile industry in the county of Lancashire, Manchester and Liverpool experienced a severe decline from 1950 onwards. Around 1930, both boasted approximately 850,000 inhabitants; today, only about half as many people live within the city boundaries of each. In both places, extreme de-industrialisation and suburbanisation went hand-in-hand with growing poverty among the working class and an increasing rate of population loss. The nadir of decline was marked by violent riots in Manchester’s Moss Side and Liverpool’s Toxteth districts in 1981.
Shrinking cities are no longer the exception but have become a lasting phenomenon of global dimensions
Since then, the situation has substantially and visibly improved. During Margaret Thatcher’s time as Prime Minister, when local government services in Britain were extensively privatised, Manchester chose the path of coalition, while Liverpool chose opposition. The result was that Manchester survived the crisis much more successfully than Liverpool did, even though the signs of shrinkage (such as vacant properties, poverty, blighted areas, high crime levels) are easy to find in both cities.
During the last decade, Manchester has tried to renew its derelict sites with a whole series of cultural institutions and events. Among these are: the Lowry Centre, opened in 2000; the Imperial War Museum North, designed by Daniel Libeskind; the bid to host the Olympic Games in 2000 and the holding of the Commonwealth Games in 2002. “But the economic success of the city centre”, as it says on Manchester City Council’s website, “stands in sharp contrast to the surrounding districts, whose inhabitants suffer from one of the highest concentrations of crime, as well as bad health and poor housing”.
In other parts of Manchester, young architects have been at work since the end of the nineteen-eighties. Large, deserted warehouses are especially favoured for conversion into offices and loft apartments – much in demand with the new, upwardly-mobile generation.
During the late Seventies and early Eighties, Manchester spawned a new music scene influenced by punk and indie, later also hip-hop and House, and performers made vacant rooms and buildings their stage. Among the former industrial sites famous on the music scene were the headquarters of Factory Records, the Hacienda Club and the Dry Bar. Even though music had little effect on the city’s economy, it played a key part in changing and improving Manchester’s image: from a manufacturing city to a centre of the service industry.
Some time later, on one of the many canal-side roads, the Gay Village sprang up. This and the music scene share a development pattern typical of minority urban cultures. They are first discovered by students, then tourists – and then by investors. The developers appropriate the aura and renown of the place. One clear sign of this is the demolition of the Hacienda: today, a building with loft-style apartments stands on the site and the club’s name lives on as a sales gimmick. Similarly, the music culture of the Eighties has largely disappeared from the centre of Manchester, not least because of the increased cost of property.
Detroit: suburbanization and segregation
photo © Bas Princen, courtesy Shrinking Cities
In the second half of the last century a new pattern of urban development dramatically changed pre-war urban structures in developed countries. Population, economy and infrastructures moved from the old city centres to peripheral regions. The desire for better living conditions, the improvements in private transportation and the desire for detached family homes near the countryside were the main reasons that influenced people to leave and to create new urban realities, increasingly removing economic and cultureal activities from the city centre. In some regions – especially in North America – this process of suburbanization became a major reason for declining urban populations.
The phenomenon of suburbanization first occurred in North America after World War II. Already in the 1970s the majority of Americans lived in suburban neighbourhoods and with them a big share of the economic, political and financial power was withdrawn from the cities. At that time, 18 of the 25 largest cities suffered from significant population losses while the suburbs expanded dramatically. Some cities lost about half of their residents, such as St. Louis (-59%), Youngstown (-51%), Pittsburgh (-50%), Buffalo (-49%), Detroit (-49%) and so forth.
Although the world population is increasing – with slightly decreasing growth rates – the 21st century will be the first period in history of sustainable population decline for some regions
Detroit became one of the first to experience the drift of population to the edge of town. Detroit was the centre of American car production at the beginning of the twentieth century. The “Big Three” – Chrysler, Ford and General Motors – created the ultimate “Motor City”. It was here that the first street was surfaced with concrete; here that Davison Freeway, the first city motorway, was built. Detroit was long able to boast unparalleled economic growth. During the 1920s, one skyscraper was built after another; department stores and palatial cinemas lined the streets. It is no wonder that the number of inhabitants rose from 285,700 to 1.85 million between 1900 and 1950.
In 1950 the growth of Detroit came to a sudden end. The gigantic factories were decentralised, partly for strategic military reasons, partly owing to the drift, of white people especially, to the suburbs. As a consequence of the oil crisis of 1973 and increasing competition from foreign manufactures, Chrysler, Ford and General Motors suffered immense losses. They reacted by closing their old works in favour of new facilities, many of which were set up in countries where wages were much lower. Between 1970 and 1980 alone, Detroit lost 208,000 jobs.
Retailers were also attracted to suburbia. The Northland Shopping Centre, the first of its sort in the world, had been opened in Detroit in 1953. By 1958, there were twenty such places, half of which were sited in the inner city. Twenty-five years later, there was not one single shopping centre to be found in the city centre.
The suburbanization of Detroit took place against a background marked not only by the rise of the car, but also by racial tension. With the upturn in car production following the end of the Second World War, more and more black people came to Detroit to work. During the nineteen-forties and nineteen-fifties, the black population swelled from 150,000 to 500,000. The greater part lived in the poor neighbourhoods on the lower East-side. The working class whites who lived there were not willing to accommodate the newcomers’ way of life. Blacks for neighbours? They would rather move out to the suburbs. In 1998, 78 percent of those living in the suburbs were white, while 79 percent of those in the inner city were black. At this time, the average income in the metropolitan area was almost double that in the inner city.
The suburbanisation of Detroit was dramatic. Whilst the 127 boroughs of the metropolitan area prospered, the inner city gradually began to decay. Between 1978 and 1998, 108,000 buildings were demolished in Detroit, while only 9,000 new applications for building permits were granted. In some streets, Detroit resembles a ghost town.
Nowadays, one third of the entire city area lies derelict. Street signs are rusting away. Grass grows over the pavements. Stray dogs roam in packs. Visitors to Detroit should prepare themselves for dystopian scenery. The city’s blatant decline found its way into textbooks on town planning long ago. Despite all this, attempts at re-urbanization are still undertaken: in the Seventies, the Renaissance Centre, which failed in this respect, and in the Nineties, Greek Town, which succeeded.
For some years now, new investment has been flowing into the centre of downtown – modestly, but steadily. Now that the social and political tension between the inner city and the metropolitan area has died down, Detroit can capitalize on its old title of “Motor City”, in individual cases – but it is only downtown that a slow urban recovery is being registered. In the inner city, in contrast, the decline is progressing apace. Here and there, secure estates of detached homes are springing up: suburbia is taking over the inner city.
Ivanovo: a city in postsocialist transformation
niko.21 with Nils Emde ‘Orbit Palast – Indications for Types and Spaces of Released Time, Courtesty Shrinking Cities
Although population shrinkage first occurred in the richest and most developed Western countries, the collapse of socialist regimes in Eastern Europe heralded an unprecedented urban crisis. Traditional industrial regions could not compete on the open market and collapsed, causing a mass migration to western countries and weakening the urban populations at home. This process was paralleled by a sudden drop in birth rates and life expectancies, due to deterioration of medical care and individual desperation causing increasing problems of alcoholism and suicide.
Over night cities lost their economic and demographic foundations. While the so-called Transformation Countries included about 20 major cities with decreasing populations during the 1980s, the number rose to more than 200 in the 1990s! In Russia the number of shrinking cities with more than 100.000 inhabitants rose from 7 to 93. In some countries, such as Russia, the Ukraine and Hungary shrinking cities rose far above the number of non-shrinking cities and population losses exceeded the remaining population increments.
Ivanovo lies almost three hundred kilometres north-east of Moscow. It has 448,000 inhabitants and is the capital of a district of the same name, with a population of 1.1 million. The industrialisation of Ivanovo began early in the eighteenth century, when the first textile manufacturing works were founded there. At the end of the nineteenth century, production grew dramatically, as did the labour movement. Some of the most important events of the Russian Revolution of 1905 took place in Ivanovo; the first “soviet” was set up here. Around 1935, the city became the Soviet Union’s main centre for the manufacture of clothing. The economy flourished. This growth, however, brought the problems inherent on monostructures ever closer.
Shrinking cites are a symptom of global processes, which give rise to new patterns of urban development and an escalating polarisation of urban growth and shrinkage
As early as the nineteen-forties, the region of Ivanovo began to suffer from a lack of investment of any sort, because the Five-Year Plans of the USSR concentrated all resources on the development of heavy industry. The textile branch became increasingly side-lined as a result. The siting of new mechanical engineering works in the region’s capital city during the nineteen-fifties was due not least to the lack of work for men in the textile factories.
After 1990, however, the industrial monostructure became the area’s downfall. Like many other manufacturing plants, Ivanovo’s large, fully-automated “8th March Textile Factory” was closed down; its buildings were converted into a shopping mall. These days, both official and unofficial unemployment figures are high. The number of inhabitants, who mostly live in vast, pre-fabricated housing estates, has dropped by 5.8 percent. In some towns and villages in the area, almost one-fifth of the populace moved away.
Since then, the region has experienced a sharp decline in the birth rate, while more people are dying than before. Women make up 55 percent of Ivanovo’s population: a fairly high proportion. Since they live, on average, for ten years longer than men do, this figure will probably increase. Ivanovo cannot compensate for its loss of inhabitants by attracting people from the villages and towns of the surrounding area. Migrants from the former Soviet republics in the south, or from Asia, are not welcome.
Shrinkage, albeit concealed, could thus have been observed in Ivanovo even back then. It was not until the end of the Soviet Union, however, that the city fell headlong into an unprecedented economic crisis, which hit the textile industry especially hard. The supply of cotton from Uzbekistan ceased. Sales faltered, because the market was suddenly open to clothing suppliers from Western Europe and the Far East. The drastic ‘transition’ from a centralised economy to a free market one led to a slump in the volume of production: in 1998, it was only 22 percent of what it had been in 1989. It did, however, rise strongly again towards the end of the Nineties. The main reason for all these developments was that in post-communist Russia, the manufacture of textiles and machinery counted for little; economic prosperity was provided only by the telecommunications industry and the exploitation of natural resources. The large manufacturing plants of the Ivanovo region suffered from this shift of emphasis. Since then, they have only been able to run at a small fraction of their full capacity. In order not to lose their status as employees, which guarantees only a minimum of medical and social care, many men and women continue, on paper, to work for these businesses, which are deep in debt. Their salary is so low, however, that it can not pay for their daily needs. Although dachas had never merely been places to relax in at weekends, fruit and vegetables from their own gardens became essential for survival for 60 percent of Ivanovo’s population during the Nineties. There is a great deal of personal initiative and the community is close-knit. The importance of this was long evidenced by numerous kiosks and stalls – and the large bazaars that grew up at crossroads and railway crossings, appropriating wide, empty spaces for trade.
Conclusion
photo ©Rainer Jordan, project Sofie Thorsen ‘Village Guided Tours’, courtesy Shrinking Cities
Today more than 500 major cities in more than 100 countries are losing inhabitants.
We can assume that the process of urban shrinkage will continue. Many countries, especially in Central and Eastern Europe are expecting population decline for the next decades. Economic transformation, suburbanization and demographic changes will continue, not only in developed countries. Indicators like growing unemployment, recession or falling birth rates are having a considerable impact on cities of developing countries.
After the accelerated growth of European cities during the period of industrialization, urbanization has entered a new phase. Shrinking cities are not the end of urbanization, since urban populations are expected to increase in many regions, especially developing countries. Shrinking cites are rather a symptom of global processes, which give rise to new patterns of urban development and an escalating polarisation of urban growth and shrinkage.
