Shrinking cities South/North

Abstract

In the late 1980s, urban decline and the shrinking of urban economies were identified as relatively recent phenomena inherent to industrialized

countries. It was also diagnosed as coinciding with the end of industrial- ization (Clark, 1989). Although these assessments may have been correct

for Anglo-American and European cities -as illustrated by Detroit, Berlin, Liverpool or Manchester- this conventional wisdom has been challenged by research documenting that the "shrinking cities" phenomenon's scope and geography are global despite different causes and specific manifestations. This view has been advanced by a variety of groups such as the Shrinking Cities Project of the German Federal Cultural Foundation (Oswalt, 2006) and the Shrinking Cities International Research Network (SCiRN) founded in 2004 at the University of California, Berkeley in the United States. Collectively these groups' initiatives, including this volume, aim to shed light on the global dimensions of a phenomenon which, until recently, was

believed to be a rich nation's isolated incident of localized urban misfor- tune that could be reversed given the right planning interventions and the

right amount of federal assistance. The intractable decline and relentless depopulation of certain cities in the US, Japan, and Western and Eastern Europe have stimulated scholarly research into causal explanations and new ways of understanding urban decline beyond classic formulations. In

the midst ofthis search, which is by no means complete or conclusive, "ur- ban shrinkage" has acquired a new meaning connoting a variety of urban

afflictions, challenges, and opportunities and has encompassed a global, transnational scope.