Compare methods

	Neighborhood Effects Analysis	Shrinking Cities Analysis
Field	Urban Studies	Urban Studies
Family	Process / pipeline	Process / pipeline
Year of origin	2002	2014
Originator	Robert J. Sampson (and the Chicago neighbourhood-effects tradition)	Shrinking Cities research network; Haase, Rink, Grossmann, Bernt, Mykhnenko (synthesis)
Type	Pipeline for estimating the contextual/causal effect of neighbourhood on individual outcomes	Descriptive pipeline for analysing urban population and economic decline, vacancy, and right-sizing
Seminal source	Sampson, R. J., Morenoff, J. D., & Gannon-Rowley, T. (2002). Assessing "neighborhood effects": Social processes and new directions in research. Annual Review of Sociology, 28, 443–478.	Haase, A., Rink, D., Grossmann, K., Bernt, M., & Mykhnenko, V. (2014). Conceptualizing urban shrinkage. Environment and Planning A, 46(7), 1519–1534.
Aliases	Neighbourhood Effects Modelling, Contextual Effects Analysis, Multilevel Neighbourhood Analysis, Place Effects Estimation	Urban Shrinkage Analysis, Urban Decline Analysis, Right-Sizing Analysis, Depopulation Analysis
Related	4	4
Summary	Neighborhood effects analysis estimates how much the place a person lives — its poverty, social cohesion, disorder, or institutions — shapes individual outcomes such as health, crime, educational attainment, and economic mobility, over and above the individual's own characteristics. It is dominated by multilevel (hierarchical) models that recognise people are nested within neighbourhoods, separating variation that lies between places from variation within them. The central methodological challenge, crystallised in Robert Sampson and colleagues' influential 2002 review, is distinguishing genuine contextual effects from selection bias: the fact that people do not sort into neighbourhoods at random.	Shrinking cities analysis is the study of cities and neighbourhoods that are losing population and economic activity, tracing the demographic decline, job loss, housing vacancy, and infrastructural over-capacity that follow, and the 'right-sizing' planning responses they provoke. It treats shrinkage not as the temporary failure of a growth path but as a distinct, often persistent urban trajectory requiring its own descriptive tools. The conceptual synthesis by Haase and colleagues in 2014 frames urban shrinkage as a multidimensional process linking population loss, economic restructuring, and changes in the built environment.