Compare methods

	Shrinking Cities Analysis	Gentrification Analysis
Field	Urban Studies	Urban Studies
Family	Process / pipeline	Process / pipeline
Year of origin	2014	1979
Originator	Shrinking Cities research network; Haase, Rink, Grossmann, Bernt, Mykhnenko (synthesis)	Ruth Glass (term, 1964); Neil Smith (rent-gap theory)
Type	Descriptive pipeline for analysing urban population and economic decline, vacancy, and right-sizing	Pipeline for detecting and measuring neighbourhood socioeconomic upgrading and displacement
Seminal source	Haase, A., Rink, D., Grossmann, K., Bernt, M., & Mykhnenko, V. (2014). Conceptualizing urban shrinkage. Environment and Planning A, 46(7), 1519–1534.	Smith, N. (1979). Toward a theory of gentrification: A back to the city movement by capital, not people. Journal of the American Planning Association, 45(4), 538–548.
Aliases	Urban Shrinkage Analysis, Urban Decline Analysis, Right-Sizing Analysis, Depopulation Analysis	Gentrification Measurement, Neighbourhood Upgrading Analysis, Rent Gap Analysis, Displacement Risk Analysis
Related	4	4
Summary	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.	Gentrification analysis is the set of methods used to detect, measure, and map the process by which a previously disinvested, lower-income neighbourhood is upgraded through an influx of capital and higher-status residents, often displacing the existing population. It typically combines repeated small-area census data on income, education, tenure, and rents with housing-market indicators to compute change indices that flag where socioeconomic status is rising fastest. Grounded in Neil Smith's 1979 rent-gap theory, the analysis frames gentrification as the reinvestment of capital in places where the gap between actual and potential land rent has grown large enough to be profitable.