Shrinking Cities Analysis

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.