Shrinking cities, the hidden challenge

This paper aims at casting light on the hidden challenge of shrinking cities. Its main hypothesis is that in the current debate on the effects of demographic change and city management shrinking cities are widely neglected but will be a major urbanization issue in the near future. The first part ’Growth and decline of cities’ presents and discusses world urbanization trends. Hereby the idea is to contrast trends of growing urbanization and population increase with the spreading phenomenon of shrinking cities. Furthermore the conditions for the rise and decline of cities are identified. Based on this more introductory part, the chapter ‘Cities with a past but no future?’ focuses on case studies of city shrinkage. Among the most often found cases in the literature, which are also highlighted in this paper are cities such as Detroit and Manchester.