Urban Shrinkage and Resilience in smaller settlements

Arkhangelsk (north-western Russia), Amagasaki (southern-central Japan), Detroit (Midwestern United States), Dresden (eastern Germany), Zabrze (south-western Poland) and Zaporizhzhia (eastern Ukraine) – cities all over the Northern Hemisphere are faced with three monumental challenges:
i) in the short-term, if they are to rise above the condition of fiscal austerity, they have to deal with the travails of restructuring their economies and discovering untapped community resources;
ii) in the medium term, these cities ought to be equipped to manage the pressures of an ageing and declining population and
iii) in the long run, the capacity and systemic resilience of the critical urban infrastructure must be enhanced to cope with potentially cataclysmic consequences of climate change.
Developing out of more than a decade of research on shrinkage and abandonment and building on the network of shrinking cities, this research project considers the role of resilience in experiences of shrinkage and specifically how shrinkage impacts at different scales of settlement and whether small towns and cities are more vulnerable to shock events such as abandonment. Within this there is a need to explore how definitions of resilience prescribe certain interventions and outcomes when compared to a framework of analysis based on sustainability. Social resilience emerges from the concept of self-reliance and therefore mitigation and adaptation responses may support particular governance arrangements or ideological positions.
Processes of localism, authenticity and gentrification leading to spatial segregation across industrialised and industrialising nation-states make this an important missing component in the research on shrinkage.

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