Analysis of Demographic Changes in Urban Decline and Shrinkage

This chapter is aimed to analyse the implications that demographic changes have on urban decline and shrinkage in a global environment. The analysis departs from the assumption that deindustrialization restructuring and demographic suburbanization processes contribute to economic urban decline and shrinkage. After reviewing the evolution of urban decline and shrinkage framed on a methodological approach, the study analyses in detail the different factors involved in any demographic and urban decline and shrinkage. It is concluded that deindustrialization restructuring, demographic decline, and suburbanization processes are crucial in urban shrinkage.

Urban Social Hauntings: Disappearing Gravestone Murals in Gentrifying Brooklyn

This article concerns the disappearance of gravestone (or “rest in peace”) murals in gentrifying Brooklyn, New York. Social hauntings reveal the unresolved violence of Black disposability and dispossession, as it manifests in the urban landscape in periods of urban decline and gentrification; gravestone murals are forms of “wake work” that attend to social haunting, accounting for Black life and death in urban place. This article first considers the wake work of gravestone murals, that they are memorials, archives of collective memory, spaces of worldmaking, and resistance to anti-Black violence. Because gravestone murals illustrate how Black people produce meaning in the urban landscape, they are also forms of Black spatial production. The article then explores the emergence of newer, stylized murals as aesthetic commodities that bring social and economic value to urban space, while commodifying Black life and death. The disappearance of gravestone murals, a visual record of the urban crisis, indicates the transformation of Black urban space in the 21st century.

Refugee Arrival under Conditions of Urban Decline: From Territorial Stigma and Othering to Collective Place-Making in Diverse Shrinking Cities?

Places affected by urban shrinkage are widely depicted as left behind places characterized by decline and decay. Refugees are generally constructed as victims or ‘dangerous other’. Hence, place-making and negotiations of belonging in shrinking cities are accompanied by multiple layers of stigmatization. Despite this contextual factor and even though many questions related to inter-group relations in shrinking cities are still unanswered, refugee-centered revitalization of shrinking cities is being discussed among city officials, planners and in the scientific community. This paper investigates local discourses on urban shrinkage and refugee arrival as contextual factors for negotiations of place and belonging, and connects to previous studies on the stigmatization of declining cities and the othering of refugees. It uses Nayak’s (2019) concept of re-scripting narratives to analyze whether acts of re-writing apply not only to stigmatizations of place, but marginalized groups as well. The paper finds that while dominant discourses on place are contested and at times re-scripted by local actors, discourses which construct refugees as other are reaffirmed. Confirming previous findings according to which stigma was passed on to other marginalized groups, it concludes that there is a need to consider dominant discourses and their negative impact on social cohesion in debates around refugee-centered revitalization.

Reimagining urban success: rhythms of activity at Gabii, 800 BC–AD 600

The ancient city of Gabii—an Italian polity of the first millennium BC and a peer to early Rome—has often been presented as an example of urban decline, a counterpoint to Rome's rise from a collection of hilltop huts to a Mediterranean hegemon. Here the authors draw on the results from recent excavations at Gabii that challenge such simplistic models of urban history. Diachronic evidence documenting activity at the site over the course of 1400 years highlights shifting values and rhythms materialised in the maintenance, transformation and abandonment of different urban components. This complex picture of adaptation and resilience provides a model of ancient urbanism that calls into question outdated narratives of urban success and failure.

Editorial for Special Issue “Nature-Based Solutions (NBS) in Cities and Their Interactions with Urban Land, Ecosystems, Built Environments and People: Debating Societal Implications”

Today’s cities increasingly serve as the nexus between nature and people in times of strong urban growth and, in some cases, urban decline [...]