Abstract
Manifested by population loss, shrinking cities are currently under heated discussion in the developed countries. The emerging shrinking cities in developing world, however, have not attracted enough attention. This paper focuses on the shrinking cities in China, where has been witnessed fast economic growth, rapid urban expansion, and massive urbanization in the last decades. By collecting and analyzing township-level demographic data of the Census in 2000 and 2010, we identified 180 shrinking cities. We then classified them into two sets of categories based on their causalities and spatial patterns of depopulation, respectively. Despite their great quantity, shrinking cities are largely disregarded by China’s planners and local authorities during the plan-making process. We conceptualized the causalities of the disregard into the systematic paradox and technological paradox, both of which are the effects of a combination of China’s specific planning system, land marketization, cadre promotion system, and the national urbanization policy. We then further conceptualize the overwhelming growth-oriented paradigm into a vicious cycle that continuously exacerbates oversupply of the built environment in shrinking cities. This paper ends with a discussion of appealing for more attention on shrinking cities in China and a paradigm shift from the growth-oriented planning, as well as the future research agenda for shrinking cities’ research in China.
Ying Long and Shuqi Gao contributed equally to this chapter.
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- 1.
The information of Chinese cities from spatial entity dimension (urbanized areas) and functional dimension (e.g., functional urban areas) is not open in China officially, and we use the administrative cities as the study area and object of this paper. We admit that identifying shrinking cities using the cities defined from spatial entity or functional dimension is more feasible.
- 2.
As what we have mentioned in Sect. 1.4.3, almost all identified shrinking cities in China have experienced increased economy during 2000–2010. Therefore, it is not feasible to incorporate economy factors into the identification of shrinking cities in China at the current stage.
- 3.
We admit that the inconsistent between spatial entity of a city and the administrative area of a city (city proper). Generally, a city proper contains several natural cities if we refer to the USA or EU definition on a city. In this paper, we do not challenge the definition of a city in China and still use the administrative-oriented city proper.
- 4.
For more information, please visit https://www.beijingcitylab.com/ranking/.
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Long, Y., Gao, S. (2019). Shrinking Cities in China: The Overall Profile and Paradox in Planning. In: Long, Y., Gao, S. (eds) Shrinking Cities in China. The Urban Book Series. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-2646-2_1
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