Shrinking and Non-Global Cities: Similarities and Differences

Abstract

The concept of shrinking cities has become well-known among both scientists and practitioners in urban planning and design. Basically, shrinking cities experience many downturn trends due to structural problems in local economy. The most notorious trend is certainly population shrinkage, by which the concept got this name two decades ago. The other ones, such as a brain drain, limited employment opportunities or population ageing, are not less problematic for the future urban prospects, too. Nevertheless, the focus in the current research on shrinking cities has changed last decade. The overall focus on the effects of deindustrialisation has slowly receded to other subtopics related to various socio-economic constraints, such as relation between regional and urban shrinkage, suburbanisation vs. central city development, spatial peripherality, etc. Many such new subtopics touch the huge theme of globalisation and global cities, as well as connected topics of spatial networking, centrality, and multi-layer connectivity. Interestingly, the opposite phenomenon – non-global cities – has not been adequately addressed within it despite the most of cities globally belongs to this group. This research is dedicated to explain the term of non-global cities as a new paradigm in urban studies and tries to link it with the phenomenon of shrinking cities. The comparison of the tenets of shrinking cities are compared with the general elements of non-global cities to fi nd the main similarities and differences between them, enshrining additionally the phenomenon of non-global cities. The conclusion of this research reveals that both of them, although present independent concepts, overlap in the certain regional and typological contexts.