Abstract:

With the slowdown in China’s urban growth, urbanization has entered a mature age, which makes shrinking cities a serious problem. This paper reviews the concept of shrinking cities and the transformation of the urban cognition. We discuss the shrinking cities phenomenon from the view of the spatial evolution of the population, as well as the trends of urban development. We obtained the following results. First, in industrial and post-industrial societies, once a city shrinks, it is difficult to “revive”, which means the expectation of “small but beautiful” and “thin but strong” cities is limited to utopian imagination. Second, there are two basic limitations of China’s current urban planning: the mismatch between urban planning and urban development, and the failure of planner-stakeholders to guide urban planning in an objective and scientific way. Finally, from the perspective of the state, this paper suggests a way of dealing with a large number of cities entering the shrinking stage: i) ideological understanding towards urban shrinkage should be changed from passive to active; ii) the Household Registration System should allow for the free right of migration; and, iii) in order to make the market play a fundamental role in city shrinking, it is suggested to focus on the development of the Market Economy, establish an incentive mechanism for wealth creation, and a basic Social Insurance System that covers all citizens while strengthening the protection of property rights.

Key words: shrinking cities, scale effect, urban planning, city governance