Abstract
Since the 1980s and 1990s, many metropolitan areas in North America and Europe have registered population growth within the urban core, driven primarily by younger, better-educated and higher-income people – a phenomenon often referred to as ‘urban renaissance’ or ‘re-urbanization’. To date, the research on this topic has primarily focused on the socio-spatial implications, especially with the type and intensity of displacement pressures affecting low-income households. Demographic manifestations of this have rarely been explicitly targeted by empirical studies. This paper addresses the change of intra-regional age structures in metro areas that have witnessed a demographic revival of their core areas. It hypothesizes that an increasing segregation by age is a universal pattern of urban demographic change in advanced Western countries. With data for six German and US metro areas over a period of 20 years (1990–2010), strong evidence for this proposition was found: in all regions, the urban core became ‘younger’ over time, whereas the ageing of the population was more dynamic in suburban areas. However, the analysis also revealed transatlantic differences: whereas a kind of ‘childless’ urban renaissance can be posited for the American cities, families in Germany were at least partially involved in the process of densification of inner-city areas. The analysis provides evidence for a general trend towards re-urbanization and age segregation in regions of both countries. At the same time, re-urbanization is assessed as a strongly context-dependent development with distinctly varying socio-spatial characteristics.
Highlights
‘Do cities need kids?’ – in the February 2015 issue of Governing Magazine, Alan Greenblatt used this provocative title for his article on gentrification in Seattle, Washington
The demographic change of inner-city areas could be seen as an integral part of an increasing age-based segregation at metropolitan and regional levels.The rejuvenation in inner-city areas stands in contrast to the trends of ageing (‘greying’) in suburbia (Bundesministerium für Verkehr, Bau und Stadtentwicklung (BMVBS), 2013; Nelson, 2013)
The calculated ring-zone statistics for the six selected metro areas show that the highest growth rates in the American regions during both decades were overwhelmingly found in the outer suburban zone, which suggests sustained suburbanization (Table 2)
Summary
‘Do cities need kids?’ – in the February 2015 issue of Governing Magazine, Alan Greenblatt used this provocative title for his article on gentrification in Seattle, Washington. Since the 1980s and 1990s, many cities in advanced capitalist societies have registered population growth within their urban core, driven primarily by younger, better-educated and higher-income people (Birch, 2005; Bromley, Tallon & Roberts, 2007; Florida, 2013; Haase et al, 2010; Juday, 2015; Moos, 2015; Van Criekingen, 2010) These contemporary forms of demographic and socio-spatial transformation, which are often referred to as ‘urban renaissance’ or ‘re-urbanization’ or ‘urban resurgence’ – in the following we only use the term ‘re-urbanization’ – have been both welcomed and critically reflected by urban scholars. Until the 1980s, these studies came to the conclusion in both European and North American urban regions that
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