Abstract
Urban shrinkage has become a common pathway (not only) in post-socialist cities, which represents new challenges for traditionally growth-oriented spatial planning. Though in the post-socialist area, the situation is even worse due to prevailing weak planning culture and resulting uncoordinated development. The case of the city of Ostrava illustrates how the problem of (in)efficient infrastructure operation, and maintenance, in already fragmented urban structure is exacerbated by the growing size of urban area (through low-intensity land-use) in combination with declining size of population (due to high rate of outmigration). Shrinkage, however, is, on the intra-urban level, spatially differentiated. Population, paradoxically, most intensively declines in the least financially demanding land-uses and grows in the most expensive land-uses for public administration. As population and urban structure development prove to have strong inertia, this land-use development constitutes a great challenge for a city’s future sustainability. The main objective of the paper is to explore the nexus between change in population density patterns in relation to urban shrinkage, and sustainability of public finance.
Highlights
The study of the urban shrinkage process has ranked among established research areas in a number of scientific disciplines [1,2,3,4,5,6,7]
The demographic decline during the first monitored period in Ostrava (1991–2001) was relatively weak at the micro-level (−3.46%), the population density changes were relatively weak. Their development was greatly influenced by inherited patterns from centrally planned economy, with the first transition years being characterized by a relatively low unemployment rate, a decline in construction due to real price growth, and real income decline and by gradual development of supportive instruments of the housing supply
The largest decline in population density was recorded in the historic city center and some resurrecting basic settlement units (BSUs) in the inner city corresponding to the organic urban structure and the urban block structure
Summary
The study of the urban shrinkage process has ranked among established research areas in a number of scientific disciplines [1,2,3,4,5,6,7]. Shrinkage has affected 40% of medium-sized and large cities in Europe ten years ago [8] and 70% in Central and Eastern Europe [9], today it seems that some of the previously shrinking cities are gradually succeeding in mitigating or countering this process [7]. Urban shrinkage represents a complex open-ended process [12]. Rich empirical evidence suggests that there are cases in social reality where the urban shrinkage process shows both positive and negative effects [13]. Finding adequate local policy responses is, still rather rare [14,15], the shrinkage presents many specific challenges for sustainability [16,17,18]
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