Urban shrinkage in a developing context: Rethinking China's present and future trends

Abstract

While many studies have investigated urban shrinkage in Chinese cities, most have used political-administrative boundaries rather than urban entities to examine population change. This results in an inaccurate picture of urban shrinkage and, more importantly, an inadequate understanding of its underlying mechanism. This study utilized land-use data to identify the urban entity boundary of a city, and then employed the Suomi National Polar-orbiting Partnership-Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite (NPP-VIIRS) nightlight data as a proxy to estimate urban population change from 2012 to 2019. Next, a conceptual framework was developed from the perspective of migration processes and their transformation to explain current urban shrinkage and to explore future trends. We found that only about 6.3% of the sample cities experienced significant urban population shrinkage from 2012 to 2019, most of which were resource-based cities in the Northeast region. A lack of employment opportunities, stagnant economic growth, and low birth rate were important drivers of urban shrinkage. In contrast, low urbanization levels and the accompanying strong intra-regional rural-to-urban migration process can help prevent urban shrinkage and have contributed to the current low percentage of shrinking cities. However, urban shrinkage may increase in the future based on insights into the transformation of migration processes under the persistent unbalanced regional development and the increasing urbanization level. According to these findings, we suggest that, while urban expansion and related challenges may still be prioritized by Chinese policy makers, it is also necessary to promote the sustainable development of urbanization to deal with and prevent urban shrinkage.