What we talk about when we talk about shrinking cities: The ambiguity of discourse and policy response in the United States

Abstract

Although United States cities began to shrink in large numbers as early as the 1950s, the shrinking city discourse was obscured by the overriding “urban crisis” narrative, and did not emerge until much later, in the late the 1990s and 2000s. Rather than trigger national policy change, however, the discourse became the starting point for local action, epitomized in the efforts to address widespread housing abandonment through land banks and greening strategies, spearheaded by an informal alliance of local officials and both local and national sources of expertise, largely outside academia. At the same time, the term ‘shrinking city’ was widely seen as problematic outside scholarly circles, and a major element of the discourse was the ongoing search for acceptable terminology to refer to the class of shrinking cities. In the final analysis, however, the association of growth with success and shrinkage with failure in the urban lexicon remains largely unchallenged.