WE ARE TAUGHT TO BUILD, BUT DO WE KNOW HOW TO TEAR CITIES DOWN? EUROPEAN URBAN SOCIETIES ADAPTATIONS TO THE SHRINKING CITIES PHENOMENON

Abstract

While much attention is paid to urban development and to what is being built in general, much lesser notice has been given to the opposite phenomenon. While some cities are growing rapidly, many others are experiencing a population decline for various reasons. These include economic, environmental, and social changes to which urban societies and structures have to adapt. Significant outflow of population and decreasing population density are symptoms of these cities’ structural crisis. As a result, local urban centers are reorganized and parts of residential districts are demolished. The paper analyzes the neighborhoods of selected European cities in which a significant demolition of residential structures has taken place over the last 30 years and seeks to find the parameters that characterize the affected areas and embody the nature of „what and why“ we demolish in our cities today. On the other hand, it is looking for characteristics that make these places different from one another. It also compares resulting quality of the respective areas after their adaptation to the new situation. The paper focuses mainly (but not only) on the physical impact of shrinkage on the selected cities structures and seeks for evidence and reasons of different vigour of studied phenomenon in diverse neighborhoods of cities. We achieve it through comparing variables related to shrinkage in 3 selected European cities. The selected variables are demographic (population trends), spatial (demolition rates, distribution within the city relative to the urban structure) and specific local conditions (urban policies, ownership). The comparison shows a wide range of conceptualised approaches to shrinkage, with housing tenure and the openness of urban policies to shrinkage emerging as key factors, although it should be noted that even these do not always lead to clearly better results, as the problem of shrinkage is not purely urban based and thus cannot be solved by purely urban planning methods.