Journal article
Urban shrinkage with Chinese characteristics
- Abstract:
- This study exposes and maps a hitherto little‐known dimension of China's urban geography – that of shrinkage, directly affecting one in 10 of its cities. Urban shrinkage is revealed to be a growing concern for the most populous country on earth, with the absolute number of shrinking cities rising by 71% from 164 in the 1990s to 281 in the 2000s. By developing its own definition of the city as an urban area (UA) in the Chinese political‐administrative context, this paper builds a morphologic taxonomy of China's shrinking cities. This reveals the overall net population loss across Chinese shrinking cities more than doubling since 1990, reaching 7.3 million inhabitants in 2010. Sixty‐eight Chinese UAs, mostly in north‐eastern China, are found to have been shrinking continuously since 1990. Despite the multifaceted and entangled make‐up of urban shrinkage, the paper identifies four distinct causes of this geographical phenomenon in China: (1) state‐incubated reindustrialisation and economic restructuring, impacting upon 63% of all shrinking UAs; (2) the country's new economic geography, with the underlying centripetal forces of agglomeration pushing around 34% of all shrinking cities towards marginalisation; (3) state‐propelled demographic change, leading to natural population decline in 26% of Chinese shrinking cities; and (4) state‐sponsored mega‐shrinkage, responsible for urban population loss in almost 20% of all the cases. This study further provides a theoretically informed reflection on the peculiarity of shrinkage in China and its public policy implications.
- Publication status:
- Published
- Peer review status:
- Peer reviewed
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(Preview, Version of record, pdf, 781.7KB, Terms of use)
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- Publisher copy:
- 10.1111/geoj.12266
Authors
- Publisher:
- John Wiley & Sons Ltd
- Journal:
- Geographical Journal More from this journal
- Volume:
- 184
- Issue:
- 4
- Pages:
- 398-412
- Publication date:
- 2018-08-06
- Acceptance date:
- 2018-05-26
- DOI:
- EISSN:
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1475-4959
- ISSN:
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0016-7398
- Keywords:
- Pubs id:
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pubs:854037
- UUID:
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uuid:4048d139-8c6c-481f-add6-10f41cefc4e3
- Local pid:
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pubs:854037
- Source identifiers:
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854037
- Deposit date:
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2018-05-26
- ARK identifier:
Terms of use
- Copyright holder:
- Li and Mykhnenko
- Copyright date:
- 2018
- Notes:
-
Copyright © 2018 The Authors. The Geographical Journal published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of Royal Geographical Society (with the Institute of British Geographers).
This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
- Licence:
- CC Attribution (CC BY)
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