Speaker
Description
The debate on shrinking cities illustrates the idea of growth dependency of urban development. The growth theory rewards places with particular neoliberal economy features. Big metropolitan areas have intensified, while smaller cities lacking those features are left behind, which creates geographic winners and losers. That reality highlights another common outcome from population decline: spatial inequality, which could be linked to further economic decline in many cases. The disparity between the center and periphery is a central question in the case of shrinking cities (Mallach, 2023). South Korea, as one of the countries with rapid population decline, has gotten the consequences and become especially severe, threatening the quality of life of the remaining residents.
Attempts have been made to ignite economic growth in these shrinking cities; however not all cities would likely recover through the traditional “pro-growth” strategies, especially small-medium cities (Lim, 2017). For example, proposing urban regeneration projects is commonly found to revive the decaying city center in depopulating cities with the hope to attract more people, but with little to no avail. On the other hand, policies related to reforming public services & land use and relocating residents did not appear much for consideration in municipal comprehensive plans (Lee, 2023). This circumstance may reflect a reluctance among planners and politicians due to them being controversial and progressive measures, despite the potential to address fundamental challenges in shrinking cities. Therefore, this study seeks to gain evidence of disparity issues in the shrinking issues to prove the urgency for a strong role of long-term strategic land policy rather than instrumental activism.
This study first investigates the spatial and social disparities between city centers and peripheries in shrinking cities, with a focus on uneven development as a key driver of inequality. The quality of life of residents will be reflected through the quality of their surrounding environment. Utilizing the emerging potential of street view images with machine learning models, this study will analyze the changes of the built environment quality over the years between the center and the periphery. Place pulse 2.0 dataset is used to derive human perception variables from an urban scene through street images, in addition to other socioeconomic measures such as GDP, employment rates, housing density, land use mix and accessibility to amenities. Furthermore, building on prior findings that revealed disparities in perceived quality between these areas, this research then explores the potential of compact city principles as a solution by scenario modeling to assess the feasibility and trade-offs of strategies such as densification, improved transit, and mixed-use development. Overall, the study integrates GIS-based spatial analysis, perception score comparisons, economic data, and comprehensive city plan to identify disparities and evaluate compact city interventions. The findings aim to provide evidence-based recommendations for applying compact city principles in shrinking cities, which is particularly relevant to the present and future of shrinking cities in South Korea.
References
Lee, Sukjin et al. (2023) Comprehensive plan assessment of Korean shrinking cities toward smart decline, Journal of the Urban Design Institute of Korea Urban Design, 24 (6), pp.183-202.
Lim, HB (2017) Urban planning using shrinking city in population declining age, Journal of the Korean Urban Management Association, 30 (2), pp.87-114.
Mallach, Allan (2023) Smaller cities in a shrinking world. Island Press.
| Best Congress Paper Award | No |
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