Smaller Cities in a Shrinking World: Learning to Thrive Without Growth

By Alan Mallach

Over the past hundred years, the global motto has been “more, more, more” in terms of growth – of population, of the built environment, of human and financial capital, and of all manner of worldly goods. This was the reality as the world population boomed during the 1960s and 1970s. But reality is changing in front of our eyes. Growth is already slowing down, and according to the most sophisticated demographers, the earth’s population will begin to decline not hundreds of years from now, but within the lifetimes of many of the people now living on the planet.
 
In Smaller Cities in a Shrinking World, urban policy expert Alan Mallach seeks to understand how declining population and economic growth, coupled with the other forces that will influence their fates, particularly climate change, will affect the world’s cities over the coming decades. What will it mean to have a world full of shrinking cities? Does it mean that they are doomed to decline in more ways than simply population numbers, or can we uncouple population decline from economic decay, abandoned buildings and impoverishment?
 
Mallach has spent much of the last thirty or more years working in, looking at, thinking, and writing about shrinking cities—from Trenton, New Jersey, where he was director of housing and economic development, to other American cities like Detroit, Flint, and St. Louis, and from there to cities in Japan and Central and Eastern Europe. He has woven together his experience, research, and analysis in this fascinating, realistic yet hopeful look at how smaller, shrinking cities can thrive, despite the daunting challenges they face.
 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Island Press
• Release date: Jun 13, 2023
• ISBN: 9781642832280

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SMALLER CITIES IN A SHRINKING WORLD

Learning to Thrive without Growth

Alan Mallach

Washington

Covelo

© 2023 Alan Mallach

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means without permission in writing from the publisher: Island Press, 2000 M Street, NW, Suite 480-B, Washington, DC 20036-3319.

Library of Congress Control Number: 2022946266

All Island Press books are printed on environmentally responsible materials.

Manufactured in the United States of America

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Generous support for the publication of this book was provided by Furthermore: a program of the J. M. Kaplan Fund.

Keywords: capitalism; climate change; community ecosystem; demographic change; Eastern Europe; economic conditions; economic stability; fertility rate; geopolitical risk; Germany; green infrastructure; immigration; industrial base; Japan; land use; local economy; localized resilience; migration; networked localism; political instability; The Population Bomb; population decline; social stability; sustainability; technological change; urban greening; vacant property; White flight

ISBN-13: 978-1-6428-3228-0 (electronic)

CONTENTS

Preface and Acknowledgments

Introduction: The End of Growth

1. The Past, Present, and Future Shrinking City: A Historical Overview

2. Demography as Destiny: Beyond the Demographic Transition

3. A Restless Species: Migration and the Fate of Cities

4. Land and Buildings in the Shrinking City: Households, Vacant Properties, and the Urban Prairie

5. Social and Economic Conditions in the Shrinking City: The Effects of Population Decline

6. A Difficult Future: Three Global Challenges for the World’s Shrinking Cities

7. Embracing the End of Growth: Rethinking Cities in a Shrinking World

8. Thinner, Greener Cities: Greening the Urban Environment

9. Cities Are People: Building a Sustainable Social and Economic Environment

10. The Future of American Shrinking Cities: Can the United States Learn to Be a Smaller Country, and Can Cities Learn to Change?

11. Learning to Thrive in a Shrinking World: How Do We Get There?

Notes

About the Author

Index

PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I have spent much of the last thirty or more years of my life working in, looking at, and thinking and writing about shrinking cities. It has been a journey that has taken me from Trenton, New Jersey, where I was director of housing and economic development for eight years in the 1990s, to American cities like Detroit, Flint, and St. Louis, and from there to Europe and Japan. For most of that time, for all their fascinating features and challenges, I—and almost everyone else—tended to think of shrinking cities as anomalies. They were outliers in a world in which growth, of population, of GDP, of everything, was unquestioned as the normal state of twenty-first-century humankind.

Yet at some point I became aware that that was no longer the case. Economic and, especially, population growth were slowing down and were likely to do so even more in the future as the effects of climate change become more and more destructive. Like the valves and pistons of a huge, old-fashioned engine gradually running out of steam, the machinery of global growth was moving ever more slowly and haltingly. Growth will not end any time soon, but in a few decades, the only parts of the world where populations are still growing will be Africa and the Middle East, both regions at risk of devastation from climate change. The great age of growth is ending.

In a world of ever-slower growth, I realized, where one country after another is moving toward negative population growth, shrinking cities are no longer anomalies or outliers. In some countries, mostly in Eastern Europe and East Asia, they are increasingly becoming the norm. I found myself wondering about what this was likely to mean. After all, as I had learned over many years, shrinking was not simply a matter of arithmetic, especially in a world where growth was considered the cure for almost any social or economic ill. Population decline triggers a host of occasionally good but mostly problematic social, economic, and environmental consequences. What then will it mean to have a world full of shrinking cities? And does it mean that they are doomed to decline in more ways than simply population numbers, or can we uncouple population decline from economy decay and impoverishment?

These questions led me to decide to write this book. Other people are beginning to think about the effects of the leveling-off of global population, and the slowing—and eventual end—of growth. Some people have written cogent analyses of the emerging trends, while others with more ambitious streaks have begun to design new economic systems to replace capitalism, which they hope or expect to be relegated to Leon Trotsky’s dustbin of history. But people don’t live in the world, they live in places. And more and more of those places are going to be shrinking cities and their surrounding hinterlands. I wanted to zoom down from the global picture to the specific, to look at how cities would be affected by the larger changes around them and what they could do about it. For if there is one principle I believe in deeply it is that the people of the world’s cities are not simply pawns in the hands of larger forces but have more power than they may realize to shape their futures.

The past two years have been an adventure. As I started, I came to realize how much I needed to learn before I could even begin to do justice to this subject. I have immersed myself in demographics, migration, climate change, geopolitics, decentralized manufacturing technology, and a host of other subjects about which I knew just enough to realize how little I knew. But in the course of that exploration, as all of these pieces came together, I came to realize that cities and their regions could learn how to thrive and build a sustainable future without growth. That is the central message of this book.

Over the years, I have been blessed to have come to know and often become friends with many people who share my passion for cities, from whom I have learned far more than I can ever repay. I cannot list them all, but would like to single out, among many others equally worthy, Lavea Brachman, Michael Braverman, Charles Buki, John Gallagher, Bill Gilchrist, Marcia Nedland, Diane Sterner, and Todd Swanstrom. I am deeply grateful to Akilah Watkins and my colleagues at the Center for Community Progress for their encouragement and support, and to my many European colleagues, including Annegret Haase, Katrin Grossman, Thorsten Wiechmann, Susanna Frank, Jörg Plöger, Bogdan Nadolu, Gratian Mihailescu, Ewa Korcelli-Olejniczak, Gintarė Pociūtė, and many others. They have been my guides to important parts of the world with which few American scholars, or Americans of any stripe, can claim any familiarity.

I particularly want to thank friends who allowed me to use them as guinea pigs, either to test ideas I was thinking through or to read chapters of the book as they emerged, including Robert Adler, David Greene, David Herrstrom, John Shapiro, and above all Sarah Sieloff, who actually read and offered thoughtful, timely comments on every chapter. Thanks also to my editor, Heather Boyer, for her unflagging support and engagement. I know she had hoped I would finish the book sooner, but now that it is done, I hope that she will be pleased with the results.

Introduction

The End of Growth

For many of us who came of age between the 1960s and the 1990s, the population explosion and the future of the world were inseparable. And for many, Paul Ehrlich’s 1968 The Population Bomb, an impassioned jeremiad that opened with The battle to feed all of humanity is over, was the defining work of the time. In the 1970s and 1980s, he wrote, hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now.¹ To Ehrlich and many of his contemporaries, rapid population growth threatened not only the quality of life on the planet but the survival of human civilization.

Ehrlich’s starting point was a simple graph (figure I.1). Freed by modern medicine, sanitation, and technology from the restraints imposed by the famines, plagues, and endemic infant and child mortality that had limited world populations for thousands of years, humanity was reproducing out of control. Ehrlich was the most prominent of many observers who concluded that Malthus’s prophecies had finally come true and that if humanity was to survive, the exponential curve of population growth needed to be flattened, as he put it, hopefully through changes in our value system, but by compulsion if voluntary methods fail.²

Despite some dissenting voices, that conclusion set in motion a crusade, led by the United Nations, the World Bank, and a host of other governmental and nongovernmental bodies, to control population by whatever means necessary. The outcome was not only voluntary population control programs around the world but millions of forced sterilizations in 1970s India and the coercive one-child policy introduced by China in 1979.

Image: FIGURE I.1. World population, 1300 to 2000 c.e.

FIGURE I.1. World population, 1300 to 2000 c.e.

As the world was going, so were its cities. Cities were growing even faster, particularly in the Global South, as rural migrants flooded into the cities, and once-small cities exploded into megacities, surrounded by belts of struggling informal settlements where millions lived in crowded and unhealthy conditions. Cities like Lagos and Kinshasa, small cities of 200,000 and 300,000 in 1950, grew to four and five million, respectively, by 1990. Jakarta and Manila, already larger than one million in 1950, each held more than eight million people by 1990. To be a city was to grow, and to be a city in the Global South was to grow exponentially.

There is nothing factually incorrect about this picture. The world’s population was growing rapidly in the 1960s and 1970s, and millions were flocking to cities like New Delhi and São Paulo and forming vast shantytowns around those cities, albeit more often for economic than demographic reasons. But it was a fundamentally wrong picture, not because the facts were wrong but because of the way people understood and interpreted them. Rather than seeing this metastatic growth as a transitional moment, contingent on a host of social, economic, and other factors, they interpreted it as being the inevitable course of a humanity hell-bent on reproduction, relieved of the limiting factors that had once held back population growth. Without what Ehrlich called conscious regulation of human numbers,³ this course was all but universally seen as leading to disaster.

That way of defining our planet’s reality remains central to our thinking. That is not to fault the thinking of many intelligent, well-intended people in the 1960s and 1970s; after all, it is not easy to identify a transition when one is in the middle of it. But reality is changing in front of our eyes, and we are still largely caught up in ways of thinking that were instilled in us fifty or more years ago.

What has changed most fundamentally is that world population growth has slowed to a crawl and that according to the most sophisticated demographic analysts, the earth’s population will begin to decline, not hundreds of years from now but within the lifetime of many of the people now living on the planet. The only major part of the world in which this is not largely true is sub-Saharan Africa, which for various reasons is likely to continue to grow for many years even as most of the rest of the world’s population growth slows and eventually ends. And population growth has slowed for reasons that have little or nothing to do with any of the measures, coercive or otherwise, put in place by national governments and international agencies to control population. For reasons I discuss in chapter 2, this is not likely to be a transitional moment.

Yet we have a hard time acknowledging it. As Christopher Murray, one of those sophisticated analysts, who heads the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington, puts it, People are so caught up in the 1960s view of the population explosion, the threat of unbridled population growth, that I have found in the last couple of years, in talking to people, [outside a few countries] others just laugh this off. It couldn’t possibly be true, [they say] because they’ve been educated that they should be worried about the population explosion.⁴

The slowing of population growth and its impending reversal should not make anyone complacent about the existential risks posed to human society as we know it by climate change, desertification, sea level rise, and other anthropogenic changes to our world. They are real. But they are only in part a problem of population and in larger part a problem of consumption and extraction. Clearly, no one but a few technophiles and economists believes the earth’s carrying capacity is infinite, but that is not really at issue. Numerous experts agree that the earth is capable of more than adequately feeding, clothing, and housing the eight billion who live on our planet today, or the nine to ten billion who are likely to be here when global population peaks. As those same experts point out, however, that will not be possible if we continue to act the way we do today, with vast inequalities in access to resources and unsustainable levels of consumption, use of fossil fuels, and release of greenhouse gases and other pollutants. But that is a very different matter from the number of people on the earth.

Life on a shrinking planet calls for ways of thinking that are likely to be very different from those we are used to. For more than a hundred years, the global motto has been more, more, more. Economists, planners, public officials, and corporation executives have all looked at the world through a lens that assumes that growth—of population, of the built environment, of human and financial capital, and of all manner of worldly goods—is the natural and, leaving aside population numbers, desirable trajectory of humankind. That will change. Economic models and corporate strategies that assume continued population growth will have to be reconsidered. Fewer children will mean older populations and radical changes in the demand for goods and services. Although declining populations may make it easier to tackle some of our pressing environmental issues, they may also make it harder, if decline means increasing scarcity of financial resources and intensified struggles over a shrinking pie.

That the pie will shrink over the coming decades seems all but certain. Declining and aging populations will reduce demand and consumption. The effects of higher temperatures, sea level rise, and desertification, along with shrinking workforces in Europe and East Asia, will reduce productivity, nowhere more than in China, which will face traumatic social and demographic change over the next few decades. Continued geopolitical instability and the rise of nationalist and neofascist regimes around the world will undermine the global trade system on which the world’s prosperity has depended for decades. The likelihood that any of this could be significantly reversed by magical new technologies, Elon Musk notwithstanding, is remote.

But my intention in this book is not to explore global population and economic decline as such, except to set the stage for my real purpose, which is twofold.⁵ First, I describe how declining population and economic growth, coupled with the other forces that will influence their fates, particularly climate change, will affect the world’s cities, particularly its smaller cities, over the coming decades. Not only will cities’ populations decline along with everyplace else, but powerful migration trends will make declines highly uneven. Many cities will decline faster than their nations, while a smaller number of cities, mainly the largest ones, may keep growing, even where their nation’s population is in decline. We can already see this in Eastern Europe, where capital cities like Sofia in Bulgaria and Minsk in Belarus are growing even as their countries, and most of both countries’ smaller cities, are losing population. Second, I suggest a path by which smaller, shrinking cities can thrive in the future, despite population decline and its attendant challenges.

How we understand cities will change. We have long thought of cities and growth as inseparable, seeing cities as growth machines, in Harvey Molotch’s memorable formulation.⁶ Shrinking cities, especially in the United States, have been treated as outliers, perverse deviations from the norm of growth. Their decline has drawn attention from a gaggle of scholars, journalists, and filmmakers, a phenomenon dubbed ruin porn by some uncharitable observers. Over the coming decades, more cities will shrink and fewer will continue to grow. By 2100, most cities around the world will be shrinking cities. That will not yet be true in 2050, this book’s time horizon, but shrinking cities will no longer be deviations from the norm. They will increasingly be the norm.

Cities are important for many reasons. Over half of the world’s population lives in urban areas, and with continuing urbanization, that percentage will steadily rise over the coming decades. Cities have long been, and will continue to be, the economic and social engines of their nations and the world, generating economic activity, innovation, social ferment, and cultural creativity well beyond their share of the population. Since antiquity, they have also been the locus of opportunity and upward mobility for millions of people, a role they still play, for the tech-minded Millennial moving to a loft in Brooklyn or the struggling Indian farmer moving to a slum in Mumbai. These features are uniquely urban; in many respects, one could say that cities have evolved to be the means by which human beings could realize their capabilities. As go cities, so goes the world.

Thus, whether and how well cities thrive and continue to play their role in an era of declining population and whether and how they can remain sustainable, healthy entities in the midst of the climate change shocks of the coming decades is essential in terms of understanding how humanity can weather those shocks and adapt to new realities. By looking at how cities will be affected and can respond, we can move beyond the inevitable vagueness of conversations about how the world will respond, as if it were possible to envision the world as a single, organized, coherent entity in that sense. How the world fares over the coming decades will be the sum of how innumerable discrete entities rise or fail to rise to the challenge. Among the most important—perhaps the most important—are the world’s cities.

It is going to be a difficult proposition. Although shrinking cities have up to now been outliers from a global perspective, there have been and are more than enough, primarily in the United States and parts of Europe, to enable us to learn valuable lessons for the future. Those lessons should give us pause. Shrinkage is not simply a numerical adjustment. On the contrary. Although the dynamics of shrinkage vary widely from city to city and country to country, shrinkage triggers profound social, economic, physical, and behavioral damage, which affects a city’s vitality and its resilience in the face of future challenges. We need to understand those changes, and how they are likely to play out in the many cities that will lose population over the coming decades, if we are to learn how to build future resilience. To argue, as many environmentalists do, that population shrinkage is nothing more than a blessing that can easily be harnessed to facilitate the transition to a more environmentally sustainable world is pure wishful thinking.

This subject fits well with my own predilections as both scholar and activist. Throughout my career, while always interested in the big picture, I cannot stay there for long before feeling starved of intellectual oxygen. I am drawn to the specific and granular. I would like to know what is going on, say, in Pleven, a mid-sized Bulgarian city that has lost over a quarter of its population since 1992, or Siauliai, a Lithuanian city that has lost 30 percent of its people over the same period, to pick two of hundreds of possible examples. I would like to know what that loss of population has meant to those cities’ social, economic, and physical fabric, how they are likely to fare in the coming decades, and why local leaders in Siauliai are trying to figure out how to become a vital smaller city but those in Pleven are not.

This granularity also makes this subject infinitely more complicated. Trying to anticipate how global change will reverberate locally, at the level of geography where people live their lives, is both important and irresistibly fascinating. The cultural, political, and economic context and the physical form of Siauliai are vastly different from those of Pleven, even though they both share a post-Communist and European identity. They have more in common with each other, though, than either does with cities like Youngstown or Akron in the United States, or their shrinking counterparts in Japan, China, or Thailand. And yet all of these cities are facing similar challenges, and all can learn from one another’s achievements, missteps, and outright failures.

These cities’ futures will not be determined solely by what local actors do, however. What happens in their region, in their country, in the European Union, and in important ways, across the globe, will affect their ability to forge a successful path to a smaller, sustainable future. And yet, as I will discuss in these pages, local actors have an extraordinary opportunity to shape their cities’ futures and carve a path to remain vital in the midst of global decline.

The first three chapters of the book lay out the conditions and trends that provide the setting for my exploration of the future of shrinking cities. Chapter 1 opens with an overview of the history of shrinking cities and then provides a picture of the changes that are taking place and that will turn urban shrinkage into a global phenomenon, describing the scale and distribution of shrinking countries and cities, with illustrations from around the world. Chapter 2 looks at the demographic drivers of population change. I look at the reasons for and the effects of the global decline in fertility, changes in age structure, and other demographic shifts driving population decline and urban shrinkage, including the long-term global population prospects, the relationship between urbanization and demographic change, and why the trends driving lower fertility and shrinking populations are unlikely to be reversed.

Chapter 3 then looks at migration, the second principal driver of urban change. I look at migration within countries as well as international emigration and immigration, in order to understand how all of these trends affect different cities, regions, and countries and how these changes interact with the demographic shifts taking place at the same time. I also look at how different types of cities are affected differently and why certain cities, particularly small cities, are shrinking faster than others.

The next two chapters focus on the implications of population decline for cities, based on the experience of shrinking cities around the world up to now, and how shrinkage plays out differently in different countries with different physical, social, and economic environments. Chapter 4 looks at the physical and environmental consequences of shrinkage. I explore how sustained population loss can lead to fundamental changes in the physical and natural environments of cities, including vacant buildings and vacant land, changes to the urban infrastructure, and the reversion of built land to natural or semi-natural conditions. In chapter 5, I then look at the effect shrinkage can have on economic and social conditions, including poverty and economic decline, increased fiscal constraints on local governments, and the effects of the growth of the older adult population and the decline in school-age populations.

Chapter 6 then shifts back to a global perspective to examine the challenges that the world, and within it, its cities, will face in the coming decades, from now until about 2050. I move from largely describing what is or has been to looking at what may come, laying out the challenges that the world is most likely to face over that period. These include, most prominently, climate change and its many associated effects, but also other concerns such as shifts in the nature of work, technological change, and the rise of nationalism and neofascism and increasing geopolitical instability. Placing all these challenges in the context of national, regional, and global population decline, I explore how they can potentially affect the future sustainability of shrinking cities.

Chapter 7 moves from the largely descriptive chapters that precede it to form a transition to the more prescriptive ones that follow. Stepping back from the specific issues laid out in the preceding chapters, I look at the underlying challenge, namely, that any serious effort to address population decline demands a fundamental change to the growth paradigm that has been so firmly embedded in public policy and economic thinking throughout the world for so long. I offer a new model for cities to replace today’s global growth model, which I call networked localism. It is a radical strategy, but one firmly grounded in reality, by which shrinking cities can escape the globalization trap in which they currently find themselves and put themselves on a path for future vitality and sustainability in a world of declining growth.

In the last four chapters, I lay out the key elements of that path. Chapter 8 focuses on the environmental effects of shrinkage and the opportunities that exist to remake the built and natural environments of shrinking cities. I look at how cities can take advantage of vacant land and buildings for such areas as stormwater management, greening, and the creation of localized food systems, and how these transformations can enhance their residents’ quality of life and build resilience in the face of climate change.

Chapter 9 tackles the challenges that flow from the demographic, economic, and social changes linked to declining urban populations. I explore how shrinking cities can take advantage of today’s technology to build localized economies and distributed energy systems and address the needs of their changing populations without the growth that has historically driven them. I stress, here and elsewhere, that building a sustainable economy is as much a social and political process as it is economic, deeply dependent on the ability of cities to build inclusive and participatory governance and social structures, engaging the community’s institutions and people as a whole in the process of building the new economy.

In chapter 10, I narrow my focus to the United States. Showing that the United States is likely to begin losing population much sooner than widely expected, I look at how population decline will affect cities across the country, from the Northeast to the desert Southwest, and focus on how American cities can address the daunting challenges that stand in the way of a future as smaller yet still strong and vibrant cities. Finally, in chapter 11, after summing up the key themes of the preceding chapters, I suggest how governmental partnerships at the national, state, and local level can help overcome the barriers to change and put smaller, shrinking cities on the path to a vital future.

As some wise person once said, prediction is difficult, especially when it’s about the future.⁷ Futurism, as futurist Alvin Toffler has said, is not about prediction in the literal sense; its purpose instead is to open up the questions of what’s possible. Not necessarily what will be, but what’s possible.⁸ Rather than predict, I want to suggest where many of the world’s cities are likely to be heading and what it may take to maintain them as vital, resilient entities in an increasingly difficult world. I believe my predictions and prescriptions are credible and well grounded, but in the final analysis, I have no idea whether they will indeed come true.

Many of the broad outlines of where the world is heading over the next few decades are already becoming clear. Climate change, with all of its consequences, is a reality. It will continue. One may well argue about the pace and intensity of its effects, and how much future global action can mitigate them, but for anyone who accepts science, those arguments will take place within increasingly well-defined parameters. The same is true of population decline. The demographic trends driving the slowdown and ultimate decline in the world’s population are powerful ones with deep economic and social roots. The likelihood that so-called pro-natalist policies, to get people to have more children, will do more than at most modestly slow those trends is exceedingly small.

Beyond that, things become more uncertain. It is one thing to project temperature changes or sea level rise; it is another to predict the economic effects of those changes, although it is likely that they will be more negative than positive. Similarly, though it is reasonably safe to assume that the march of innovation in artificial intelligence and robotics will continue over the coming decades, it is far harder to predict the extent to which innovations will actually be adopted and the effect they will have on the number and type of jobs that will be left for human beings. The coronavirus pandemic has begun to trigger changes in work and its relationship to where people live. Those changes have only begun to be felt.

The experience of the past provides little direction from which one can extrapolate with confidence. Indeed, people have been making confident predictions on these issues at least since the 1950s, with terrible batting averages.⁹ It is well past 2000, and we are little closer to getting around in flying cars and taking vacations on the moon. Whether with respect to vacations on the moon or changes to human society closer to home, I am deeply skeptical of the gee-whiz school of futurism that sees awesome technological breakthroughs over every horizon. I am equally skeptical of the catastrophists who expect the collapse of civilization as we know it imminently. The world of 2050 will be different, probably worse in many respects but still recognizably the same.

All futurism begins with extrapolation, which can be defined as the application of various techniques to interpret already visible trends and phenomena and the likelihood of their continuing, shifting, or ending over the coming years. It can never be literal or dogmatic, of course. There will always be what Nassim Nicholas Taleb famously calls black swans, or large-scale unpredictable and irregular events of massive consequence.¹⁰ Many experts suggested that a global pandemic was likely to arrive sooner or later, and a few that a war might erupt in Eastern Europe. Just the same, the COVID-19 pandemic that disrupted the world in 2020 was a black swan, as was the Russian invasion of Ukraine early in 2022. The outcomes of the pandemic are still uncertain and those of the Ukraine war equally so, although all foreseeable outcomes appear to be horribly bad. One could not predict either event, nor can one predict their long-term consequences, but now that they have happened, one can explore their possible outcomes.

The likelihood of additional black swans over the course of the next thirty years, including but certainly not limited to future wars or pandemics, is extraordinarily high. Since we do not know either their nature or their frequency, we cannot incorporate them into our analysis, but we must recognize the likelihood of their taking place as part and parcel of the great uncertainty inherent in the complex global system. More importantly, we can learn to anticipate uncertainty and try to become not only resilient but, in Taleb’s term, antifragile, growing stronger as a result of shocks.

Around the world thousands of cities are already shrinking, or will be shrinking over the next three decades. Most are smaller cities, although some are large metropolitan centers. Their futures, while not solely theirs to determine, to a large extent lie in their hands. I believe, despite the overwhelming challenges that the world will face over those decades, that those futures can be bright ones. Even as growth slows and eventually grinds to a halt, people, communities, and regions can learn to thrive as growth slows and eventually ends.

CHAPTER 1

The Past, Present, and Future Shrinking City

A Historical Overview

How doth the city sit solitary, that was full of people.

—Lamentations, Chapter 1, Verse 1

Anyone who travels much through the Middle Eastern countryside soon notices many irregular mounds dotting the landscape, clearly distinct from the ranges of rolling hills that make up much of the region’s terrain. Thousands of these mounds can be found across Israel, Syria, Iraq, and other Middle Eastern countries. These mounds, which are known in both Hebrew and Arabic as tels, are all that is left of ancient cities that were depopulated, abandoned, or destroyed thousands of years ago. Over the following centuries, wind-blown earth accumulated around the ruins of the city, ultimately covering them completely. The one shown in figure 1.1, Tel Qashish, is located in Israel’s Jezreel valley just north of the modern Israeli town of Yokne’am.

In the ancient Middle East, the depopulation or destruction of cities was a tragic but predictable event. Cities were periodically sacked by invaders and their people killed, enslaved, or exiled, as happened after the destruction of Jerusalem by the Babylonians in 586 b.c.e. To the author of the biblical book of Lamentations, the city’s destruction was its punishment for having disobeyed God’s commandments. Similarly, the city’s escape from destruction by the Assyrians a little over a hundred years earlier was seen as a sign of God’s favor. From a more modern perspective, both were more about the ups and downs of Middle Eastern power politics, within which