urban decline

From the Field

Demystifying Urban Agriculture in Detroit

Flaminia Paddeu - 14 December 2017
Urban agriculture projects in North American shrinking cities have been the subject of much media attention in...
From the Field

Mitigating urban decline through the compact city? Reflections on 15 years of urban recentralization policies in Japan

Sophie Buhnik - 7 December 2017
To cope with a rapidly spreading and now pervasive phenomenon of urban decline, Japanese authorities have actively...
From the Field

Who Stays and Who Leaves? Residential Flows in French Shrinking Cities

Mathilde Rudolph - 1 November 2017
In focusing on residential flows, Mathilde Rudolph seeks to shed light on the processes of urban decline at play in...
From the Field

Shrinking to Survive? Demolition and Energy Transition in Small-Town France

Yoan Miot & Max Rousseau & translated by Oliver @Waine - 18 October 2017
Faced with a process of advanced decline, public and private actors in the town of Vitry-le-François, in eastern...
From the Field

Shrinking Cities in France: The Cumulative Effects of Decline

Nicolas Cauchi-Duval & Frédérique Cornuau & Mathilde Rudolph & translated by Oliver @Waine - 4 October 2017
In France, different shrinking cities have followed different trajectories. They nevertheless all have certain...
From the Field

Shrinking Networks, Growing Solidarities? How to Design a New Social and Territorial Contract

Daniel Florentin - 27 September 2017
Utilities operators in a number of European cities, faced with significant reductions in consumption levels across...
From the Field

From “Black City” to “Slum City”: The Importance of Image in Saint-Étienne

Vincent Béal & Christelle Morel Journel & Valérie Sala Pala & translated by Oliver @Waine - 20 September 2017
In December 2014, an article in the French daily newspaper Le Monde painted a highly negative portrait of the city...
Essays

Urban Shrinkage in France: An Invisible Issue?

Rémi Dormois & Sylvie Fol & translated by Oliver @Waine - 13 September 2017
Although the phenomenon of urban shrinkage affects a significant number of French towns and cities, it is an issue...
Essays

American Shrinking Cities May Not Need to Grow

Deborah E. Popper & Frank J. Popper - 25 April 2017
Successful cities are expected to continually grow, and when this doesn’t happen, city managers typically try to...
From the Field

The Actually Existing Markets of Shrinking Cities

Joshua Akers - 18 April 2017
In a bid to halt urban decline, Michigan’s state government sought to create incentives for the creation of urban...
Essays

Urban Decline Is Not Natural

Jason Hackworth - 11 April 2017
Is urban decline inevitable for cities affected by deindustrialization? While many scholars espouse the idea that...
From the Field

Overcoming Decline Through Graffiti? The Case of the Open Space Gallery in Halle (Saale)

Nina Gribat - 4 April 2017
Open Space Gallery, a collective in Halle (Saale), Germany, turned the marginalized neighborhood of Freiimfelde...

Series

Urban Wastes, Present and Future
New York Dossier: The Food Industry Faces the Covid‑19 Pandemic
Cities in the Age of Financialization
Contemporary Housing Struggles: Crises, Activism, and Critical Research
New York Tech Dossier: The Dark Side of New York’s Tech Economy
Progressive Mayors and Urban Social Movements
Land Rights in the Urban Global South
Climate Change and Social Change
Shrinking Cities

Featured

Debates

Covid-19, War, and Working-Class Neighborhoods

Pierre Gilbert & translated by Oliver @Waine - 5 June 2020
The residents of France’s working-class neighborhoods, accused of exacerbating the coronavirus pandemic through...
Essays

Sentinel Territories: A New Concept for Looking at Environmental Change

David Blanchon & Frédéric Keck & François-Michel Le Tourneau & Stéphane Tonnelat & Adriana Zuniga-Teran - 8 May 2020
In this essay, the authors develop the concept of “sentinel territories,” or environments where humans can perceive...
From the Field

Who Cleans Paris? Garbage Collectors in Their Own Words

Coline Ferrant & Marie Mourad & translated by Oliver @Waine - 21 June 2019
Who are Paris’s garbage collectors? Coline Ferrant and Marie Mourad highlight the diverse working conditions covered...
From the Field

Moving Inside City Limits: The Urban Mobility of Undocumented Youth

Stephen P. Ruszczyk - 4 June 2019
The urban context and public transportation shape how undocumented youths move within cities. In a comparison of...
Interviews

Teaching Art and the History of Tattoos at Rikers Island: An Interview with Tamara...

Lisa Jean Moore - 22 January 2019
An interview with Tamara Santibanez, who teaches art and the cultural and social history of tattoos to youth...
From the Field

Snowbirds’ Gift Economy in the Arizona Desert

David Frati - 7 November 2017
Each year, 200,000 retired people spend the winter in and around the small town of Quartzsite, Arizona, in the...

Other resources online

Cycles of Violence: Analysing Media Discourse in the Newspaper...

Mobile Lives Forum
How are cyclist and pedestrian deaths depicted in newspaper reports, and how do these reports help shape...

Lahti: The First Carbon-Rationing Experiment Applied to Local...

Mobile Lives Forum
The city of Lahti in Finland was the first to experiment with a carbon-trading scheme among its inhabitants to...

Is Rationing Carbon for Travel a Fair, Efficient, and Realistic...

Mobile Lives Forum
In the wake of the pandemic, a carbon tax at Europe’s borders is now on the agenda, but a domestic version for...

Reducing Carbon-Emitting Travel: A Factor of Social Cohesion and...

Mobile Lives Forum
As part of France’s Mission on the Future of the Economic Model of Public Transportation, commissioned by the French...

Strasbourg, An Example of a Cycling City

Mobile Lives Forum
Strasbourg is the leading city for cycling in France and a constant source of inspiration for all French cities...

The Trinity of Walking, Cycling and Public Transportation Must Be...

Mobile Lives Forum
While emissions from the transportation sector remain at a very high level, all hopes are currently pinned on the...
Centre national de recherche scientifique
Journal supported by the Institut des Sciences Humaines et Sociales (Institute of Human and Social Sciences) of the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS)

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