The political economy of managing decline and rightsizing

While population losses have accompanied urban development since the emergence of the first cities, it has only been quite recently that “shrinkage” has become a field of research in its own rights. Critical scholarly research stands in a somewhat difficult relation to this situation. On the one hand, there are numerous contributions calling for a general “acceptance” of shrinkage and more “openness” towards planning for a reduced population size. On the other hand, one can find contributions that criticize the limits of existing rightsizing policies, describing smart shrinkage as an exclusionary project, or set it into a context of the current austerity moment. The evaluation of this new round of urban policies is thus controversial. The common denominator of the papers in this special issue is a call for both widening the perspective on rightsizing policies by embedding them into a wider context of neoliberal urbanization and a demand for more attention towards context-specific pathways, dynamics and outcomes. At the same time, we want to highlight not only the local specificities but also provide a comparative political economy perspective on shrinking cities.