After many decades of inner-city decline and massive suburbanization during the post-socialist transition of the 1990s, in eastern Germany there has been recently evolving a new, specific phenomenon: the simultaneousness of shrinkage, fading suburbanization and rising reurbanization. In this...

During the last three decades, the countries of the developed world have been engulfed by the 'second demographic transition', which involves new family relations, less and later marriage, declining fertility rates, population ageing, postponement of child-bearing and smaller households, among...

Social cohesion always appears more frequently as a policy goal of the European strategy that promotes the integration of spatial, economic, and social dimensions of growth. This comprehensive approach also has to deal with the social consequences of demographic change, tackle urban poverty, and...

In this paper, we analyse the appropriateness of monitoring approaches for the observation of inner-city reurbanization processes. Reurbanization is conceptualized here as a process of long-term stabilization of inner-city areas by both a readiness of present residents to stay and an influx of...

This article discusses the question of how urban shrinkage gets onto the agenda of public-policy agencies. It is based on a comparison of the agenda-setting histories of four European cities, Liverpool (UK), Leipzig (Germany), Genoa (Italy) and Bytom (Poland), which have all experienced severe...

After a decade of tremendous population loss indicating severe decline, some large east German cities have been displaying signs of reurbanisation since the late 1990s. Using the city of Leipzig as an example, this paper identifies the major characteristics, progress and underlying...

The evolving debate on 'urban shrinkage' mirrors an increasing interest in demographic phenomena on the part of urban scholars. This paper discusses ambiguous evidence about recent population decline in the large cities of Poland and the Czech Republic, with a particular focus on Lodz and Brno...