Pathways to a resilient future: A review of policy agendas and governance practices in shrinking cities

Recent years have seen a proliferation of case-study researches on shrinking cities, stimulating intense debate on the policy responses and governance practices enacted in several cities under conditions of decline. What is notably absent, however, is an evaluation of existing policies and policymaking in shrinking cities that takes into account the resilience of these cities. This paper reviews the policy agendas and governance practices adopted in shrinking cities through the lens of resilience. To this end, we first take a closer look at the policies that have been pursued and the challenges that they have sought to address, with the aim being to unravel the resilience paths that arise from these decisions. In the following stage, we direct our attention to the actors and decision-making processes that underlie the applied responses and governance mechanisms required to deploy these decisions. In doing so, the aim is to invigorate our understanding of policy responses to shrinkage that is more attentive to the resilience of cities. It can be understood from our review that, in their attempts to maintain function, cities employ a diversity of strategies, not least to relieve themselves of the risk of focusing on one policy option, but also because the amount of change required for a fundamental transformation is difficult. Under these conditions, recovery and incremental adjustments to the prevailing policies predominate, while attempts to challenge the existing policy principles, introduce novel responses that have the ability to fundamentally change existing policies and governance practices, and to set new directions for the future, remain limited.