ABSTRACT
This chapter contributes to the literature on shrinkage through the analysis of a planning effort in one such depopulating region. A practical example of smart shrinkage is the Poppers proposal to establish a Buffalo Commons in severely shrinking parts of the Great Plains. More often, plans for shrinking cities do nothing to acknowledge or prepare for population decline. Despite recent efforts throughout the 1990s to spur economic development, thereby creating new jobs and retaining or attracting new residents, in the aggregate the total population and the number of jobs in the Buffalo-Niagara Region has continued to decline. Shrinkage-based sprawl occurs when a population decreases across an existing built up area, leaving behind a landscape of geographically dispersed households served by an increasingly oversupplied and far flung physical and social infrastructure. Urban shrinkage happening on a region-wide scale might ironically present itself as just such an opportunity for political coalition and consensus building across a community.
