ABSTRACT
This chapter presents a data on shrinking cities, mainly for the recent period from 2000 to 2010, but also with some data for earlier dates. Geographers and regional scientists tend to look at growth or decline in terms of the functional entity, which can be the built up urban area, measured in the US by the urbanized area, or the larger metropolitan area, which includes a wider commuter and trade hinterland. The basic underlying reason for urban decline is that major export sectors of the urban economy are no longer competitive against producers in other regions. Cities and their urbanized areas do vary in the quality of the labor force. Long declining cities tend to have older and less educated populations, less adaptable to attracting services and higher technology industries. The main era of shrinking of the cities was the 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, with the 1970s the most extreme, which indeed was called the Rural Renaissance.
