Shrinking Cities!

Define Small cities -- Population between 100,000 and 500,000 Large cities -- Population > 500,000 Since 1950 total population of small cities has been growing faster than that of large cities.

Cumulative Pop. (millions)

Population Losses They have been significant -- in the hundreds of thousands in NY, Chicago, Detroit, Philadelphia, Cleveland, St. Louis. They have generally been in metro areas that have been growing. Look at pop_90_00.xls spreadsheet

Some Turnaround in 1990s

Vertical and Horizontal Older cities were vertical. Discuss. Newer cities are horizontal. Discuss.

Are Cities Like Shopping Malls Vacancies -- What do you do? Lower rents? Offer tax breaks? Close the mall? Can you close a city?

Managing shrinkage Is shrinkage necessarily bad? What about regional government? What do we do with empty tracts of land?

Radical proposal De-annex part of their cities to private developers to create a smaller, more viable city. How? –Provide funds to (now) smaller city. –Reduce costs to (now) smaller city. –Lead (possibly) to quicker development than if they were parts of the larger city What do you think?

Central Place Theory Within a region, you’ll have a set of cities: –Some BIG ones –Some smaller ones –Some tiny ones How many cities will develop? Why are some larger than others?

Central Place Theory Suppose, within a region, you have three consumer products –CDs –Pizzas –Jewelry What are their characteristics?

What does our region look like? Uniform density -- 80,000 people No shopping externalities Ubiquitous inputs Uniform demand

Technologies for Stores Jewelry -- Operates at larger scale  1 store/80,000 people  1 store in region. Compact disks  1 store/20,000 people  4 stores in region Pizza  1 store/5,000 people  16 stores in region

City L 1 Jeweler 2 CD 4 Pizza City M 1 CD 2 Pizza City S 1 Pizza City S 1 Pizza City S 1 Pizza City S 1 Pizza City S 1 Pizza City S 1 Pizza City S 1 Pizza City S 1 Pizza City M 1 CD 2 Pizza

Hierarchy of Cities Larger city  larger variety of goods sold People in S cities shop in M and L cities, but people in L cities shop only in L cities Why? If we have increasing economies in producing pizzas, what will happen to small cities?

Thoughts Go over Exercises and Discussion Questions. I will almost certainly use them on exams. Next time, we move on to Chapter 7. We’ll backtrack to Chapter 6 a little later in the term.