Urban shrinkage. Theoretical reflections and empirical evidence from a southern European perspective

Over the last decade, many studies have focused on the demographic and functional decline occurring in several cities throughout the old industrialised countries, both in Europe and in the United States. This process, rapidly dubbed by the international scholarship ‘urban shrinkage’ (Pallagst et al., 2009), does not seem to present the same features in each country. This aspect is not clearly underlined in literature, even though some authors recognised the nuanced nature of the phenomenon (Hollander et al., 2009) . Particularly, literature does not stress sufficiently the need to collect data at an appropriate geographical scale, identifying the territorial units where the indicators must be assessed: 1) the municipal boundaries do not suit in order to evaluate the shrinking processes, because these ones have often a trans-border nature; 2) the different urban systems can respond differently to the ‘global’ solicitations, according to their economic basis, social fabric and planning capability (Wiechmann and Pallagst, 2012), showing variable gradients of resilience. Starting from a critical review of the international literature, which requires to be sharpened in its assumptions and theoretical frameworks, we propose an empirical exercise of interpretation of the Italian urban systems, trying to assess the validity of the concept of ‘shrinking city’ in a Southern European context.