A childless urban renaissance? Age-selective patterns of population change in North American and German Metropolitan areas. (original) (raw)

The age dimensions of urban change and socio-spatial inequality

Contemporary societal transformations are marked by particular age dynamics and shifting fault lines between generations. Growing divides between young and old have been signaled out as a key concern, for example on the housing market where especially the young struggle to acquire secure housing. Such age relations may also play an important role in broader socio-spatial changes in cities. However, age is not very often explicitly integrated into analyses of urban socio-spatial inequality. This paper makes an effort to do so, drawing on the case of Amsterdam (The Netherlands). First, by placing age center stage, it shows how aggregate urban upgrading comes about. Some age groups drive urban upgrading more than others, while still other age groups have become poorer, dampening upgrading. Second, geographies of affluence and poverty differ substantially between age groups. While affluent elderly concentrate in the most privileged areas, and increasingly so, younger generations deflect to neighborhoods lower on the urban hierarchy. Third, at any one point multiple generations are involved in driving neighborhood gentrification. An explicit incorporation of age dynamics thus help us understand how gentrification progresses over time, takes on new forms and expands into areas previously left untouched.

Demographic Patterns of Reurbanisation and Housing in Metropolitan Regions in the US and Germany

2017

After decades of decline, fi rst signs of a central and inner city revitalisa-tion were noticed towards the end of the 1980s in North American metropolitan areas. The repopulation and redevelopment of the metropolitan cores – often referred to as " reurbanisation " , " urban renaissance " or " back-to-the-city-movement " – has accelerated since then and is today one of the outstanding characteristics of recent urban development in the US. In Western and Central European urban regions, reurbanisation patterns were detected some years later although starting from a different level, as the inner cities have never faced a process of decay to the extent that was known in North American cities. At present, reurbanisation is intensely debated in urban and regional research. Although the evidence of reurbanisation is hardly questioned any longer, there is considerable uncertainty about how this new pattern of population change can be explained, how long it will last and how it will change the spatial urban structure of metropolitan areas in the long run. In this paper, we comparatively investigate recent trends of urban development in the US and Germany based on both survey and case study methods, with a focus on demographic patterns and housing. Our results suggest that reurbanisation is a universal trend in large metro regions in the Global North, manifesting itself as a signifi cant repopulation and densifi cation of core areas. At the same time, we found considerable divergence in terms of scale, dynamics and sociodemographic composition of reurbanisation patterns in the selected regions of the US and Germany.

Uncovering Demographic Trends and Recent Urban Expansion in Metropolitan Regions: A Paradigmatic Case Study

Sustainability

While urbanization trends have been characterized for a long time by deconcentration of inner cities with expansion of low-density settlements, economic repolarization leading to re-urbanization and recovery of central districts are now counterbalancing population shrinkage in compact urban areas and slowing down suburban growth. In this context, the recent demographic evolution of a large metropolis such as Athens (Greece)—following expansion, crisis, and a more subtle economic recovery—may reveal original relationships between form and functions at the base of recent urban growth. Based on an exploratory analysis of demographic indicators on a metropolitan and urban scale, the present study provides an updated and integrated knowledge framework that confirms and integrates the most recent urban trends in southern Europe. Documenting the emergence of more individualized paths of urban expansion at the local scale (recovery of the historic center, shrinkage of semicentral neighborho...

Neil Brenner and Christian Schmid, “The ‘urban age’ in question,” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 38, 3 (2014): 731-755.

Foreboding declarations about contemporary urban trends pervade early twenty-first century academic, political and journalistic discourse. Among the most widely recited is the claim that we now live in an 'urban age' because, for the first time in human history, more than half the world's population today purportedly lives within cities. Across otherwise diverse discursive, ideological and locational contexts, the urban age thesis has become a form of doxic common sense around which questions regarding the contemporary global urban condition are framed. This article argues that, despite its long history and its increasingly widespread influence, the urban age thesis is a flawed basis on which to conceptualize world urbanization patterns: it is empirically untenable (a statistical artifact) and theoretically incoherent (a chaotic conception). This critique is framed against the background of postwar attempts to measure the world's urban population, the main methodological and theoretical conundrums of which remain fundamentally unresolved in early twenty-first century urban age discourse. The article concludes by outlining a series of methodological perspectives for an alternative understanding of the contemporary global urban condition.

The New Demographic Growth of Cities: The Case of Reurbanisation in Switzerland (Urban Studies)

Urban Studies, 2011

After having lost population for some decades, many cities are experiencing a new growth. This paper addresses this reurbanisation phenomenon in the case of Switzerland. It argues that the demographic evolution of cities is not adequately explained by the ‘stages of urban development’ model that tends to consider urban regions as closed systems. It should rather be analysed by unfolding the underlying mechanisms that include housing consumption as well as in-and out-migration flows. Swiss cities have gained inhabitants since 2000 thanks to international migrants, young adults, non-family households and some parts of the middle to upper class. From a demographic point of view, families’ residential behaviour remains the driving force of suburbanisation so that the population growth is still higher in suburbs than in cities.

Spatially Differentiated, Temporally Variegated: The Study of Life Cycles for a Better Understanding of Suburbia in German City Regions

Raumforschung und Raumordnung | Spatial Research and Planning

This paper takes a spatially differentiated and temporally variegated perspective on suburban areas. It proposes a conceptual framework for studying the temporal variation and related trajectories of the subject matter, with suburban lifecycles being the key to our analysis. In empirical terms, the paper summarises the findings of research undertaken in 12 selected locales of four major metropolitan regions in Germany. Against the background of assessing the broader socioeconomic development of these regions, detailed local case studies have been conducted in order to reconstruct past and current development trajectories. Our analyses detected particular life cycles (and related segments) in the study areas, based on age and social composition, the physical conditions of the built environment and broader developments in the real-estate market. The different cycles include, in most cases, growth, maturity, transition and resilience, and they are also discussed in terms of their relev...