"Designed" shrinkage? Managing demographic challenges/decline in urban planning. The case of small and medium-sized cities of Southern Russia

Urban shrinkage, provoked by the combination of long-term depopulation and economic decline, is an emerging challenge now facing most Russian cities, which appears to be the largest shrinking urban system in the world. Shrinking cities have attracted the attention of scientists, policymakers, and planners throughout the world due to the inadequacy of the available planning and policy approaches and tools that have been developed for growth scenarios. However, in Russia, the long-term population decline is still viewed by most as a temporary phenomenon provoked by the dramatic socioeconomic transition and, accordingly, spatial planning remains growth-oriented.The PhD thesis is motivated by the contradiction between the current demographic development in Russian cities and the obsolete planning approaches and methods being used. The study aims at discovering evidence of population decline as an important trend in the development of Russian cities and to then identify which opportunities exist for the transformation of municipal and regional spatial development policies in order to appropriately address this urgent challenge. The research pursues two main lines of investigation: the urban shrinkage phenomenon itself (its definitions, causes, consequences, threats and opportunities) and the spatial planning of cities experiencing shrinkage conditions. Within this logic, several levels of research have been developed: 1) analysis of the global discussion of the topic through the literature review; 2) confirmation or applicability of the aspects discussed in the literature to the Russian context (at the national and regional levels) as a verification for the necessity of a deeper analysis; 3) testing the developed hypothesis at the city level through multiple case studies; 4) integration of the results obtained through the case studies into the general view; 5) evaluation of the findings. The thesis provides empirical evidence drawn from cities located in southern Russia, which statistically represents the most favourable part of the country in terms of its demographic development. The intention was to show that even in an area where depopulation is not considered an issue; many cities are shrinking and experience a lack of demographic resources that could compensate for their depopulation. The research focuses on both shrinking and growing small to medium-sized cities in southern Russia, investigating through the comparative analysis the drivers and consequences of population change, but also how existing policies reflect upon demographic issues. Based on a mix of quantitative and qualitative data, I have found that population decline is a new reality for most Russian cities, where the current and future depopulation trends are an unavoidable process. The consequences are especially notable in small and medium-sized cities, which are more vulnerable and often lack development resources. However, the current negative transformations in both shrinking and growing cities result from a combination of complex factors, the influence of which should be deeper analysed through further research. Due to such discreet effects of depopulation, planners and policy-makers are largely ignorant of these processes, not only because of a lack of “awareness”, but also due to institutional, managerial, professional, and educational issues, which must yet be solved in order to provide a professional approach to spatial planning. Another discovery of the research is of a specific pattern of urban shrinkage in the cities of southern Russia where depopulation happens over the background of a growing need for housing and infrastructure construction and an extensive ongoing urban development. Moreover, growth-oriented urban planning itself, which ignores demographic factors, creates conditions for the appearance of negative consequences of shrinkage in the future, such as abandonment, vacancy or infrastructure surplus, instead of using planning as an opportunity to prevent these effets. This thesis therefore contributes to the general discussion on urban shrinkage. While the existing literature on the topic is mainly dedicated to various contexts that differ significantly from the Russian situation, this research helps to fill in the important missing element of the Russian experience in the global puzzle of urban shrinkage.