LIBRO COMPLETO SHRINKING CITIES.Indb

Shrinking cities South/North SERIE MIGRACIÓN Y DESARROLLO URBANO-REGIONAL/2 MIGRATION AND URBAN-REGIONAL DEVELOPMENT SERIES/2 Shrinking cities South/North Ivonne Audirac and Jesús Arroyo Alejandre Editors FLORIDA STATE UNIVERSITY & UNIVERSITY OF GUADALAJARA UCLA PROGRAM ON MEXICO PROFMEX/World JUAN PABLOS EDITOR 2010 Primera edición, 2010 First edition, 2010 D.R. © 2010, Universidad de Guadalajara Centro Universitario de Ciencias Económico Administrativas Periférico norte 799 45100, Zapopan, Jalisco, México D.R. © 2010, PROFMEX 1242 Lachman Lane Pacifi c Palisades, California 90272 USA D.R. © 2010, Juan Pablos Editor S.A. Malintzin 199, Col. El Carmen, Delegación Coyoacán 04100, México, D.F. ISBN: 978-607-7700-71-5 Impreso y hecho en México Printed and made in Mexico CONTENT Introduction..................................................................................................... 9 Ivonne Audirac and Jesús Arroyo Alejandre Part 1. Urban shrinkage: South and North contrasted I. De-industrialization and economic restructuring: The case of two European shrinking cities ............................................................................ 37 Emmanuèle Cunningham-Sabot and Sylvie Fol II. De-industrialization and de-innovation in shrinking cities ..................51 Cristina Martinez-Fernandez III. Long waves of industrial change and urban restructuring in the South and North: Latin America in the second phase of globalization .................................................................................................. 69 Ivonne Audirac IV. Inequality, urban shrinkage, and urban policies in Brazil .................. 95 Sergio Torres Moraes V. Are fi rst generation suburbs of Mexico City shrinking? The case of Naucalpan ................................................................................ 113 Sergio Flores Peña VI. The development of affordable housing in the historic center of Panama City: Searching for new models of economic development and social integration ...........................................................149 N. Ariel Espino Part 2. Dimensions of regional and urban contraction in Western Mexico VII. Depopulation of small and medium size cities in West Central Mexico ........................................................................................................177 Jesús Arroyo Alejandre y José Manuel Arroyo Sánchez VIII. De-industrialization of the GMA: The case of the electronics industry in the face of Chinese competition ............................................. 217 Raquel Partida Rocha IX. Shrinkage of Atenquique’s environmental and economic development in an era of globalization ..................................................... 235 José Guadalupe Vargas Hernández Acronyms ..................................................................................................... 257 About the authors ....................................................................................... 261 INTRODUCTION Ivonne Audirac and Jesús Arroyo Alejandre In the late 1980s, urban decline and the shrinking of urban economies were identifi ed as relatively recent phenomena inherent to industrialized countries. It was also diagnosed as coinciding with the end of industrialization (Clark, 1989). Although these assessments may have been correct for Anglo-American and European cities –as illustrated by Detroit, Berlin, Liverpool or Manchester– this conventional wisdom has been challenged by research documenting that the “shrinking cities” phenomenon’s scope and geography are global despite different causes and specifi c manifestations. This view has been advanced by a variety of groups such as the Shrinking Cities Project of the German Federal Cultural Foundation (Oswalt, 2006) and the Shrinking Cities International Research Network (SCiRN) founded in 2004 at the University of California, Berkeley in the United States. Collectively these groups’ initiatives, including this volume, aim to shed light on the global dimensions of a phenomenon which, until recently, was believed to be a rich nation’s isolated incident of localized urban misfor- tune that could be reversed given the right planning interventions and the right amount of federal assistance. The intractable decline and relentless depopulation of certain cities in the US, Japan, and Western and Eastern Europe have stimulated scholarly research into causal explanations and new ways of understanding urban decline beyond classic formulations. In the midst of this search, which is by no means complete or conclusive, “urban shrinkage” has acquired a new meaning connoting a variety of urban affl ictions, challenges, and opportunities and has encompassed a global, transnational scope. [ 9 ] 10 IVONNE AUDIRAC AND JESUS ARROYO ALEJANDRE SHRINKING CITIES Persistent economic downturn, de-industrialization, resident and busi- ness hemorrhage, abandoned structures, high unemployment, decaying infrastructure, beleaguered tax bases, concentration of the aging and poor populations, and segregation and blight occurring in Eastern European cities after the fall of the Berlin Wall spurred a heated German debate. The debate was about “raze and rebuild” as a solution to the old symptom of urban distress, which was new in its recalcitrant persistence and resistance to German economic unifi cation and development policies. A total of more than 550 billion euros invested in East Germany from 1990 to 2003, primarily in infrastructure development (Knorr-Siedow and Droste, 2003), did little to stem the tide of east-west migration and depopulation of East German cities. These cities, which were already struggling with the effects of Post-Socialist institutional change, were not able to withstand the massive job losses and abrupt de-industrialization stemming from the obsolescence of its industrial base, which hampered the German Democratic Republic’s (GDR) efforts to catch up with the West. The words of an East German resident illustrate the plight of shrinking cities in this context: We have lost all large companies either by their collapse or by their head- offi ces moving west. Of course, at an unemployment rate steadily above 20 percent they have left the estate, it is not incomprehensible that we are becoming an estate of the aged and the dissatisfi ed rest. All others have left already (in Knorr-Siedow and Droste, 2003: 24). Thus, the term Shrinking Cities, of German coinage “Schrumpfende Städte”, emerges in the 1990s in the aftermath of the collapse of the Soviet Union and partly as a result of the massive, east-west migration that depopu- lated a large number of Post-Socialist cities. Among these, East German cities appeared as pioneer case studies of “urban shrinking” scholarly research in two fundamental ways: as “symptom” and as “remedy.” The fi rst approach strives to identify and diagnose the causes e.g., post-industrial, social, demographic, and economic dynamics of growth and decline, at global and local levels. The second investigates the policy and planning interventions which could save the city and help regenerate it. Shrinking cities studies in the latter sense are part of the urban planning debate about “rightsizing” a city’s housing and infrastructure to fi t a dwindling population. This approach also includes the strategies pursued by cities and regions to revive their shrinking places (Bontje, 2004). INTRODUCTION 11 SHRINKING CITIES AROUND THE WORLD The German shrinking cities discourse was globally expanded by Oswalt (2006, 2009), Rieniets (2006), and associates of the Shrinking Cities project for the German Federal Cultural Foundation. After examining world statis- tics and an array of European, American and Asian case studies of cities, they concluded that “urban shrinkage” is a globalized development pattern. “Between 1960 and 1990 their number grew by 100%, whereas the number of growing cities only increased by about 60% during the same period. Thus, approximately every sixth large city (i.e., one with more than 100,000 inhab- itants) in the world was a shrinking city” (Rieniets, 2006: 27). In the 1990s, the total number of shrinking cities arose as a result of the aforementioned, Post-Socialist, east-west, urban diaspora and as a consequence of European and North East Asian Pacifi c demographic transition characterized by steeply declining birthrates. By 2006, the same authors estimated that the total number of shrinking cities had almost doubled between 1990 and 2000, and that around the world more than one in four cities (larger than 100,000 people) was a shrinking city (Rieniets, 2006: 27). Today, this group further posits that the incidence of shrinking cities will intensify the world over as a consequence of the end of the growth era based on cheap fossil fuel. Begin- ning with the industrial revolution, this growth ushered a world of suburban expansion and rapid metropolitanization. However, with the onset of climate change effects, the number of shrinking cities is poised to soar, abetted by new rounds of deindustrialization and the restructuring of service economies. Ostensibly, this will result in suburban decline along with a tendency for populations to re-centralize and for polarization between haves and have nots to increase1 (Oswalt, 2009). 1 Oswalt (2009) presents these argument in six hypotheses : (1) Shrinking cities are qualitatively and quantitatively different from the urban decline experienced in the 20th century. In the 21st century shrinking cities represent the end of a growth era that began with industrialization

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