This article surveys selected theories of urban growth and decline, from an American shrinking cities perspective, on the backdrop of three key themes. First, urban change is context‐dependent. Second, urban (de)growth processes are multiscalar. And third, growth and shrinkage are not part of a dichotomy but are different realizations of similar underlying processes. Because the relationships between globalization and regional‐ and city‐level urban restructuring tendencies are relatively established in the shrinking cities literature, the present article focuses primarily on sublocal theoretical approaches. This is intended to uncover insights about the mechanisms and bottom‐up constraints that influence the direction of urban change. The review leads to a proposed framework for understanding how urban neighborhoods (do not) respond to internal or external pressures to change. Notably, the framework is partially derived from efforts that seek to re‐ground the study of urban change in evolutionary theory, which in some ways represents a theoretical turn back toward the earliest (ecological) school of thought on urban decline. However, while earlier evolutionary approaches were acontextual and deterministic, the proposed framework emphasizes that analyzing urban change demands attention to multiple spatial scales and location‐specific features, particularly the distribution of social capital within a city.
Geographic regions can be defined in many ways, including via physiography, historical development patterns, language, and culture. After broadly surveying different methods of regionalization and their influences on studies of the American West, this article uses a vernacular‐mapping approach to: first, propose distinctive toponyms that are relatively unique to cultures situated in the American Rocky Mountains and Southwest areas; second, map the spatial distributions of these toponyms across the western American landscape; and, third, compare the resulting distributions to the geographies of western businesses that incorporate regional terms into their corporate names. Notably, while the Rocky Mountains and the Southwest are iconic American regions that have captured the imagination for centuries, their cultural geographies are relatively underexplored in the literature. This article makes a modest contribution to this research gap by using geographic information systems (GIS) to map high concentrations of culturally distinctive feature names. The results reveal that the boundaries of vernacular Southwest and Rocky Mountain regions correspond relatively well with boundaries delineated with physiographic characteristics
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