Alternative Perspectives on Urban Decline and Population Deconcentration

Abstract

INTRODUCTIONThe widely-quoted trends in most industrial countries during the 1970s toward sharply reduced rates of urban growth and a spatial redistribution of population and jobs have led to a fascinating debate, an avalanche of facts, and of course competing explanations. Perhaps the most common expressions of these trends relate to the relative-and in some instances absolute-decline of the largest metropolitan areas, a reversal of traditional migration flows into these areas and the resurgence of growth in some peripheral regions and smaller urban areas. In combination these trends imply, but do not prove, that a substantial spatial reorganization of population and economic activity is taking place. If true and persistent, they call for new images as well as new theories of the geography of our urbanized landscape and society. ObjectivesThis paper does not undertake to debate these assertions in depth, or to evaluate the empirical evidence on which they are based. In most countries, except perhaps in the United States, this evidence is as yet sparse for the 1970s. The data and analyses which are available are often contradictory or of questionable quality, and the time period involved (post-1970) is as yet still too short. For international comparisons, there is even less consistency among data sources or definitions.Instead the objectives of the paper are more modest: First, it attempts to review and summarize some of the theories-or better stated as hypotheses or perspectives-which have been put forward to account for these trends. Second, it seeks to identify some common threads-or schools of thought-in the literature, as well as competing hypotheses, with the purpose of stimulating interdisciplinary dialogue and research. Admittedly, given that the available evidence is not sufficient to prove conclusively that urban population decline and deconcentration 2 are now the dominant spatial processes, this approach may appear to be putting the cart before the proverbial horse. Yet the attention given to these phenomena in the recent academic literature is in itself sufficiently large to warrant a review of alternative assertions of why such shifts might be taking place. Since many of the explanations to date have been advanced without a sound empirical base, and without setting the early 1970s period in its longer-term historical context, we should not be surprised that recent theoretical frameworks are as yet fuzzy and incomplete. Our failure to adequately anticipate the direction and scale of changes in urban development in the 1970s testifies, as Zelinsky (1977) noted, to the inadequacy of our existing theories.More specifically, the question of whether these trends represent a "clean break" with the past, as argued by Berry (1976), Vining andStrauss (1977), and Alonso (1978b), for example, or simply a continuation of past trends of an increasingly dispersed pattern of suburbanization and exurban development, as Gordon (1979) among others contends, is also not debated here. It is not debated despite its pro...

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