SHRINKING CITIES IN URBANIZED CHINA: DYNAMIC TIME-SERIES CLUSTERING

Keywords: Shrinking Cities; China; Time-Series Clustering; State Rescaling
Session Type: Virtual Paper Abstract
Day: Tuesday
Session Start / End Time: 3/1/2022 05:20 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada)) - 3/1/2022 06:40 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada))
Room: Virtual 11

Abstract

Shrinking cities are now considered one of the most critical challenges in urban planning and also raised attentions in the developing world, especially in rapidly urbanizing China. This paper contributes to the study of urban shrinkage in China both methodologically and theoretically. It utilizes an innovative technique, Dynamic Time Warping (DTW) algorithms, to conduct time-series clustering analysis on urban growth and shrinkage. It groups all 290 prefecture cities in China into different urban trajectories from 2006 to 2018, such as continuous growth, recent growth, stabilized shrinking, recent decline etc.

Then, the paper further explores the factors that may affect urban shrinkage in China using a multinomial logistic regression. The impacts of state spatial selectivity, local responses to state rescaling, core-periphery neighboring effects and economic restructuring are examined across different urban trajectory typologies. In general, cities in the northern China, especially in the Middle Yellow River region and the Northeast suffer from population loss and economic decline due to not being privileged by the state for development, higher local economic share in resource-based sectors, lower natural growth rate, less competitiveness and attractiveness to the market and developers. In
contrast, shrinking cities in the south-central China, especially in the southeastern coast and Middle Yangtze River, can be attributed to their proximity to state-selected high-level large cities that have a gravitational pull of people and economic activities. Since these middle and smaller cities are not favored by the state policies, they are likely to rely on debts to sustain local economic growth.