Building resilient cities in the shrinking paradigm: A UK and China comparison using new sources of big data

Urban shrinkage is a common phenomenon throughout the world despite urbanisation being a well-established trend. With increasing globalisation, cities in both developed and developing counties experience economic downturn, population decline, de-urbanisation. Reasons and solutions of urban shrinkage have been discussed and documented extensively for developed countries (e.g. UK, US, Germany, and Japan). However, deeper understanding of urban shrinkage issues and how to resolve them in the developing world, especially in China with a large number of fast growing cities, is still lacking. Insights from developed countries could be learned in order to better address the challenges for building resilience into shrinking cities of the developing world. Northeast China provinces, including Liaoning, Jilin, and Heilongjiang, now known as the "rust belt" in China, have topped the chart in the number of shrinking cities due to resource depletion, deindustrialization, and the change of demographic structure. Similarly, most of the top UK declining cities are in the north of England as a strong indication of the North-South divide. Core cities of North England, such as Liverpool, Manchester, Leeds, Sheffield and Newcastle, share some common characteristics with their counterpart in Northeast China in terms of industrial legacy, aging population, and loss of growth power to support surrounding areas in city-regions. Insights could be gained for those cities in both countries by a comparative study of their resilience to internal and external changes. With a focus on Northeast China cities, this project seeks to 1) identify and better understand the spatial, economic and social issues of shrinking cities and the underpinning mechanisms in relation to other Chinese cities, and 2) design adaptive strategies to build resilience into these cities through a comparative study of urban shrinkage in China and UK. This project will expand the existing research by combining the spatial, economic and social dimensions of human mobility and urban interactions and considering the interplay of all three dimensions in defining a multidimensional measurement and assessment of urban resilience. Furthermore, this project will promote the collaboration between the UoB research team and the Chinese stakeholders in order to incorporate local interests and benefit decision-makers with both general and place-based strategies in policy-making.