Description
"World population growth has slowed to a crawl, and that according to the most sophisticated demographic analysts, the earth's population (outside of sub-Saharan Africa) will begin to decline, not hundreds of years from now, but within the lifetime of many of the people now living on the planet. In this book urban expert Alan Mallach seeks to understand how declining population and economic growth, coupled with the other forces that will influence their fates, particularly climate change, will affect the world's cities, particularly its smaller cities, over the coming decades. Not only will cities' populations decline along with everyplace else, but powerful migration trends will make declines highly uneven. Many cities will decline faster than their nations, while a smaller number of cities, mainly the largest ones, may keep growing, even where their nation's population is in decline. Life on a shrinking planet calls for ways of thinking that are likely to be very different from those we are used to. Mallach suggests a path by which smaller, shrinking cities can thrive in the future, despite population decline and its attendant challenges"--
