Incorporating the life-course approach into shrinking cities assessment: the uneven geographies of urban population decline

The demographic dynamics of urban areas is highly relevant for urban and regional planning, in a global context marked by rapid socioeconomic changes and growing competition between cities. Demographic and economic decline processes associated with shrinking cities are usually analyzed by the evolution of the overall population, indicators of the natural and spatial population dynamics and socioeconomic variables. This article proposes a complementary method to enrich the vision of urban dynamics, based on incorporating the life-course approach to the study of demographic variations. The evolution of population groups with an indicator value on socioeconomic changes over time is studied. The population groups correspond to different birth cohorts, including the generations that have reached higher education or their first jobs in the labour market, and the generations that have remained at a mature working age during the study period. The case study comprises 404 Spanish urban areas in 2002-2017, a time when the overall population of the country grew by 11.3%. While 7.2% of the cities saw a decline in the overall population, 65.1% experienced population decline in some population indicator group.