A childless urban renaissance? Age-selective patterns of population change in North American and German Metropolitan areas

Since the 1980s and 1990s, many metropolitan areas in North America and Europe have registered population growth within the urban core, driven primarily by younger, better-educated and higher-income people – a phenomenon often referred to as ‘urban renaissance’ or ‘re-urbanization’. To date, the research on this topic has primarily focused on the socio-spatial implications, especially with the type and intensity of displacement pressures affecting low-income households. Demographic manifestations of this have rarely been explicitly targeted by empirical studies. This paper addresses the change of intra-regional age structures in metro areas that have witnessed a demographic revival of their core areas. It hypothesizes that an increasing segregation by age is a universal pattern of urban demographic change in advanced Western countries. With data for six German and US metro areas over a period of 20 years (1990–2010), strong evidence for this proposition was found: in all regions, the urban core became ‘younger’ over time, whereas the ageing of the population was more dynamic in suburban areas. However, the analysis also revealed transatlantic differences: whereas a kind of ‘childless’ urban renaissance can be posited for the American cities, families in Germany were at least partially involved in the process of densification of inner-city areas. The analysis provides evidence for a general trend towards re-urbanization and age segregation in regions of both countries. At the same time, re-urbanization is assessed as a strongly context-dependent development with distinctly varying socio-spatial characteristics.