Natural and social processes in the shrinking city

Background/Question/Methods

The typical sustainability policy vision paints a vibrant urban landscape that combines “green” with wholly sustainable communities that are idealized visions of the real world. Alternatively, for many post-industrial cities that once served important economic functions, the concept of sustainability is highly elusive. The urban core of many of these industrial cities has been steadily emptying (eg, Cleveland, Detroit, St. Louis), something that represents a major challenge to sustainability.  Migration to the suburbs has also led to significant socioeconomic disparities within the urban core, further challenging sustainability policies. The bulk of academic research concerning sustainability in urban systems have concentrated on the impact of urban sprawl, and its associated consumption of land and resources. Yet, a large number of cites have been decreasing in population. In St. Louis, MO, the population peaked in 1950 at 856,796 and was recorded at 319,294 in 2010. The socioeconomic disparity in the city is highly spatially correlated with the bulk of the lower quantile of the socioeconomic scale living in the north side of the city. Here the population is predominantly African-American (>90%), and is also where the greatest number of empty lots, brown fields, and vacant property are located. We hypothesized that the surrounding social and cultural matrix of a green space, like a city park, will influence the environment of that green space. We use a combination of aerial photographs, satellite images, and ground surveys to categorize 103 of 104 public parks in the city of St. Louis. We used a non-metric multidimensional scaling ordination to classify the parks. 

Results/Conclusions

Two distinct clusters emerged from the analysis, one that corresponds to those parks in the lower socioeconomic neighborhoods, ie, the north side of the city, and another that represents the rest. Our research indicates that environmental, infrastructure, economic, social and cultural processes influence the ecology of urban cores in shrinking cities. Finally, we argue that truly integrative research is the only capable way of generating the evidence needed to address sustainability questions in the shrinking city.