Oportunităţi pentru oraşele în declin
Opportunities for the shrinking cities

Author(s): Mihai-Ionuţ Danciu, Anca Iulia ŢÂC
Subject(s): Human Geography, Historical Geography, Applied Geography, Governance, Socio-Economic Research
Published by: INCD URBAN-INCERC
Keywords: Pandemic; shrinking cities; social distancing
Summary/Abstract: The COVID-19 pandemic produced a series of drastic short-term changes in everyone's life and generated a professional debate regarding the long-term impact it will have on the public space. In the context in which we are in the twelfth month since its debut worldwide and nine months after the first measures in Romania, we can see its effects especially for those cities that were vulnerable until then: shrinking cities. Between March and December 2020, a number of specialized articles were published in the hope of identifying certain patterns of reconfiguration of socio-economic processes and the impact of measures imposed by the health crisis on public spaces. This paper uses classical methods of synthesis, analyzing the literature published in this interval to identify the first signs of pandemic effects in city life, especially shrinking cities. The results show that, in fact, shrinking cities are favored in the pandemic context in terms of phenomena that benefit them, by limiting brain drain to magnet cities and accelerating programs of projects to increase the quality of life by increasing the quality of the urban environment. In conclusion, the measures that can be implemented by local authorities to use public space in the most efficient way, taking into account the current conditions imposed by social distancing, are presented.

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