The urban shrinkage and urban restructurings of habor cities in a comparative perspective

这个项目的重点是当代工业国家普遍存在的城市萎缩问题，以寻找其政治和政策影响。随着出生率的下降和世界经济的全球化，许多城市都在关注老龄化社会带来的人口萎缩问题。然而，收缩并不是一条走向衰落的单行道。相反，它为政治行为者和政策倡导者提供了新的机会，通过他们的创造性反应找到城市重组的新途径。我们试图通过研究美国、法国、德国和日本的8个港口城市，来具体说明是什么导致城市萎缩的政策反应在不同城市之间存在差异。因此，我们发现，影响城市政策差异的制度性因素如下：选举制度、政府结构--特别是行政和立法部门之间的关系、政府间关系--以及地理职能分割的程度。

This project focuses on urban shrinkage, an issue prevailing among contemporary industrial countries, to search its political and policy implications. Many cities are concerned on the shrinking of population entailed by aging society with a falling birth rate and globalization of the world economy. However, shrinking is not a one-way street to decline. Rather, it offers new opportunities to political actors and policy advocates for finding new ways of urban restructurings through their creative reactions.We tried to specify "what makes policy responses to urban shrinkage divergent among cities", by researching 8 harbor cities in America, France, Germany, and Japan. Consequently we find out that institutional factors as follow matter in making urban policies differentiate: electoral systems, governmental structures-particularly relationship between executive and legislative branches, inter-governmental relations-, and the degree of geographical-functional segmentation.