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

本研究以当代工业化国家普遍存在的城市萎缩问题为研究对象，探讨其政治和政策含义。随着人口老龄化、出生率下降和世界经济一体化，许多城市都在关注人口减少的问题。然而，萎缩并不是一条通往衰落的单行道。本文通过对美国、法国、德国、日本等国8个港口城市的研究，试图明确“是什么因素导致了城市对城市萎缩的政策反应的差异”。因此，我们发现，制度因素，如以下事项，使城市政策的差异：选举制度，政府结构，特别是行政和立法部门之间的关系，政府间的关系，和程度的地理功能分割。

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.