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

Stefan Siedentop, Philipp Zakrzewski and Peter Stroms

Regional Studies, Regional Science, 2018, vol. 5, issue 1, 1-20

Abstract: 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.

Date: 2018
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DOI: 10.1080/21681376.2017.1412270

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