Niels Kuiper (p), Mark van Duijn, Arno van der Vlist

Masatomo Suzuki

This paper empirically examines the relationship between the initial socioeconomic status of neighborhoods and housing development patterns in the Netherlands from 2013 to 2020. We generate a unique dataset by combining registry data on housing construction and demolition in the Netherlands with a novel spatiotemporal clustering methodology. This approach enables us to identify housing development projects and distinguish between different types of development. The findings in this paper show that the likelihood of a development project occurring in a neighborhood is not related to the neighborhood’s socioeconomic status. However, this overall finding ignores substantial heterogeneity across different types of development projects. Looking in more detail, large-scale housing redevelopment projects are found to be more prevalent in neighborhoods with a low socioeconomic status, whereas infill developments and small redevelopment projects are more prevalent in neighborhoods with a high socioeconomic status.

Can Orhan (p)

Niels Kuiper

Shrinking cities are faced with various problems and experience major declines in population and/or industry. Among their counterparts in the world, shrinking cities in the Baltic Sea Region are one of the most dramatically affected and transformed ones with regard to the shifts in volume and density with their physical and social entities. The region is concerned by outmigration and demographic change not only in its rural areas but also in its cities. Shrinkage is interlinked with economic, social, and institutional aspects in the Baltic Sea Region and is associated with a complex process. It brings up some challenges, such as population changes, shifts in quantity and quality of material stocks, and alterations in the volume of economic activities over time. According to the existing literature (Bernt et al., 2017; Couch & Cocks, 2013; Gao et al., 2023), housing, as a component of the material stock, is a critical challenge and contains some spatial anomalies in the context of shrinkage in the Baltic Sea Region cities. Besides, housing is not only a challenging context in shrinkage, but also an opportunity for different groups in shrinking cities with its physical, economic and social forms. Abandoned and vacant presences of the housing stock, e.g. large housing estates, transform the city landscapes; economic and population declines affect the housing values that may cause housing to become a financial tool; and dynamics in shrinking cities create an unstable environment in ownership structures.

Different spatial and institutional formations produce different dynamics. Therefore, this research considers shrinkage as a multidimensional process and aims to disentangle the economic and demographic perspectives of shrinkage. By doing so, it aims to quantify the economic and demographic decline through the lens of the Baltic Sea Region cities and to investigate especially the consequences for the housing market. Moreover, there is no scholarly or policy consensus on how shrinkage should be addressed. Some cities, for instance, adopt governance models based on counteraction against shrinkage and promoting growth, while some attempt to “shrink smart” (Bernt et al., 2012). The initial descriptive results are therefore extended by surveying different policies aimed at tackling housing problems in shrinking cities in the Baltic Sea Region.

Masatomo Suzuki (p)

Can Orhan

This paper conceptualizes how the difficulty for owners in abandoning their property ownership affects housing market structure and short/long-term consequences of the shrinking society. Using Japan as a case study, we develop a framework of market for existing houses facing low demand. The framework shows that the property prices can be negative from the burden for owners to keep the unused assets. Since market transaction is possible only with positive prices, the resale market disappears, which leave the properties vacant without changes of ownership. The implications are: (i) in the short-term, a need for volunteer maintenance becomes a heavy burden for absent owners, while it retains the quality of neighbourhood environment; and (ii) in the long-term, failure of property transaction does not update registration information, which diverges ownership of the neighbourhood’s lands or leads their true ownership unknown, hindering future conversion of the assets to other profitable purposes such as farmland and greenery. We argue that such problems arising from the difficulty for owners in abandoning their property ownership are more pronounced in Japan, but are common in shrinking society.