The everyday politics of urban shrinkage Negotiating “decline” in two medium-sized cities

This thesis examines the everyday reality of urban shrinkage and the associated power struggles within urban spaces. Drawing on ethnographic studies in Dieppe and Nevers, two medium-sized French cities experiencing long-term shrinkage, the research explores how residents experience and negotiate this phenomenon in their daily lives.
Building on existing scholarship on urban shrinkage, this work introduces new perspectives by highlighting everyday urban shrinkage and its politics. Using approaches from urban studies, geography, and anthropology, a new conceptual framework is developed, presenting urban shrinkage as a lived, political, and ordinary process of urban change. This process involves unequal power relations and unfolds in non-spectacular ways within ordinary cities.
Four key themes are identified in residents’ everyday experiences and negotiations of urban shrinkage: the selective production and mobilisation of symbols of “decline”; the negotiation of territorial stigmatisation; the recomposition of social capital; and the negotiation of socio-spatial change through sensory politics. These themes show that urban shrinkage shapes urban experiences profoundly and prompts diverse negotiation strategies.
Negotiating change involves power struggles between various groups at different scales, from the national level to domestic spaces. Urban inequalities are central to the differentiated experiences and negotiations of shrinkage. The everyday politics of shrinkage are often inconspicuous and informal, reflecting inequalities in social capital, power to impose or contest urban representations, and capacities to craft pleasing urban environments.