Cities develop according to different patterns, undergoing population growth during some periods and decline 17 (shrinkage) during others. Theories attempting to understand these behaviours include: 1) shrinkage is a natural 18 process in the life cycle of a city, alternating with periods of growth, or 2) shrinkage is an extreme event that 19 places cities into a continuous decline process with no return to population growth. We use retrospective data 20 over a period of 130 years to study 25 Portuguese cities currently facing population decline, and show that 21 both theories coexist in time and space. Five types of shrinking city are revealed: "Persistent Early Shrinkage" 22 due to exodus from the rural periphery, "Metropolitan Shrinkage" due to the challenges of urban sprawl, "Recent 23 Shrinkage" in de-industrialisation hotspots, "Cyclic Shrinkage" occurring in political transformation cores, and 24 "Mild Shrinkage" due to life-style disamenity. As diversity of city population trajectories appears to be the 25 norm in both Portugal and other Western European countries, the incorporation of this range into the 26 management of urban transitions is recommended in order to reinforce city resilience.27

Portuguese historiography has mostly adopted a pessimistic view regarding the contribution of the railways to the development of country. Yet, railway access helped to increase population concentration and economic development, favoring migration into towns, the growth of pre-existing urban centers, and the emergence of new centers. But railways tended to be more beneficial to regions that were already prosperous and to aggravate the conditions unfavorable to development in areas with greater structural weaknesses.

Inês Gomes [orcid.org/0000-0001-9210-9959] is a Post-doc Researcher at

This article proposes a methodology to address the urban evolutionary process, demonstrating how it is reflected in literature. It focuses on “literary space,” presented as a territory defined by the period setting or as evoked by the characters, which can be georeferenced and drawn on a map. It identifies the different locations of literary space in relation to urban development and the economic, political, and social context of the city. We suggest a new approach for mapping a relatively comprehensive body of literature by combining literary criticism, urban history, and geographic information systems (GIS). The home-range concept, used in animal ecology, has been adapted to reveal the size and location of literary space. This interdisciplinary methodology is applied in a case study to nineteenth- and twentieth-century novels involving the city of Lisbon. The developing concepts of cumulative literary space and common literary space introduce size calculations in addition to location and structure, previously developed by other researchers. Sequential and overlapping analyses of literary space throughout time have the advantage of presenting comparable and repeatable results for other researchers using a different body of literary works or studying another city. Results show how city changes shaped perceptions of the urban space as it was lived and experienced. A small core area, correspondent to a part of the city center, persists as literary space in all the novels analyzed. Furthermore, the literary space does not match the urban evolution. There is a time lag for embedding new urbanized areas in the imagined literary scenario.