Urban shrinkage is not a new phenomenon. It has been documented in a large literature analyzing the social and economic issues that have led to population flight, resulting, in the worse cases, in the eventual abandonment of blocks of housing and neighbourhoods. Analysis of urban shrinkage should take into account the new realization that this phenomenon is now global and multidimensional — but also little understood in all its manifestations. Thus, as the world's population increasingly becomes urban, orthodox views of urban decline need redefinition. The symposium includes articles from 10 urban analysts working on 30 cities around the globe. These analysts belong to the Shrinking Cities International Research Network (SCIRN), whose collaborative work aims to understand different types of city shrinkage and the role that different approaches, policies and strategies have played in the regeneration of these cities. In this way the symposium will inform both a rich diversity of analytical perspectives and country-based studies of the challenges faced by shrinking cities. It will also disseminate SCIRN's research results from the last 3 years.

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This article discusses how information and communications technology (ICT), construed either as evolutionary or revolutionary, permeates two broad urban research traditions of metropolitan change. It reviews research findings from these two research traditions concerning metropolitan population and employment redistribution. It suggests that synergies between ICT and our car, truck, and airplane society may be a thrust behind well-established urban decentralization and deconcentration trends. Furthermore, a review of research on ICT-intensive firms, assumed to be the “glue” of urban agglomerations, reveals that metropolitan dispersion and regional deconcentration are also occurring in this sector. Although both centrifugal and centripetal forces are shaping the form of the information age metropolis, rather than central city renaissance or absolute urban dissolution, the resulting spatially distributed network pattern is polycentric and evolving into a regional constellation of ICT agglomerations interconnected via high-speed transportation and digital networks. The increasingly spread-out metropolitan form embodies the time-sensitive logic of the information age. However, such logic poses serious challenges to smart growth’s metropolitan agenda.

New urbanist sociospatial reforms, like previ ous urban planning and design syntheses such as the superblock, rely on the assumption that the physical design of communities results in social sense of community. New urbanism's sense of community relies on developing pe destrian-friendly neighborhoods and assumes that suburbanites are so deprived of physical sense of community that they would gladly trade-off the lot size found in ordinary subur bia for pedestrian proximity to shared neigh borhood amenities. Using a consumer-attitude survey of Floridians, this work investigates the likelihood that individuals would exchange a large yard for pedestrian proximity to five community amenities The analysis finds contradicting evidence for new urbanist as sumptions about suburban preferences, but also finds some groups favorably responding to the trade-offs. The paper ends with a dis cussion of implications of findings and needs for future research.

Among the various American postmodern urban design schemes which offer pedestrian propinquity as design synthesis and remedy for suburban malaise, traditional neighbor hood design (TND) bears the influence of Leon Krier's architectural determinism. This paper claims that social consequences axiomatic to TND principles are problematic given previous experiences with planned communities and neighborhood research. In light of this literature and observations made at Seaside, Florida—the prototypic example of the TND movement—this paper concludes that developments which attempt to adapt TND elements to the realities of modern lifesryles and a metropolitan context will further test TND assumptions and result in compromises necessary for the evolution of the paradigm.