Depopulation as a Way to Saturate the Various Urban Structure’s Inherent Deficits? Case of the Post-war Solitary Housing Estates

Abstract

As part of the research on the impact of urban depopulation on different types of urban structures, this paper focuses on one of the common types of urban development in Central Europe: post-war housing estates of solitary apartment buildings. The basic premise of the research is that the reduction of pressure on the territory caused by the population decline (the phenomenon of “shrinking cities”) makes it possible to saturate some inherent deficits of these urban structures that are difficult to address in the situation of “normal” growing cities. Several reference neighborhoods of post-war settlements are selected, we collect their analytical data and monitor their change in relation to shrinkage. The variables monitored for the data analysis are (a) spatial (public space and urban composition, hierarchy of privacy levels of public spaces), (b) cultural (historical value, symbolic meaning), (c) functional (diversity of functions, availability of amenities, capacity of technical and transport infrastructure), and (d) demographic (population density). The data obtained on the urban districts affected by shrinkage are confronted with the inherent deficits of each type of structure defined in the existing literature. On this basis, the possibilities of using shrinkage (a form of quantitative decline) to qualitatively grow post-war solitary urban structures are proposed. It seems possible to enrich the spectrum of public space types (reduced in this period of development compared to previous periods), to enrich the possibilities of housing types, to enrich the functional structure, or to reflect the change in the need for transport infrastructure capacity due to lower population density.