Twenty years of research on shrinking cities: a focus on keywords and authors

Most scholarly attention to vanishing cities is fairly recent so, to guide future research, a comprehensive evaluation of prior findings is required. This study is a network analysis of 333 publications authored in English, published over the last two decades. The findings are as follows: (1) shrinking city research has increased significantly since 2016; (2) the key themes are planning, decline, depopulation, policy, regeneration, vacant land, green infrastructure, and case studies such as Detroit; and (3) major academic groups have not yet collaborated effectively on the subject.