A Comparative Case Study on Urban Strategy for Flexible Smart Shrinking City

The world's population reached 7.7 billion in 2019. Despite this trend, not all cities are growing. Most of the growing population is driven to large cities for convenience and jobs. This phenomenon has led to a decrease in the population of small and medium-sized cities, and in certain cities, a decrease in employment as well as recession have resulted. Korea is no exception. The nation's population is concentrated in the metropolitan cities. To solve these problems, researchers started to study how to deal with the contraction of a city, i.e., a shrinking city, rather than focusing on only the growth of a city. In this paper, demographically outstanding declined domestic cities were selected as shrinking cities and their characteristics were analyzed. The concept of smart shrinking cities was then defined for the selected cities, which were chosen as a good case in overseas countries to solve the shrinking city problem. Through this process, the strategic differences were compared between domestic and oversea cases. As a result, a modified strategy for the smart shrinking city concept, FSSC (flexible smart shrinking city), is proposed as an alternative strategy that can save resources and cost.