An excerpt from, "Thousands of U.S. Cities Could Become Virtual Ghost Towns by 2100" By Rachel Nuwer, Scientific American, January 11, 2024:
The Urban U.S. could look very different in the year 2100, in part because thousands of cities might be rendered virtual ghost towns. According to findings published in Nature Cities, the populations of some 15,000 cities around the country could dwindle to mere fractions of what they are now. The losses are projected to affect cities everywhere in the U.S. except Hawaii and Washington, D.C.
“The way we’re planning now is all based on growth, but close to half the cities in the U.S. are depopulating,” says senior author Sybil Derrible, an urban engineer at the University of Illinois Chicago. “The takeaway is that we need to shift away from growth-based planning, which is going to require an enormous cultural shift in the planning and engineerinng of cities.”
Derrible and his colleagues were originally commissioned by the Illinois Department of Transportation to conduct an analysis of how Illinois’s cities are projected to change over time and what the transportation challenges will be for places that are depopulating. As they got deeper into the research, though, they realized that such predictions would be useful to know for cities across the entire U.S.—and not just for major ones, such as New York City, Chicago and Los Angeles. “Most studies have focused on big cities, but that doesn’t give us an estimation of the scale of the problem,” says lead study author Uttara Sutradhar, a doctoral candidate in civil engineering at the University of Illinois Chicago.
An excerpt from, "The Planet of Cities: North American cities from 1980 to 2080" By Greg Clark and Borane Gille, RICS, December 19, 2024:
With just 6% of the world’s population, North America (Canada, Mexico and United States) commands outsized global attention due to its economic clout. Over the past 40 years, cities in North America have charted a dual trajectory: the global success of ‘superstar cities’ alongside the stark decline of once-thriving industrial cities. Shaped by financial crises, globalisation, industrial offshoring, suburbanisation, the COVID-19 pandemic and shifting geopolitics, North America’s urban landscape tells a story of resilience, reinvention and disruption.
. . .North American cities have diversified their economies and shifted focus to knowledge-based industries, technology, finance and healthcare.
What we begin to see now is a the emergence of new set of cities and regions through reindustrialisation while the high-growth model of tech cities is being challenged by land constraints, unaffordability, and inequality.
While New York remains a financial powerhouse, the city has also successfully grown its innovation economy. It is a leading destination for AI talent and companies, with AI companies expanding their footprint in the city tenfold in ten years. Following strategic public and private investment, it also boasts new edges in life sciences and the green economy.
San Francisco and the broader Bay area have become synonymous with the tech industry, while Los Angeles has continued to dominate entertainment, arts and fashion. However, congestion, housing unaffordability and higher taxes are casting a shadow on the long-term success of these cities, leading to a major outflow of people since the COVID-19 pandemic. San Francisco has also been impacted by the post-pandemic shift to more hybrid work patterns. Recent data suggests it could take up to two decades for the city’s office market to recover to pre-pandemic levels.
