Exploring residential satisfaction in shrinking cities: a decision-tree approach

The number of cities experiencing population decline has been increasing worldwide. Despite the existence of theoretical propositions of shrinkage as an opportunity to increase levels of residential satisfaction, the issue has not been addressed empirically. This paper contributes to fill this gap by assessing, through survey, the residential satisfaction of inhabitants of four shrinking Portuguese cities. Data were analysed by means of a tree-decision approach: the Chi-squared Automatic Interaction Detection (CHAID) analysis. A sense of safety is the feature that best discriminates inhabitants’ level of residential satisfaction. The results show that shrinkage due to deindustrialisation processes is detrimental to residential satisfaction