Urban growth and decline: the causes and consequences of urban shrinkage – case study the city of Pancevo (Serbia)

At the beginning of the 21st century the phenomenon of shrinking cities across Europe was widely discussed since a large number of urban areas find themselves amongst the cities losing population. The problems that Central, Eastern and South-Eastern Europe is facing today (declining population, internal migration from underdeveloped regions, increasingly population ageing) did not go beyond Serbia. In Serbia shrinking and outmigration has become one of the leading process, as a consequence of economic restructuring and demographic change in the last decades. The economic development the city of Pančevo is characterized by major changes during the transition process initiated with the collapse of industry and declining the number of employees. These changes led to demographic and socio-economic restructuration of population, reflecting in urban shrinkage. The paper focus is to examine the influence of economic and demographic drivers on shrinking the city of Pančevo. Thereby, the spatial distribution of different trajectories of shrinking in the period from 1991 to 2011, as well as the causes and consequences of urban shrinkage will be presented