On November 8, 2021, Global Asia Research Center, Waseda University, hosted a workshop entitled “Shrinking Gracefully: Finding Sustainable Transitions in Declining Japanese Municipalities”, presented by Dr.Fernando Ortiz-Moya, City Taskforce, Institute for Global Environmental Strategies (IGES)

Dr. Fernando Ortiz-Moya’s main question was inspired by the movie: Sunset Boulevard (1959), directed by Billy Wilder: how the change developed in Hollywood and the shrinking city in the emerging economy, as well as the big scale of migration, caused problems to larger cities. His research points out the problems emerging from shrinking cities that experience simultaneous decline of population and economy after a certain period of growth.

The workshop started with a critical assessment of the “Growth ideology” as an widely adoped approach to studying and analyzing the shrinking cities. Normally this approach is based on a ‘pro-growth’ standpoint and its focus lies in ‘decline management.’ The ‘pro-growth’ standpoint consists of four elements: physical regeneration, economic development, city branding, and mega-events. The ‘decline management’ aims to reboot economic growth through a set of fiscal austerity, right-sizing, and land banks.

Dr. Fernando Ortiz-Moya brought a series of questions about why human beings are obsessed to Growth as if Growth were a religion. Still, not much consideration is placed on growing sustainably. He also argued that different approaches should be developed, one of which he refers to as ‘graceful shrinking’, a enhanced quality of life without depending on growth ideology. To examine this idea, he gave an example of two cities in Japan: Imabetsu town in Aomori Prefecture and Shimokawa town in Hokkaido. Both cities have been suffering a long-term population decline and ageing with the absence or the decline of major local industry. Whilst the case of Imabetsu shows a local development project that depends on the siting of super-express (Shinkansen) train station, the case of Shimokawa illustrates a bottom-up approach that promotes cooperation between local municipality and local people in coping with the problem of shrinkage.

At the end of the presentation and after a fruitful discussion, the key message is what to do when the shrinkage is unavoidable? By addressing the shortcomings that emerged from the cases mentioned above, Dr. Ortiz-Moya remarked that a more realistic approach needed to be considered in order to ‘gracefully embrace the shrinkage.’