Recently, there was a study that predicted that by the end of the century, “about half” of American cities will lose a significant amount of their population. The Northeast and Midwest are expected to see the biggest losses, but Southern cities such as Columbus, Birmingham, Ala., and Jackson, Ms. are also expected to lose residents.
Another study was released last week by the Atlanta Regional Commission. It is predicted that by 2050, Metro Atlanta’s population will have grown by another 1.8 million people to reach a total of 7.9 million.
Are all those people leaving cities going to move to Atlanta? Or do these two studies represent wildly variant forecasts of population growth? When you look beneath the headlines, there’s not as much dissonance between these studies as might first appear.
The study predicting widespread depopulation appeared in the first edition of a new academic journal called Nature Cities. On closer inspection, what the University of Illinois Chicago researchers found was that 43 percent of U.S. cities are losing population, 40 percent are gaining population, and 17 percent show fluctuating trends. One might argue that’s close enough to “close to half,” but it does put it in a little sharper perspective.
In a similar fashion, the ARC’s growth report looks like the very opposite of depopulation. But its 2050 population projection is about 700,000 less than the ARC’s estimate four years ago. Metro Atlanta is still growing but within a larger environment of slower population growth.
Moreover, “virtually all the net growth will come from racial and ethnic minority groups,” according to the ARC report. The Nature Cities report mentions the tendency of Hispanic and Asian populations to settle “along the periphery of metro areas,” and that is reflected in the ARC’s projections about the counties where growth will occur in coming decades.
One of the big problems in trying to think through what all these predictions mean is terminology. Consider that plain old word, “city.” When the Census Bureau reports on the 15 largest cities in Georgia, it doesn’t report on Gainesville, Warner-Robins, or Valdosta, although these are the 7th, 8th, and 9th largest metropolitan areas in the state, respectively. If you’re only counting the governmental units at the center of these areas, none of them are as large as Stonecrest, a new city in DeKalb County that almost no one in Atlanta could tell you how to get to. By the same token, Jacksonville is the largest “city” in Florida, with Miami being the second largest.
The Census Bureau considers a “city” to be a legally charged government with fixed boundaries. The Nature Cities study considers “cities” to be “organically emerging population agglomerations.” To determine the size of these “cities,” complicated math is used to combine core incorporated areas with the areas surrounding them.
That’s closer by definition to what the Census Bureau calls a Metropolitan Statistical Area (MSA), but the dimensions are much different. There are 387 MSAs in the United States (14 in Georgia). The Nature Cities study, using its definition, counts 30,000 “cities” in the country.
So there’s really no useful way to compare the data from one study with that of another, which describes a lot of the research in this field.
The word “suburb” or “suburban” came into wider usage in the 1950s and ‘60s as an increasing number of Americans settled outside the city limits. In the following decades, a new term, “exurban,” was used to describe settled areas farther out than the suburbs. By this definition, Cobb County was suburban, while Cherokee County was exurban.
Lately, demographers, including those who wrote the Nature Cities study, have begun using the term “periurban,” from the same Latin prefix as “perimeter” and “periscope.” It describes, in a vague way, areas where there is only sparse development, but which are no longer rural.
The way in which one term has succeeded another tracks with the way a growing population has affected the American landscape. Less and less of it is “unspoiled,” to use another term we don’t hear as much these days. Many cities may lose population over the coming decades, but there will still be plenty of us to go around.
