Shrinking world, fewer spaces

20 Apr, 2026

One of the truisms of this blog is that the effects of population decline will be seen unevenly throughout the world. Perhaps it is a corollary that some of these post-growth effects will be seen even in places where the population is rising.

Superstar cities, with their infrastructure and amenities, will be able to attract a working-age population even as the national population continues to decline. It's not clear that new residents will bring children, though, especially given the higher cost of housing in urban areas. This is the case despite the fact that many cities are, arguably, more amenable to family formation than they were two decades ago (with the re-discovery of the walkable community).

Here¹ is an article from last week's Financial Times about what becomes of a city when the demographic pyramid begins to look like a diamond:

[I]t’s not just that fewer children are being born, many are moving away. In the UK, eight of the 10 fastest-shrinking boroughs for primary school children in the past five years were in inner London, according to the Education Policy Institute.

Why? London rents are 65 per cent higher than the UK average and the highest in the UK, according to data from the Office of National Statistics. Then there is the issue of space. Census data shows that less than half of London’s homes have three or more bedrooms, compared with nearly two-thirds in the rest of England.

...

According to Sam Long of Molior, many larger build-to-rent homes tend to be let to “sharers rather than families”. He cites the developer Quintain as “a rare exception that has made a point of marketing larger units to families. The Robinson building in Wembley has 27 per cent of units with three or more bedrooms and a good playground”.

As a result, despite the capital growing by 543,000 residents between 2014 and 2024, its population of under-nines fell by 107,000, according to Trust for London.

In other words: housing in London is expensive - and spaces tend to be small, with fewer bedrooms. Larger housing units with multiple bedrooms tend to be built for the purpose of renting to groups of adults - not sold to families with children. So families leave.

This means smaller class sizes - and while smaller class sizes are often desirable, underutilized schools eventually close. As a result, families with young children must weigh the longevity of their local school before moving into an area.

Watching the closures around them, parents are having to strategise, often moving further out pre-emptively to schools less likely to close: “If you think year-on-year [the council will be] closing local schools, you’ll try to pick one that isn’t going to,” he says.

School closures are meaningfully disruptive to the community, particularly if the graduates remain in the area - the article describes a psychological cost and feelings of displacement associated with watching your former school close. In fact, in my own suburban community here in the US, a group of parents have petitioned to prevent the population of their (aging) local high school from being moved to a newly-constructed building less than 5 miles away. The old building was in desperate need of repair, but despite this community members want to retain their old location. This is a high-performing school, and I'm sure local property values contribute to this controversy - but many students and parents have also cited their desire to live within walking distance of their school (which is a community hub) as a reason for their protest.

How does a community change when it no longer has a neighborhood school? Arguably, you lose a component of what Jane Jacobs called the "sidewalk ballet:"

Shopkeepers, neighbours and parents provided an informal web of supervision and sociability; schools, in this sense, were not just institutions but engines of street life, generating rhythm, encounters and a sense of continuity. “The trust of a city street is formed over time from many, many little public sidewalk contacts,” [Jacobs] wrote in The Death and Life of Great American Cities. The book’s argument that dense, mixed-use, walkable neighbourhoods created safer, more vibrant cities than large-scale redevelopment helped reshape urban policy in the US.

There has, in fact, been an effort within the US (and apparently Europe) to develop dense walkable neighborhoods rather than suburban sprawl. Schools should be a part of that planning because children's foot traffic is a part of that "sidewalk ballet." But - as stated above - increased housing costs prevent families with children from staying in such communities.

As children leave a neighborhood, local amenities suffer from disuse:

Saffron Woodcraft, urban anthropologist and research fellow at University College London’s Institute for Global Prosperity, points to other knock-on effects: fewer children using local services such as community centres or church halls makes them more likely to close, which comes at a cost to everyone. “My local Bermondsey village hall, as well as toddler groups and children’s music classes, hosts the polling centre, puppy training, music classes, exercise classes for people of all ages — and you can rent it for a party or a wedding. We would lose all that,” she says.

Much has been written about the decline of "third spaces" for adults - places apart from work and home where one can exist without being expected to spend money. A library counts; a coffee shop might (but often doesn't, depending on the policies of the proprietor). Less has been written about the fact that these spaces, when they exist, often exist to serve the needs of children/young teens (who want to exist and participate in the 'real world') and parents (who want them out of the house for a few hours). Everyone benefits from this arrangement. But a community with fewer children will have fewer third spaces (and vice-versa). A superstar city like London can get by because it can always attract more young adult renters who want third spaces of their own - but eventually you run out of those too!

Which brings us to the title of this post. A smaller future is likely a more isolated one - it means fewer third spaces for everyone to enjoy, fewer participants in the sidewalk ballet, and the loss of the associated ancillary benefits.

This is a really important point to internalize, as it directly the simplistic and optimistic "more resources for the rest of us" theory of population decline. The world is not necessarily a zero-sum game; ironically fewer people around can mean that each of us gets less of the things that we like. Other people don't just compete with each of us for resources - they contribute to our lives, particularly when they can provide what we want, help create popular demand for things we want, or collaborate with us toward a common goal.

#Europe #USA #atomization #education #urban