Shrinking cities

Current urban context in the Danube area

The cities on the Danube have developed in different spatial, historical and geo-political contexts, under the impact of national or regional policies that have influenced, sometimes decisively, their economic and social profile, their connectivity in the territorial system and their ability to capitalize on their local heritage. At present, these cities present considerable differences, cumulated at the level of the Danube basin in a strongly unbalanced ratio of the network of localities, characterized by extremes, between centres and poles of development in dissonance with peripheries and marginalized areas. This imbalance is visible through the prism of macro-economic indicators, which reflect, in a cyclical relationship, the situation of economic branches such as tourism, social-health and education services, their accessibility, economic and social attractiveness (Kádár, Gede, 2021).

Looking at different mappings of recent tourist activity on the Danube, of travel for recreation or business, of port activity or for scientific and/or educational interest, we discover the same unbalanced picture. And it is not only the numbers and maps that are telling, but (especially) what we see as differences with the naked eye, what we feel as detached visitors or people involved in different activities: differences in the ambience of the cities, in people's attitudes and behavior. In this article, we will present one of the most interesting cities on the Danube: Sulina - a city that arouses interest because of its past, its spatially marginal position in the Danube ecosystem and the value often attributed to it as a "gateway".

In the urban image of the Danube, the fabric of cities and their connections, borders and border points, bridges, densities and centers of power, the magnetism of the metropolis and its newly expanding areas are the support and at the same time the physical manifestation of an energy which is, in essence, the intrinsic condition of development in this territory. Together, they form a complex system, fractally composed of multiple regional, sub-regional, county, municipal, local and intra-local sub-systems. The fractal character of the Danube system goes down to the depth of communities, which in turn "decompose" into small interest groups and individuals, verifying, both from a spatial-morphological and social point of view, recent theories on the metabolism and ecology of territorial systems (Brown et al., 2004) and attempting to explain some processes or similarities including those of growth-decline and the relationships between metropolis, zones of influence, suburbs and peripheral areas (Stanciugelu, 2016, Stan, 2009).

The coherence or, as the case may be, the incoherence of the system at the macro scale are at the same time mirror and cause of the phenomena felt at the level of its parts. From this perspective, phenomena such as shrinking cities, regardless of their size, must be correctly understood and assumed: there is a risk that misunderstanding or ignoring the phenomenon may lead to it being chronicized or amplified. The shrinking of cities must also be understood from the point of view of a two-pronged approach, in a one-to-one relationship: one approach that refers to the physical, visible space of cities, and another, invisible approach, which is based on the decisions, will and power of people and communities to believe in and value the places in which they live.

Shrinking Cities

In the Lower Danube region, most of which is peripheral in a geographical sense and in terms of connectivity in the network of settlements and economic performance, the shrinking of cities is already chronic. It is present both in Romanian cities and in the 'twin' cities on the Bulgarian and/or Serbian shores, which, however, as they have a different type of administrative division, with a larger territory bringing together several localities, make the demographic decline less obvious. However, as already noted in previous research (Păun-Constantinescu, 2019), the phrase shrinking cities (translated here with the term shrinking cities), covers a phenomenon present worldwide, with origins in Germany after 1990 and gaining international visibility between 2002 and 2008, with the "Shrinking Cities" project, led by Philipp Oswald. But this phenomenon manifests itself very differently from city to city and region to region.
In Romania, the shrinking of cities has structural causes, manifested in the post-communist years, such as deindustrialization, the "tertialization" of economic life, the migration of the young population towards the major economic poles or emigration. In addition to these, there are internal causes, linked in particular to poor administrative performance, lack of financial support and expertise in sustainable local development, major shortcomings in urban planning legislation, but above all, a lack of constant political will, transparency in dialogue and openness carefully shared with the local community - the minimum conditions needed to improve the decline and unlock development.

Sulina, paradoxical uniqueness

There are 21 Danube towns in Romania and all of them (!) are shrinking according to the latest ^statistics1: Sulina, Tulcea, Isaccea, Galați, Brăila, Măcin, Hârșova, Cernavodă, Fetești, Călărași, Oltenița, Giurgiu, Zimnicea, Turnu Măgurele, Corabia, Bechet, Dăbuleni, Calafat, Drobeta Turnu Severin, Orșova, Moldova Nouă. Of these, with the exception of the cities of Brăila and Galați, which are in the category of large cities (population over 100,000), the others are categorized as small and medium-sized cities, again with several sub-categories, according to several ^references2: medium-sized cities - with population between 30.000-100,000 inhabitants, small cities - with a population between 10,000-30,000 inhabitants, and very small cities - those with a population below 10,000 inhabitants (and some even below 5,000 inhabitants).
The shrinkage of these 19 small and medium-sized towns in the Danube is all the greater the further east to west we go. At the same time, it is more pronounced in towns that are not in the vicinity of a large city, considered as a main urban pole, such as Sulinei, Bechet, Dăbuleni, Corabia, Turnu Măgurele, Zimnicea. Most of these cities have port areas and shipyards built during the communist period and now abandoned or poorly managed, but with high potential in building a green urban infrastructure within the urban system of the Danube region, associated with the provision of multiple benefits that can support a healthy living environment and general well-being (Stan, Hărmănescu, 2021). Many of them are gradually (in the more than 30 years of transition) regaining their rural features from before forced industrialization. These include a high proportion (63%) of new towns, built on a pre-established plan, with orthogonal street layouts (Drobeta-Turnu Severin, Calafat, Bechet, Dăbuleni, Corabia, Turnu Măgurele, Zimnicea, Giurgiu, Oltenița, Călărași, Fetești), which have developed on a medieval or older historical core, keeping relatively intact the boundaries and the structure of the fabric of the fabric drawn during the socialist operations to eradicate villages and build 'new towns' after 1948.

9 + 1. The towns of the Danube

The town of Sulina is a special case, with a population of only 3,633 inhabitants in 2011, it falls into the category of very small towns, the only one of this size in Romania. In the context of the Danube basin, it is part of a category of towns with a population of less than 5,000 inhabitants, together with nine other towns: Fridingen an der Donau with 3,174 inhabitants (in Germany), Ottensheim with 4,478 inhabitants, Pöchlarn with 3.942 inhabitants (in Austria), the commune of Trstice with 3,735 inhabitants, Topolniky with 3,307 inhabitants (in Slovakia), Dalj with 3,937 inhabitants (in Croatia), Rácalmás with 4,766 inhabitants, Dunavecse with 3,991 inhabitants (in Hungary) and Marten with 3,632 inhabitants (in Bulgaria). What is interesting, however, is that all these nine towns belonged to historical cultural and geo-political basins similar or comparable in terms of emancipation (Austro-Hungarian Empire, Cisleithania, Transleithania, Ottoman Empire), all of them have communities based on ethnic and religious ties, they all have at least one emblematic architectural element (fortress, castle, fortress, lighthouse) dating from the medieval, pre-modern or modern period, which on their scale have the power to catalyze tourism as the current basis of their economy, in a still insufficiently or inadequately exploited proximity to the Danube. However, at the scale of their region, with the exception of Sulina, all these cities are still today part of a solid, dense network of political, economic, administrative, cultural, spiritual and moral links which bind them together and give them a certain identity in the urban system of which they are part.
Although these nine towns similar in population to Sulina are also shrinking, the cause of the phenomenon is different: they are losing population more through negative natural increase than through emigration, the process of deindustrialization, which has been present here since the 1990s, is being countered by coherent and continuously implemented urban regeneration projects, some of which are more than 15 years old. These make the decline much slower, with much less visible and stigmatizing effects on daily life.
The energy of people who are getting lost
Sulina se distinge prin câteva trăsături marcante și, în parte, paradoxale: este singurul oraș-port deopotrivă fluvial și maritim de pe Dunăre (exceptând Brăila, oraș de talie mare) și singurul oraș parte a Rezervației Biosferei Delta Dunării; este totodată cel mai izolat oraș în sens geografic, cu acces doar pe apă din centrul municipal (Tulcea) și cu o densitate de doar 10,9 loc./ kmp (care reprezintă cca. 8% of the average density of the other cities in this list); it is the only city with a depopulation rate higher than 40% in the last 50 years.
Sulina's contraction has meant a steeper population loss after 1990, approaching the low of 1948, when it had only 3,373 residents. Comparing Sulina strictly through the prism of the number of inhabitants and the density per square kilometer - although questionable under some qualitative aspects, of local culture, of course, which make these numbers relative - can nevertheless highlight for us, from another perspective, that, as Dana Vais said, in urban contraction, space becomes too much, not too little, and that the energy of the people who are lost, according to demographic statistics, cannot be compensated by that of those who remain (Vais, 2019, p. 216).

DANUrB, DANUBIAN SMCs

In a team research within the ^DANUrB+3 and DANUBIAN ^SMCs4 projects, it was analyzed how shrinkage imprints the territory of the Danube cities and two major types of its manifestation in the physical plane of urban tissues were identified:

1) shrinkage through peripheralization, when the peripheral character (of the edge of something, of unfinished space, of inferior quality) begins to dominate the character of the city, an aspect present especially in the wake of deindustrialization and, in many cases in Romania, correlated also with the loss of port activity related to that industry. It can also be called contraction by emptying because it leads to the emergence of urban voids within the existing urban structure (physical or functional abandonment of buildings, demolition, unused spaces, vacant land, etc.);
2) contraction through disconnection from the urban network, when the decline is mainly manifested by the accentuation of the isolation of small towns and the lack of viable links with the centers of gravity in the territorial system, which in turn change their areas of influence (some expanding through uncontrolled sprawl, others generating new peri-urban centralities), all of which lead to the loss of cohesion (Alexandru, 2019) and accentuation of the decline of the smallest "pieces" in the system.

Sulina is definitely a special case, a shrinking city that, spatially, makes a mix between both types presented above. It is, on the one hand, a city that is emptying itself of a stable population, but also of the identity that placed it a century ago as an important piece in the European Danube strategy. Abandonment in the urban fabric is visible in the dilapidated state of the buildings, and the character of the public spaces, which should be one dominated by the architectural values it still possesses, seems threatened by an emerging peripheralization, lacking the effervescence of specific social activities, in an isolation that is a disadvantage of the city (although it could be a distinctive feature to enhance a type of tourist attractiveness).
With plans sometimes utopian, sometimes lacking in vision, with punctual investments of little real value, without the strength to constitute sustainable urban, social, cultural or economic models, Sulina risks losing the energy to regain its identity despite the prestigious history and the (sad-)charming but authentic (sad-)charming but authentic ambience that the city still offers. In discussing Sulina's development, we cannot ignore Tulcea, to which the city is umbilically linked and which can play a key role in its revival. The development vision for Tulcea as part of a regional urban system cannot fail to include a vision for Sulina and Sfântu Gheorghe, as two of the most sensitive points in the network that is very faithfully anchored in the exceptional geographical, ecological and landscape features of these places.

Even if they will not aim in the near future at a development that will compete with the cities in the central Danube area, the cities in this area can enhance their development by considering the few indigenous values and resources that individualize them and that can bring them a harmonious and sustainable development within a regional urban system. Alongside external and internal political and economic influences, the human factor plays an important role in this reconstruction, by reconsidering the community spirit and its own social and cultural values. The city's captivity to the phenomenon of contraction leads, in a cyclical fashion, to a loss of hope among its inhabitants. The recovery of the city, the rekindling of hope and confidence among the inhabitants of these cities, the transformation of (obvious) losses and disadvantages (isolation) into preconditions for new development have been and are the tasks of many projects financed by European programs, among which we mention the European Interrer - Danube program: Explorations, mappings, case study analysis, rediscoveries, reactivations, acupuncture interventions, connecting people and their activities, beyond differences (of language, culture), perseverance and a thorough and honest knowledge of these values.

In The Danube Story

Coming out of contraction means regaining vitality, regenerating a positive, constructive, pro-active energy, which in turn needs a germinating bed of ideas and visions, adjusted from the global-regional to the local level and capable of producing a re-invigoration: not only among those who are emotionally attached to the city, but also among those who decide on its development. What is needed is both a meta-narrative of the Danube as an integrating element (such as DANUrB: Brand of the Danube) and local micro-narratives that reiterate the same message of re-activation at the closest level, at the level of proximity and everyday life.
The need for belonging, knowledge and integration is a major one in the entire Danube basin, also stated in the European Danube Strategy ^documents5, and the necessary methods should not be sought only in socio-economic, demographic data, transport corridors and geo-strategic policies at the level of the region, although these are also extremely important, especially in the current context of political, economic and military realignment generated by the war in Ukraine. Beyond these, it is also important to find those internal springs of enterprising creativity that motivate a narrative of integrative value for the Danube cities, beyond (or precisely taking advantage of) the contradictory aspects of the system and the strong differences between its elements. The specificity of these small and very small cities, still close to a rural spirit despite the traces of expansion and urbanization of the great empires, genetically imprints a multi-directed, inclusive and complex message in the sense of diversity and richness of values. These are complemented by European policies and allocations of funds related to ^territorial cohesion6. It is precisely thanks to this dramatic paradox of the Danube - of uniqueness within a family of historically and culturally spun diversities, of an imbalance in development that drives and forces the system to permanent adjustments and dynamic competition - that the small and medium-sized towns in the Lower Danube region, which do not necessarily follow the urbanization patterns specific to Germany, Austria or Hungary, have a story to tell, which enriches and enriches the Danube basin socially, culturally and economically.

NOTES

1 Data from 2011, as the results of this year's census are not yet available.
2 Ministry of Regional Development and Public Administration - "Development of territorial strategic planning tools and models to support the next programming period post 2013", ROMANIA'S TERRITORIAL DEVELOPMENT STRATEGY, BACKGROUND STUDIES, Synthesis Report, Quattro Design, 2015.
3 INTERREG, Danube Transnational Programme, DANube Urban Brand + Building Regional and Local Resilience through the Valorization of Danube's Cultural Heritage.
4 ERASMUS PLUS, DANUBIAN_SMCS - Creative Danube: innovative teaching for inclusive development in small and medi-um-sized danubian cities.
5 https://danube-region.eu/
6 https://cohesiondata.ec.europa.eu/stories/s/2021-2027-EU-allocations-available-for-programming/2w8s-ci3y/#3.-goal-european-territorial-cooperation---interreg

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