COVID-19 as a Game-Changer? The Impact of the COVID-19 Pandemic on Urban Trajectories

Will the COVID-19 pandemic interrupt the recent European urbanization trends – and if so – what is the magnitude of this sudden shock and how deaths, births, or net migration contribute to this? Until now, most discussions have mostly circled around the anecdotal evidence of city center decline, or contrarian speculations about residential inertia and the forthcoming business-as-usual. To clarify these confusing, this paper seeks to detect overarching patterns in and the magnitude of the sudden COVID-19 shock to long-term urban trajectories, understood as a reversal of the pre-pandemic population development trend, across 805 European cities in the early 2020s.During the first year of the pandemic, population growth in European cities significantly slowed down to -0.32% p.a. with 28% of all European cities having experienced a U-turn in population trends from growth to loss. Out-migration was the main driver of this rapid urban population loss while the excess mortality associated with COVID-19 adds to this in several European regions while especially smaller cities suffered from a significant drop in birth rates. The paper underlines to evaluate the factorial, hierarchical, and temporal dimensions of the COVID-19 crisis to make a plausible forecast about the future of the post-coronavirus European city.