Abstract

Shrinking Cities is an international initiative undertaken by the German Federal Cultural Foundation to address, through transdisciplinary work, the need for new ways of dealing with the fact that for a variety of political,economic, military, geographic, and other reasons, at least a quarter of the world’s large cities are shrinking. Twentieth century planning and design based on the paradigms of growth and “progress” do not work for these cities. Shrinking Cities assembled four international teams of geographers,ethnologists, cultural studies experts, journalists, sociologists, architects, and artists to examine the issues on both micro and global levels and to find and develop new concepts for urban spaces. These concepts may be too radical ever to have emerged from traditional disciplines, but may therefore have all the more potential to generate new perspectives. This paper examines some of the Shrinking Cities interventions in the light of contemporary theories of place and space.