Shrinking Cities
Volume 1: International Research
Edited by Philipp Oswalt for the
Kulturstiftung des Bundes
736 pages, 503 illustrations,
389 in color, softcoverISBN-10 3-7757-1682-3
ISBN-13 978-3-7757-1682-6(English)Atlas of Shrinking Cities
Edited by Philipp Oswalt and Tim
Rieniets
160 pages, ca. 120 illustrations,ca. 100 in color, hardcoverISBN-10 3-7757-1714-5
ISBN-13 978-3-7757-1714-4(English/German)

SOM Journal 4
Edited by Diane Ghirardo
Ca. 192 pages, ca. 250 illustrations,ca. 100 in color, ca. 100 in duotone,
softcoverISBN-10 3-7757-1803-6
ISBN-13 978-3-7757-1803-5(English)Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern
The Architecture
Edited by the Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern
160 pages, 120 illustrations, 103 incolor, hardcoverISBN-10 3-7757-1550-9
ISBN-13 978-3-7757-1550-8(English)

You will find our complete list ofavailable titles and other related
information at www.hatjecantz.com
Hatje Cantz

Contains:
Projects by Will Alsop, Ruedi Baur, Florian Beigel, Chaos Computer Club, Crimson, ­Jeremy Deller, M. J. Ginzburg, Gordon Matta-Clark, muf, Hidetoshi Ohno, OMA, CedricPrice, ­ Andreas Siekmann, Robert Smithson, Superflex, Oswald Mathias Ungers, andmany more.
Essays by Ash Amin, Regina Bittner, Wolfgang Engler, Robert Fishman, Dan Graham,­David Harvey, Juan Herreros, Bart Lootsma, and many more.
864 pages, 478 illustrations, 369 in color

Volume 2 4Interventions

Volume 2 4 Interventions

Luminous Buildings
Night Architecture
Edited by the Kunstmuseum
Stuttgart
152 pages, 120 illustrations,70 in color, hardcoverISBN-10 3-7757-1757-9
ISBN-13 978-3-7757-1757-1(English/German)

In dealing with shrinking cities, classic urban design and city planning reach their limits.
In the face of this new challenge, new paths are taken: the “hard” tools of construction
and deconstruction are joined with the “soft” tools of political, social, cultural, and commu­
nicative interventions. This book provides an international overview and critical ­discussionof concepts and strategies for shrinking cities from the fields of architecture, landscapedesign, urban planning, the media, performance, and art. The approaches discussed
range from artistic responses and self-empowerment projects to architectural and land­
scape interventions, strategies of media communication, and city marketing, to new legal
regulations and utopian designs. A series of essays critically discusses current projects inNorth America, Europe, and Japan, as well as important historical positions in ­architecture
and art.

Volume 2 4Interventions
COLOPHON
Shrinking Cities, Volume 2 4Interventions
Volume 1 4International Research (ISBN-10 3-7757-1682-3, ISBN-13 978-3-7757-1682-6)
The German edition of this book was published in conjunction with the exhibition “Shrinking Cities—­Interventions,”
Galerie für Zeitgenössische Kunst Leipzig, November 26, 2005–January 29, 2006. This English edition is pub­lished in conjunction with the exhibition “Shrinking Cities,” planned for the following venues: 10th ­International
Architecture Exhibition, Venice, September 10–November 19, 2006; University of Tokyo, with AkiDeCo ­Museum,
Tokyo, Fall 2006; Pratt Manhattan Gallery and Van Alen Institute, New York, November 2006–January 2007;
Cranbrook Art Museum, Bloomfield Hills, Mich., and Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit (MOCAD),­February–March 2007; Afoundation, Liverpool, Summer 2007; E-Werk, Saarbrücken, Germany, Fall 2007;
Deutsches Architekturmuseum in ­Frankfurt (DAM), Frankfurt am Main, November 2007–January 2008; Pro Arte
Institute, with State Museum of History, St. Petersburg, Spring 2008 (exhibition schedule as of May 2006).
Editor and concept: Philipp Oswalt; Editorial team: Philipp Oswalt, Elke Beyer (“Reorganizing” and “Imagining”
chapters), Anke Hagemann (“Reevaluating” and “Reorganizing” chapters), and Anita Kaspar (“­Deconstructing”
chapter), with Füsun Türetken, Kristina Herresthal, Alexandra Hoorn, and Lena Feldhahn; Translations: BrianCurrid (“Deconstructing” chapter), Jill Denton (“Deconstructing” and “Imagining” chapters), Nancy Joyce(“Survival Handbook”), Steven Lindberg (Introductory texts and “Reevaluating” chapter), Christina M. White(“Reorganizing” chapter); Copyediting (German edition): Miriam Wiesel, with Stefanie Oswalt; Copyediting(English edition): Ginger A. Diekmann and Niamh Warde; Proofreading: Niamh Warde, Greg Bond, and ­Rebecca
van Dyck; Production management (English edition): Elke Beyer and Anita Kaspar; Managing director:­Florian Bolenius (until February 2006), Karin Johnson (starting February 2006); Graphic design: Stephan
Müller and Tanja Wesse; Illustrations: Tina Berning (“Deconstructing” chapter), Felice Bruno (“Imagining”
chapter), Tom(as) Frey (“Reorganizing” chapter), and Maria Tackmann (“Reevaluating” chapter); ­Reproductions:Dr. Cantz’sche Druckerei, Ostfildern, and Licht & Tiefe, Berlin; Binding: Nething Buchbinderei GmbH & Co. KG,
Weilheim/Teck; Production and printing: Dr. Cantz’sche Druckerei, Ostfildern; Cover illustration: Jacques Magiera© 2006 Philipp Oswalt; authors, photographers, artists, and their heirs© 2006 for the reproduced works by John Heartfield, Lucien Kroll, Les Levine, Gordon Matta-Clark, Robert ­Smithson,
and Frank Lloyd Wright: VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn
Published by Hatje Cantz Verlag, Zeppelinstrasse 32, 73760 Ostfildern, Germany, Phone: +49 711 4405-0,
Fax: +49 711 4405-220, www.hatjecantz.com
Hatje Cantz books are available internationally at selected bookstores and from the following distribution­partners: USA/North America – D.A.P., Distributed Art Publishers, New York, www.artbook.com; UK –Art Books International, London, www.art-bks.com; Australia – Tower Books, Frenchs Forest (Sydney),
www.towerbooks.com.au; France – Interart, Paris, www.interart.fr; Belgium – Exhibitions International,
Leuven, www.exhibitionsinternational.be; Switzerland – Scheidegger, Affoltern am Albis, www.ava.ch. For
Asia, Japan, South America, and Africa, as well as for general questions, please contact Hatje Cantz directlyat sales@hatjecantz.de, or visit our homepage at www.hatjecantz.com for further information.
ISBN-10 3-7757-1711-0
ISBN-13 978-3-7757-1711-3
Printed in Germany

Edited by Philipp Oswalt for the Kulturstiftung des Bundeswith the editorial assistance of Elke Beyer, Anke Hagemann, and Anita Kaspar,with Füsun Türetken, Kristina Herresthal, Alexandra Hoorn, and Lena Feldhahn
Shrinking Cities is a project of the Kulturstiftung des Bundes (German Federal Cultural
Foundation) in cooperation with the Project Office Philipp Oswalt, the Museum ofContemporary Art Leipzig, the Bauhaus Dessau Foundation, and the magazine archplus.



Table of Contents
Project Participants, Acknowledgments
Foreword | Hortensia Völckers and Alexander Farenholtz
Introduction | Philipp Oswalt
Governmentalizing Planning | Nikolaus Kuhnert and Anh-Linh Ngo
Without a Model: Experimental Urbanism | Friedrich von Borries and Walter Prigge
Truth Discourses | Barbara Steiner
Commissioned Contributions to the Exhibition
Project Publications
Notes on Contributors
Illustration Credits

10
11
13
19
25
31
36
40
42
45

DECONSTRUCTING

48

Demolition City
Planned Destruction | Anthony Fontenot
Demolition and Urban Development: A Historical Sketch | Gerd Albers

50
52
62

La Défense | OMA

68

Leinefelde: Orderly Retreat | Ulrike Steglich
Dismantling Infrastructure | Matthias Koziol

7076

Decamping Detroit | Charles Waldheim and Marilí Santos-Munné

80

Gordon Matta-Clark | Dan Graham

86

Demolitions: Opening Interior Gardens | Lara Almárcegui98

The Background Muzak of an Epochal Change | Tina Veihelmann

99

Palast der Republik: Re-deconstruction | Eric Tschaikner

106

The Solution: Vibach in 2042 | Johannes Touché

108

Cretto | Alberto Burri

110

Evolutionary City
Robert Smithson and the Architecture of Absence | Kai Vöckler

112
114

Continuous Conveyor Belt City | Superstudio

131

Structures of Possibility | Pierre Huyghe

132

Specific Indeterminacy: Witznitz Briquette Factory | Florian Beigel Architects

136

Feral City
Naturally Determined Urban Development? | Jörg Dettmar

142
144

Duisburg-Nord Landscape Park | Latz + Partner

151

Urban Agriculture | Holger Lauinger

156

Tilbury Park | muf architecture/art
Apple Tree Court: An Urban Oasis | Anthony Milroy et al.
COW—the udder way | Ulrike Steven et al.
Grow! | anschlaege.de

165
168
169
174

Contraction City
The Compact City: A Model for Eastern German Cities? | Markus Hesse

178
180



Remaking Barnsley | Alsop Architects
Bradford City Centre Masterplan | Alsop Architects

184
185

Oswald Mathias Ungers’s Urban Archipelago for Shrinking Berlin | Jasper Cepl
Russian Disurbanism | Christiane Post and Philipp Oswalt

187
196

Fiber City, Tokyo | Ohno Laboratory

204

Depleted CityThe Shrinking and Perforated City | Marta Doehler-Behzadi
Chemnitz-Brühl | Matthias Grünzig

212
214
218

Core & Plasma | L21
Wall It Up. And Take a Breath. | Peter Arlt and letzelfreivogel architekten

220
222

The Suburbanization of Inner Cities | Walter Prigge
Gas Station Urbanism, or What’s Left of the City | Orange Edge
On-Demand Infrastructure for Shrinking Regions | Florian Böhm
Tourism in a Luxury of Void | Michael Zinganel

225
232
235
244



Pioneer City
Space Pioneers | Bastian Lange and Ulf Matthiesen
These Start-Up Times: How Dessau Organizes Vacant Spaces of the Future |Ulrike Steglich
Alternative Investment in Shrinking Cities | Birgit Schmidt

372
374

Alternative Investment: International Models

392

Leipzig-Plagwitz: The Dark Land Behind the Marsh | Kathleen Liebold andHeidi Stecker
Struggling with the Creative Class | Jamie Peck

394
401

Werkleitz Gesellschaft e.V.
Chinati Foundation | Donald Judd
Los Topos | Club Real and Peanutz-Architekten
The Settlers … In the Boondocks | Claus Strigel

407
408
412
417

Go East: On the Wild-West Rhetoric of Shrinking City Projects | Anke Hagemann

421[Inverse] Seasonal City | Hans-H. Albers, Michael Hieslmair, Maruša Sagadin,and Michael Zinganel
250

Reinterpreted City
Forty Years of Heterodoxy | Juan Herreros

426
428

Cities in an Aging Society | Matthias Grünzig

257

Potteries Thinkbelt | Cedric Price

431

Us Old Folk | L21

260

Against Necrophilia | Stephen Mullin

436

Bat Hat: Redesign of Battersea Power Station | Cedric Price

438

384
386

Polarized Regional City

268

“Urban Renewal”: Not Just Demolition | Wolfgang Kil

439

MetroSachs | Friedrich von Borries and Walter Prigge

270

WiMBY! (Welcome into My Backyard!) IBE Rotterdam-Hoogvliet | Crimson

445

The Last Bastion | Bart Lootsma
Territorial Retreat | Hans-Joachim Bürkner
Emscher Park International Building Exhibition | Arnold Voß

276
282
293

Battle of Matériel with No Winners | Claudia Wahjudi

454

Schkreutz City Map: 1st Edition | SMAQ
Bitterfeld: A Translocal Region | Urbanista
Hollocore | AMO

301
306
308

Door Recycling | Raumlabor et al.
Automatenbar | Automaten e.V.
Recycling Projects | Dan Peterman

456
460
462

REORGANIZING

464

Do-It-Yourself City
Urban Self-Organization | A Conversation with Marjetica Potrč

466
468

Adamah | Kyong Park/iCUE et al.
Catherine Ferguson Academy | G. Asenath Andrews et al.

474
476

The City Turned into a Region | Robert Kaltenbrunner

310

The Upper Calder Valley | John Thompson & Partners et al.
However Unspectacular: The New Suburbanism | Interboro and CUP

322
324

Strategic Planning | Manfred Kühn

330

REEVALUATING

336

Temporary City
Vacant Lots as Incubators? | Klaus Overmeyer

338
340

Building Guards | HausHalten e.V.
Community Gardens on Josephstraße | Lindenauer Stadtteilverein e.V.
Dietzenbach: Definitively Unfinished | Projektgruppe Stadt 2030
Sportification | complizen Planungsbüro
Utilization of Vacant Space in Dessau-West | Anonymous users

344
344
348
350
354

What Is Art Up To in Disused Buildings? | Elske Rosenfeld

355

FURTHER Up in the Air | Leo Fitzmaurice and Neville Gabie

362

Theater as Urban Intervention | Andreas Hillger

366

The Activating State | Thomas Knorr-Siedow
479
484
Can Social Capital Save Shrinking Cities? | Christine Hannemann
489
Contemporary Activist Art | Stella Rollig
Social Change, Self-Empowerment, and Imagination | A Conversation withIrene Bude, XPONA, Anke Haarmann, Kristina Leko, Tadej Pogacar, andIsa Rosenberger
499
The World Economic Crisis, Subsistence Economics, and Modern Urban Planning |Markus Kilian
503
513
The Buffalo Is Dead | A Conversation with Frithjof Bergmann

Out of Work, Into Reality! | bankleer
workstation | WochenKlausur and ideenwerkstatt berlin e.V.
Opera of the Unemployed | Robert Linke and Hans-Joachim Schulze

515
518
521

Table of Contents

Strong City
In Times of Crisis – Back to the Cities | A Conversation between Marta DoehlerBehzadi, Dieter Hoffmann-Axthelm, Stephan Lanz, Engelbert Lütke Daldrup, andPhilipp Oswalt
Wolfen: The Cost of Silence | Tina Veihelmann
The Experiment of Red Vienna, 1919–1934 | Rudolf Kohoutek
From Managerialism to Entrepreneurialism | David Harvey
The Urban Task Force and Its Urban Renaissance | Anna Minton
Rethinking Local Specificity and Community | Ash Amin
Commodified City
Communalization of Property? | Holger Lauinger



524

526
534
540
547
555
559
568
570

Reality Properties: Fake Estates | Gordon Matta-Clark
572
Acquisition of the Property at the Corner of Tibusstraße and Breul | Maria Eichhorn 576
580
Opening Empty Lots to the Public | Lara Almárcegui
581
Claiming Land | Stefanie Bremer et al.
Loans for Shrinking Regions | Rolf Novy-Huy
Fictitious Values, Imaginary Markets | Matthias Bernt
Collateral in Hand, Treuhand, and the Invisible Hand | Andreas Siekmann

587
592



[murmur] | Gabe Sawhney, James Roussel, and Shawn Micallef
Immaginare Corviale | Osservatorio Nomade/Stalker
Tenantspin (Superchannel) | Superflex
Karlskrona2 (Supercity) | Superflex
Blinkenlights | Chaos Computer Club

695
696
698
701
704

Walk the City, Flex Your Mind | Gregor Harbusch

706

Love at Leisure. Help Me Stranger. Roundabout. | e-Xplo
Rainwater Retention Tanks on Land Awaiting Development – A City Walk |Boris Sieverts

708

Communication with the Ones Who Left | Mirjam Struppek

717

Marketing City
City Marketing: Origin and Critique | Stephen V. Ward
Promoting Detroit | William J. V. Neill

722
724
730

De-TRO-it | Ursula Faix, Anders Melsom, and Kathrine Nyhus
The Pott’s Boiling | Springer & Jacoby
Leipzig Freedom | Orange Cross

736
738
742
744
753

714

Emerging City

600

The Guggenheim Effect | Lorenzo Vicario and Pedro Manuel Martínez Monje
Architecture as Branding | A Conversation with Will Alsop
Twenty-First-Century Homesteading: New Attempts to Resettle the American
Frontier | Kate Stohr

Hoang’s Bistro | Christoph Schäfer

602

Flagship Developments | Various Architects

766

Urban Transformation as Unintended Side Effect | Robert Fishman
Shrinkage and Immigration | Franz-Josef Kemper and Olaf Schnur
To Play with Shrinking – and Shrink Playfully? | Friedrich von Borries

608
615
622

Profiled CityThe Urban Self | Anke Haarmann

770
772

628

Exterritories | fiedler.tornquist

630

Recruitment of Settlers in the History of Prussia | Carsten Benke

638

The Secret of L.E. | Anke Haarmann with Irene Bude
The National Museum of Statistics | Eva Grubbauer, Martin Luce,
Joost Meuwissen, and Johannes Weisser
International Building Exhibition “Urban Redevelopment Saxony-Anhalt 2010”

776

Exceptional City

Non-plan | Reyner Banham, Paul Barker, Peter Hall, and Cedric Price

644

Enterprise Zones in the United Kingdom | Klaus ZehnerSpecial Economic Zones in Poland | Uwe Rada
Special Tax Zones as a Fatal Strategy | Corell Wex

649
655
658

Urban Identities | Ulf Matthiesen
The City Must Be Invented | Regina Bittner
Urban Blindness | Ruedi Baur

787
793
797

Special Social Welfare Zone Forst | Jesko Fezer, Stephan Lanz, and Uwe Rada
Temporary Autonomous Zone | Hakim Bey
Dresden’s Colorful Republic of Neustadt | Residents and other stakeholders

661
669
670

The Railway Underpass at Tourcoing | Intégral Ruedi Baur et associés
A Regional Image for Südraum Leipzig | Unverzagt und Albrecht

801
802

597

759

778
784

Imaginary City

804

To the Sisters of Carl Möglin | Wiebke Loeper
The Battle of Orgreave | Jeremy Deller

806
812

IMAGINING

672

Making Museums of Industrial Heritage Sites | Susanne Hauser
The Power of Desire | Stephan Lanz

816
823

Communicating City
On the Crisis of Urban Public Life | Jörg Dürrschmidt

674
676

The Square of Permanent Reorganization | Andreas Siekmann

826

Le Week-End | D. Gregor Mirwa et al.
A Monument for the Women’s Center | Isa Rosenberger

683
686

Conflict as Productive Potential | Nina Möntmann

689

S U R V I V A L
H A N D B O O K
with Perspectives on “Human Capital”
Authors collective, led by Wolfgang Engler

11

10
PROJECT PARTICIPANTS
Shrinking Cities is a project initiated by the Kulturstiftung des Bundes (German Federal Cultural Foundation)in cooperation with the Project Office Philipp Oswalt, the Galerie für Zeitgenössische Kunst Leipzig (­Museumof Contemporary Art Leipzig), the ­Bauhaus Dessau Foundation, and archplus magazine.
Chief curator: Philipp Oswalt (architect/writer, Berlin)
Curatorial team: Nikolaus Kuhnert (archplus magazine, Berlin), Walter Prigge (Bauhaus Dessau Foundation),
Barbara Steiner (Galerie für Zeitgenössische Kunst Leipzig)
Collaborators of project participants for the second project phase: Project Office Philipp Oswalt, Berlin—­managing
director: Florian Bolenius (until February 2006), Karin Johnson (starting February 2006); research associates:
Elke Beyer, Anke Hagemann, Anita Kaspar, Kristina Herresthal, Alexandra Hoorn, and Füsun Türetken; ­interns:
Lena Feldhahn and Sebastian Juhnke; sponsoring: Nicole Minten; public relations: Astrid Herbold (until
mid-2005), Achim Klapp (starting mid-2005); volume copyeditors: Ginger A. Diekmann and Niamh Warde(English edition), Miriam Wiesel with Stefanie Oswalt (German edition); Web site: e27, Berlin; EDP systemadministration: united-data.net/Johann Dinges; tax consultancy and accounting: Eckhard Stranghöner with
Regina Marks; Galerie für Zeitgenössische Kunst Leipzig—exhibition and project coordination: Kathleen ­Liebold;press and publicity: Heidi Stecker; accounting: Gisela Pataki; interns: Stefan Höhne and Stefan Pedersen;
Bauhaus Dessau Foundation—research associate/project coordination: Friedrich von Borries; intern: Tobias
Kurtz; finances: Manuela Falkenberg; archplus magazine—research associates/project coordination: Gregor
Harbusch, Kristina Herresthal, Anh-Linh Ngo, and Susanne Schindler; jury for the competition: Azra ­Aksamija,
Ruedi Baur, Regina Bittner, Anne Lacaton, Georg Schöllhammer; preliminary selection for the competition:
Mitch Cope, Anke Hagemann, Sabine Kraft, Philipp Misselwitz, Sergei Sitar, Schirin Taraz-Breinholt, Jan Wenzel;
management: Sabine Kraft
Expert advisors: Christine Hannemann (sociologist, Humboldt-Universität, Berlin), Wolfgang Kil (architecture ­critic,
Berlin), Ulf Matthiesen (city and regional researcher, Institut für Regionalentwicklung und ­Strukturplanung, Erkner)
Exhibition design: Rasmus Koch and Jakob Trägårdh, Copenhagen
Graphic design (corporate design, publications): Stephan Müller and Tanja Wesse, Berlin
Collaborating institutions (as of January 2006) for entire project: Bildungswerk Weiterdenken in der Heinrich-BöllStiftung e.V., Dresden; Goethe-Institut, London; Kulturamt Leipzig; Sächsische Aufbaubank – Förderbank, ­Dresden;Internationales Leipziger Festival für Dokumentar- und Animationsfilm; Cineding Leipzig, CinemathèqueLeipzig, Kinobar Prager Frühling Leipzig, Passage Kinos Leipzig, Schaubühne Lindenfels, UT Connewitz e.V.;
for individual works: Agentur für Arbeit Halle/Saale; Aus- und Weiterbildungsstätte “Arbeit und Leben”­Schkopau; AWO Stadtverband Leuna e.V.; Soziales Dienstleistungszentrum Merseburg; Berliner ­JournalistenSchule; Bunter Laden Leipzig; Frauenkommunikationszentrum Wolfen; Internationale Sommerschule Halle;
Metal Culture, Liverpool; RAUM—Zeitgenössische Kunst und Philosophie, Wismar; St. Gabriel’s Church,
Liverpool; Stadtplanungsamt Halle/Saale; Stadtplanungsamt Magdeburg; Stiftung Trias, Bochum; Verein der
Freunde der Staßfurter Rundfunk- und Fernsehtechnik e.V.; Westcott Farm, Devon, Great Britain

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
We would like to thank the Kulturstiftung des Bundes, above all Hortensia Völckers and Alexander Farenholtz,
Uta Schnell, Fokke Peters, and Friederike Tappe-Hornbostel, who were always there with advice, ideas, andspecific assistance. Important advice and support were provided by, among others, Omar Akbar, Harald
Bodenschatz, the Inura Network, Stefanie Oswalt, Kyong Park, Andreas Ruby, and the Galerie Barbara Weiss.
We also would like to thank Francesco Careri, Robert Jessop, Kieran Long, Gregor Mirwa, Toni Moceri, andAxel Sowa.
We are grateful to Hatje Cantz Publishers and its staff, especially Annette Kulenkampff and Christine Müller, fortheir helpful collaboration.
We are indebted to all those who actively participated, without whom this project never could have been realized.
We are grateful to the exhibition installation, education, and visitor services teams of the Galerie für Zeitgenössische Kunst Leipzig for providing the first exhibition venue in autumn 2005.
In addition to the funding received from the Kulturstiftung des Bundes, individual authors participating in the
project were supported by the Royal Netherlands Embassy in Berlin; the Embassy of the Republic of ­Slovenia
in Berlin; the British Council, Berlin; the Office of the Federal Chancellor of Austria, Department of Culture,
in Vienna; the Danish Arts Council – Committee for International Visual Art, Copenhagen; the Austrian­Embassy in Berlin – Kulturforum, Berlin; Eternit AG, Berlin; Mitteldeutscher Rundfunk, Magdeburg; Nord­deutsche Landesbank NORD/LB, Magdeburg; Stadtplanungsamt Magdeburg; TechniSat Digital GmbH,
Staßfurt; Wohnungsbaugesellschaft Magdeburg.
The exhibition was also supported by the IKEA Stiftung, MDR FIGARO – Das Kulturradio des Mitteldeutschen
Rundfunks, and Ströer Deutsche Städte Medien GmbH, Dresden.

Foreword

The shrinking of cities is found in all areas of urban life. The consequences reach far­beyond economic fault lines, fundamentally transforming the cultural and social structureof a city. On the basis of four urban regions in the United States, Russia, Great Britain,
and Germany, the first exhibition and the accompanying book offered an informed andlucid survey of the international dimension of this development. The scope of what has
been transformed for residents in their cities—reductions in schools and kindergartens,
cutbacks in public transportation systems, new unutilized spaces and empty factories inneighborhoods, changes to the tempo of the city, and the attitude to life of those “left­behind,” to name just a few—were demonstrated impressively.
The first part of this project met with great public interest and a broad resonance inthe national and international press, and that was because the situation it treated wasneither minimized nor smoothed over. The exhibition and book heightened public awareness of the cultural dimension of shrinking cities and drew attention to the fact thatshrinking cities are not a special case of urban development in, say, the former East
Germany.
When taking stock in this way, it is all the more urgent to ask what opportunities for
cultural innovation and what possibilities for creativity are opened up when we abandon
the hope that the process of shrinkage is a short-term problem to be addressed througheconomic growth.
In dealing with shrinking cities, the disciplines of urban development, urban planning, andarchitecture, which traditionally have been guided by ideas for managing growth, reach
their limits. For that reason, the second part of the project—the exhibition and this book—is rigorously focused on ideas, productive and debatable approaches, and even visionsof how to approach shrinking cities. In addition to traditional urban development measures, we must test and explore possibilities for social, cultural, and communicative interventions. The restructuring of cities should be understood as an opportunity.
It would be unrealistic to expect that the concepts and ideas that you will read about
here can provide simple recipes that can be employed directly to immediate effect. We
see their significance rather as a way of playing through options and models, sometimes
even with a utopian gesture, so that new aspects and images can be introduced to ournotion of urban life. The point is to show that there is, and must be, a whole spectrumof possibilities for action.
The spectrum of views represented in this project is especially broad. It extends, forexample, from portraits of specific people who have discovered individual ways to cometo terms with shrinking opportunities to work and consume in their city, as a way of social
survival that preserves self-respect and the practice of being responsible for oneself (the“Survival Handbook” by Wolfgang Engler et al.), all the way to a scenario—which sounds
bizarre only at first—for a Chinese special economic zone for the region of Halle/Leipzig(“Exterritories” by Johannes Fiedler and Jördis Tornquist). This notion aims at a fundamentally new understanding of design and planning: rather than establishing and planning
results, it aims to design and explore other sets of rules in which the outcomes are notdetermined in advance.

13

12

What we thus have before us is a kaleidoscope of ideas presenting possibilities for­approaching shrinkage that range from individual, everyday strategies in shrinking cities
to top-down political and social conditions and critiques thereof. Taken together, theytransform our traditional idea of urbanism and can lead to a long-term rethinking thatwill affect both individual and social action. Cities will not be reconstructed until there isa reconstruction in our heads.
With the project Shrinking Cities the Kulturstiftung des Bundes (German Federal Cultural
Foundation) entered terrain where the question of the scope of cultural production andintervention is a self-critical element of the project. We see the continual resurveying of
this terrain as an important task and challenge for the future.
We would like to thank the chief curator, Philipp Oswalt, and his team as well as cocurators Nikolaus Kuhnert (archplus magazine, Berlin), Walter Prigge (Bauhaus Dessau
Foundation), and Barbara Steiner (Museum of Contemporary Art Leipzig) for their outstanding work. Christine Hannemann (sociologist, Humboldt-Universität, Berlin), ­Wolfgang
Kil (architecture critic, Berlin), and Ulf Matthiesen (city and regional researcher, Institutefor Regional Development and Structural Planning, Erkner) have supported the projectas advisors and offered productive guidance. We would like to thank them and all theparticipants for their valuable contributions.
We hope you find these readings inspiring and informative.

Hortensia Völckers, Artistic Director/Executive Board, Kulturstiftung des Bundes
Alexander Farenholtz, Administrative Director/Executive Board, Kulturstiftung des Bundes

Introduction
Philipp Oswalt

As the theme “shrinking” has moved to the foreground of public consciousness in­Germany in recent years and is emerging in places like Japan and eastern Europe, thequestion of how to respond creatively to this unwanted urban change is raised all themore urgently. It is clear that the strategies pursued thus far have proved unable to­formulate a satisfactory response, even if one accepts that in many places it simply will
not be possible to reverse the shrinkage—an insight that has led to the prevalence of theterm “shrinking cities.”
The widespread call for artists is symptomatic of the enduring helplessness. Where
community politicians, urban planners, architects, and property owners no longer knowwhat to do, they invite artists to fill the vacuum. There is hardly an urban development
proposal today that gets by without artists, hardly a neighborhood without artistic interventions in vacant spaces. From the building ministry to the district manager, from the­investor to the neighborhood group: with the increasing skepticism about their own rolesand disciplines, they are hoping for a quasi-religious redemption from the arts. Usually,of course, this just papers over more fundamental problems.
If we agree with the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu that social space translates
into physical space,1 it must be said that social problems are reflected in the crisis ofphysical space in shrinking cities, and that without addressing this crisis, little of substance can be said about the transformation of cities. But that is not all. Not only are­social constellations expressed in urban space, which can be read as a kind of mappingof them, but social questions are also reflected in the conception of the models for action
themselves (and their crises).
Social Ideas
The classical model of urban planning took for granted control over the entire territory,
the state as a central building developer, and the existence of welfare state models toachieve good living conditions for all residents. After this model underwent a crisis, for anumber of reasons, in the 1970s, it was increasingly replaced by the postmodern modelof island urbanism—though its effects continue to be felt in many areas even today, andoccasionally it still dominates. This new model dispenses with any attempt to shape thewhole, limiting itself to small, island-like areas for development, planned with increasing
perfection and, often enough, later controlled, while the other areas of the city disappear
from the sphere of interest and fail to attract attention. The goal of such planning is toacquire private investment to realize projects. And so this concept is also called the­“entrepreneurial city.”
Both models of urban development—that based on the classical welfare state and theentrepreneurial model—are, for the most part, ill suited for dealing with shrinking cities.
Shrinking areas are characterized by both state and private disinvestment. Shrinkage
goes hand in hand with radical cuts in financing, especially at the community level, as aresult of increasing expenditures and reduced incomes. At the same time, in the context
of a drop in demand, an excess of supply, and devaluation of the real-estate market,

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­ rivate investments fail to materialize. The process is exacerbated by the fact that banksp
are not prepared to lend money to those who are willing to invest, as shrinking ­areas are
viewed as high risks.
The reaction to this dilemma in Germany—a society marked by neoliberal rhetoric,­increasing privatization, and a large state share of gross national product—is ­characteristic.
Whereas state direct investments are largely taboo, despite a state share of gross national product of nearly 50%, a simulated market economy is blossoming—a planned
economy without a plan, so to speak. The state invests enormous resources as matchingfunds for inadequate private investment or even to create the illusion of private investment. It subsidizes jobs in large industry with six-figure euro sums per capita and builds
enormous infrastructures to pave the way for private investments that often enough failto materialize anyway. From an urbanistic point of view, of course, such policies do not
result in consistent models. The funds spent according to various rules for subsidies are
manifested in a fragmented patchwork rug of disconnected, often unfinished parts.

state in the United States and Great Britain during the 1990s (“rollback neoliberalism”), a“neoliberal” rollout has long since returned in the form of an expansion of state controls,
measures, and institutions under new premises.5

Neoliberal?
Criticizing such policies as neoliberal is pointless, as this is not a genuine rollback of thestate but merely a different kind of state, employing its funds based on other criteria. The
question is for what and to what ends they are used. Urban development demonstrates
this exemplarily. For the so-called Stadtumbau Ost program (an urban renewal programfor eastern Germany), a total of €2.6 billion of communal, state, and federal funds will bemade available over a period of eight years—seemingly quite a large sum. For the same
period, however, the federal government used to pay out about €80 billion in subsidies
for private home ownership.2 The subsidy for home ownership is by no means a form of
welfare policy, for one has to have equity capital to qualify for such funding. It serves thelobby of the construction trades and provides for middle-class homeowners.
This is even more obvious using the example of the shrinking city New Orleans after
the catastrophe of Hurricane Katrina in 2005. Certainly the negligent disregard of flood
protection, the insufficient mobility of poorer residents, and the lack of catastrophe protection can be characterized as typical neoliberal practices. Yet the primary beneficiaries
of reconstruction funds amounting to several billion dollars are several American firmsthat have direct personal connections to the White House. The direct distribution of thefunds to those affected was never seriously considered. The journalist Naomi Klein observed, “‘Reconstruction,’ whether in Baghdad or New Orleans, has become shorthandfor a massive uninterrupted transfer of wealth from public to private hands.” The headline
on the cover of The Nation in which Klein’s article appeared sums it up: “Now the reallooting begins.”3
The production of ideology is not without consequences, even if it veils the facts: theconsequence of neoliberal rhetoric and the invoking of supposed economic efficiency
liberate state funds from the criterion of socially just distribution and clear the path to theshifting of social resources and influence.
In other respects, too, so-called neoliberalism is distinguished not so much by reductions in state power than by different forms of state power. In their essay “Neoliberalizing
Space,”4 the Anglo-Saxon urban geographers Jamie Peck and Adam Tickell demonstrate
that, following a first phase of deregulation and the rollback of the Keynesian welfare

The Ambivalence of Modernity
Nevertheless, however ill-suited the neoliberal model may prove to be in dealing withshrinking cities, the conservation or restoration of the classical welfare state has also
failed to provide a convincing perspective, not least because of a sad alliance with a­rationalistic determinism. The fundamental ambivalence of this approach, which characterized the modern era into the 1970s, no longer can be ignored. The question of whether
additional state welfare or more self-organization of civil society is desirable admits of noclear answer, and any decision has its disadvantages.
In the days of the High Modernism of architecture and urban planning, people still
dreamed—building on the political ideas of socialism and a general faith in progress—of
overcoming contradictions, of achieving harmony in an ideal society, of eliminating thecontradiction between city and countryside. The positions of Ludwig Hilberseimer andthe Russian disurbanists are examples of this. Essential to this model is the idea of overcoming disparities of social space and producing living conditions based on equal value.
The presumption was that economic aid to lesser-developed regions was desirable not
only for reasons of social policy but also for reasons of economic policy, for the funds­invested there would have the greatest spin-off effects on growth.6 Economic and social
goals supported each other in a win-win situation—or so the assumption went. Today, theopposite view is prevalent: only in the existing growth areas of large agglomerations caneconomic development be pursued effectively with the maximum spin-off effect on
growth. This view results in a dilemma: Should the existing funds be invested for thegreatest effect on growth, thus maximizing the wealth of the society as a whole while
simply putting up with increasing polarization of the social geography? Or should we­renounce growth and concentrate on balancing differences in living conditions?
The most productive approach may be to try to break out of this dilemma by seeking
other scenarios for development that do not futilely employ all available means to bring
shrinking regions to the standards of growth areas but rather offer unique qualities thatturn the differences into positives, without contributing to a polarization of society. The
prerequisite is to abandon the idea of uniformity and consciously emphasize qualitative
differences.
Shrinking cities question existing social practices, values, and models and thus callfor a fundamental cultural reflection and reevaluation: Is urbanism conceivable without
density? Can slowness itself represent quality? What role does property play in the useof space? Can unused spaces and materials be used in different ways? Are there ­informal
practices that can be read as positive models for action? How do mentalities and identity
crises influence urban space?
In such a process of searching for a new cultural orientation, the perspectives of­different fields matter: architecture, art, media, sociology, ethnography, economics, andso on. In such a context, scholarly work and other approaches can be joined by artistic
production—freed of the compulsion to formulate solutions and contribute directly to­improving the situation—to provide essential stimuli and communicate knowledge.

Introduction_Philipp Oswalt

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Insoluble Problems
For the planning theorist Lucius Burckhardt, decision-making dilemmas are fundamental
to urban development: “Urban planning is a doling out of comforts and sorrows; everything that urban planning plans brings some people advantages and others disadvantages…. Problems are insoluble, precisely because they are permeated with the dolingout of sorrows. There is no best and definitive solution to problems. There are only possibilities for a society to muddle through reasonably well for a while. But insolubility does
not mean that one shouldn’t do anything at all…, on the contrary. Problems have to be‘dealt with.’”7
Every model for action is structurally incomplete: it may be successful in certain­areas, but in others it will have little effect or even worsen the problems. The ideas behindthe “entrepreneurial city” that have been practiced in shrinking cities like Manchester,
Birmingham, and Baltimore exemplify this. On the one hand, they have achieved remarkable success at revitalizing city centers; on the other, they have tended to have negative
effects on outlying districts because less public funding is available for them, and they
continue to suffer from economic decline and population loss.
Any urban development plan is biased. Rather than offering an allegedly objective
or neutral promise of salvation through planning, this bias has to be exposed and negotiated. There needs to be a discussion about what social ideas, what interests, and whatgoals manifest themselves in a given project. There needs to be a repoliticization ofurban development without it being completely absorbed by politics, as happened in
the 1970s.

Reinforcing the Local
One essential point of departure for the new models for action that are required is­empowerment of the local, a reinforcement of autonomous opportunities for action.
Abandoning the enforcement of ideas of the unity of an entire country does not have totake the form of a tribute to the neoliberal policy of “locational competition.” For the­development of cities, the emancipation of the local means regaining the power to shapea situation that had increasingly evaporated in the face of the dominance of centralizedstate regulation, the fragmentation of jurisdictions, and the rise in power of external influences. These days, communes are degraded into administrative apparatuses that merely
implement the directives of others, having lost any opportunities to shape policy because
they lack freely available financial resources and are hampered by detailed regulations.
Their empowerment through decision-making authority and financial means is a pre­condition for developing productive qualities within regional inequalities, which can serve
as a basis for models for living that take into account local differences.
From this perspective, the disempowerment of the local that has been seen in many
ways in eastern Germany since reunification has proven to be one of the central politicalproblems. Along with the drying up of community finances, the impositions of the institutional apparatus of western Germany, the importation of elites from western Germany,and the properties that are largely held in western German hands have hindered any­autonomous development. It is therefore hardly surprising that participation in social­processes—by any measure of civil engagement, such as elections, parties, unions, orchurches—is clearly lower in eastern Germany than in western Germany. Acquiescence
was purchased in eastern Germany through transfer payments, but hardly any opportunities for autonomous development were created. Compared with Great Britain in the
1980s, the profound social transformation took place amid an almost ghostly silence; but
the silence thus purchased cannot produce forward-looking perspectives.
Just how far this disempowerment has gone is demonstrated by the circumstancethat the model of the participative budget practiced in Brazilian cities like Porto Alegre
cannot be applied in many German communities because they no longer have any funds
for investment. As a result of the centralized overregulation of their structures, much
wealthier former industrial countries are sometimes less flexible politically than are significantly poorer countries.

Political Deficit
The architect Rem Koolhaas recently pointed to the political deficit as one of the fundamental weaknesses of contemporary architecture: “We have broken the connection with
politics and have not been able to find a different domain of legitimacy apart from goodand intelligent architecture. But that would be tremendously important. Architecture is
only legitimate when it formulates a utopia. Since 1945, however, this idea of a social task
has continually declined. The loss was compensated by a lot of attractive new inventions
by architects. Only in the past ten years, however, as the number of projects for the publicdomain has increasingly diminished, and we architects find ourselves serving private­interests, has it become very clear that the decline of our theoretical content is also a­decline of architectural content.”8More concretely, in the context of shrinkage, there has to be a new debate over the
instruments of planning—analogous to the beginnings of High Modernism: the development of new tools of action was essential to the formation of the architecture and urban
development of High Modernism. On the basis of a new sociopolitical model, new clientsand sponsors were created, as were new forms of financing, new models for taxation,
new concepts for community politics, new institutions, and so on. Today we urgently
need such topics to be addressed again. For years, countless urban development plans
have been produced in reports and urban development proposals, in competitions anddirect commissions, but they have not had any noticeable effect. The reason is that all
the projects are based on growth-oriented models for action that do not take hold in
shrinking situations: the plans are obsolete from the outset.

Paradoxical Planning
Formulating approaches to shrinking cities necessitates regaining a form of planning that
overcomes the neoliberal reduction of urban development to insular projects, that thinksof space as a whole, and that takes into account larger temporal horizons. At the sametime, such an approach has to take the contradictions inherent in planning as the starting
point for discussions: How can one take action without being able to solve problems?
How can large areas and stretches of time be given shape when they can neither besurveyed nor predicted, much less determined? How can the incompleteness of planningbe made productive?
In addition, urban development is influenced by many different forces that are basedon a wide range of structures for decision-making, developmental processes, and power
structures. Most of them lie outside the level on which urban planning and local action
occur. Indeed, they extend across all conceivable scales: from the neighborhood to theIntroduction_Philipp Oswalt

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globe. For this reason, giving shape to urban space cannot be limited to the local but
calls for action on a broad range of levels that are only loosely connected. The urban­sociologist Klaus Ronneberger speaks of a “policy of jumping scales” in this context:“Because places are not restricted locally, and power relationships are produced and­reproduced in a variety of geographical units, the perspective should be constructed insuch a way that the individual territorial levels are leapt over and thus the boundaries ofneighborhood and city are also transgressed. A policy of jumping scales could open up apath to new forms of an urban practice that counteracts the neoliberal territorial strategies.”9Multiplicity
This book presents and discusses a number of models for action that address the ­various
scale levels of the urban. It is divided into four fields of action. The field “Deconstructing”
examines the questions of how urban rollback—that is, the process of de-urbanization—
can be shaped and what qualities can be gained by that which remains. The field­“Reevaluating” explores how the traditional, the abandoned, can be reappropriated andused differently. The field “Reorganizing” is concerned with the question of social organization: How can processes, structures, and programs be conceived differently in orderto create new opportunities for development? Finally, the field “Imagining” addresses
mental processes of communication, memory, the search for identity, and the productionof desire, considering urban action from the perspective of the imagination.
The themes of the subchapters clarify the perspectives on the city on which the envisioned approaches to action are based. The eighteen urban ideas presented are inthemselves incomplete and cover only part of the complex urban reality. At the sametime, however, they represent the necessary conceptual model on which any form of­urban action is based. They therefore give an initial sense of the ideological premises ofthe various practices, making them negotiable.
Philipp Oswalt, chief curator of “Shrinking Cities”
Translated from the German by Steven Lindberg
Notes
1
Pierre Bourdieu, “Site Effects,” in The Weight of the World: Social Suffering in Contemporary Societies (Palo
Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999), 124.
2
The program Stadtumbau Ost will run from 2002 to 2009. The costs for the state subsidy for home ownership amounted to €11.4 billion in 2004 alone. Over the eight-year period, the sum would be eight times that.
The planned elimination of the subsidy in the fiscal year 2007/08 will gradually reduce the annual costs inthe future.
3
Naomi Klein, “Purging the Poor,” The Nation, October 10, 2005.
4
Jamie Peck and Adam Tickell, “Neoliberalizing Space,” Antipode 34 (2002): 380–404.
5
See also Loïc Wacquant, “How Penal Common Sense Comes to Europeans: Notes on the Transatlantic­Diffusion of the Neoliberal Doxa,” European Societies 1 (1999): 319–352.
6
On this, see Robert Kaltenbrunner, “The End of Homogeneous Space,” trans. David Skogley, in Shrinking Cities,
Vol. 1, International Research, ed. Philipp Oswalt (Ostfildern-Ruit, Germany: Hatje Cantz, 2005), 704–710.
7
Lucius Burckhardt, “Das Ende der polytechnischen Lösbarkeit,” reprinted in idem, Wer plant die Planung:Architektur, Umwelt und Mensch (Berlin: Martin Schmitz Verlag, 2004), 119–128.
8
Rem Koolhaas, “Die Berliner Schlossdebatte und die Krise der modernen Architektur,” in Fun Palace 200X:
Der Berliner Schlossplatz; Abriss, Neubau oder grüne Wiese?, ed. Philipp Misselwitz, Hans Ulrich Obrist,
and Philipp Oswalt (Berlin: Martin Schmitz Verlag, 2005), 45–46.
9Klaus Ronneberger, “Von der Regulation zur Moderation,” dérive 14 (2003), 18. See also David Harvey,­Spaces of Hope (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 234ff.

Governmentalizing Planning
Nikolaus Kuhnert and Anh-Linh Ngo

If there is anything certain at all in the current debate on planning, it is the correlation­between the emphasis placed on the diagnosis of a crisis in the discipline of planningand the level of significance attributed to so-called players. The player, as an active social
subject conscious of problems, functions in a certain sense as a task force that must­always jump in whenever there is a fire on the planning front. What significance does
this have for a discipline that traditionally has derived its image of itself from its mandate
to help turn the big wheels of society and that was able, to an extent equaled by few­disciplines other than politics, to convey the impression that social processes could becontrolled formally? What inferences can we draw from the fact that planning no longer
is focused on instruments but rather players?
Obviously this development indicates the dissolution or rather extension of a hierarchical conception of (state) power. It also involves models for control that express thistrend toward decentralization in society and in the theory of power. We give two discourses as examples here which help to describe these trends toward flat hierarchies
and an extension of planning by means of “subplanning” instruments: the evolution froma government approach to a governance approach and Foucault’s concept of “governmentality,” which is well suited as a tool of critical analysis for penetrating these shifts in
power conceptually. Ultimately the point is to discuss the player-based approach to theplanning debate against the backdrop of a theory of power and to question the subjectification of planning instruments—emphasizing individual interventions and empowerment
strategies.
Governmentality
With the rise of neoliberalism, the enthusiasm for planning—or, more correctly, for the
possibility of controlling social processes—was sobered. Planning and controlling mechanisms survived this process of transformation as mere “phantom pains,” as Rem ­Koolhaas
sarcastically commented in “Whatever Happened to Urbanism?” At the moment, thesepains are being felt especially intensely.
Planning is presently experiencing an unanticipated renaissance. This renaissance,
however, is no longer based on cybernetic models but rather on the debate on the­assessment of the state in relation to mechanisms for self-control by society. This debate
was kicked off by Michel Foucault in the 1970s, in a famous series of lectures at the­Collège de France in which he attempted to reconstruct the history of governmentality.
The concept of “governmentality” derives from the French adjective gouvernemental.
­Using this approach, Foucault developed a genealogy of the modern state whose traces
he followed from ancient Greece to its contemporary neoliberal forms.1
The concept of governmentality offers a way of considering power and subjectivity
together. By exploring the “microphysics of power,” Foucault conceptualizes the state orsociety as the result of many micro- and macro-political practices and relationships of­social power. This specific understanding of government covers “not only … the legitimately constituted forms of political or economic subjection but also modes of action,
more or less considered and calculated, which were destined to act upon the possibilities

Shrinking Cities
Volume 1: International Research
Edited by Philipp Oswalt for the
Kulturstiftung des Bundes
736 pages, 503 illustrations,
389 in color, softcoverISBN-10 3-7757-1682-3
ISBN-13 978-3-7757-1682-6(English)Atlas of Shrinking Cities
Edited by Philipp Oswalt and Tim
Rieniets
160 pages, ca. 120 illustrations,ca. 100 in color, hardcoverISBN-10 3-7757-1714-5
ISBN-13 978-3-7757-1714-4(English/German)

SOM Journal 4
Edited by Diane Ghirardo
Ca. 192 pages, ca. 250 illustrations,ca. 100 in color, ca. 100 in duotone,
softcoverISBN-10 3-7757-1803-6
ISBN-13 978-3-7757-1803-5(English)Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern
The Architecture
Edited by the Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern
160 pages, 120 illustrations, 103 incolor, hardcoverISBN-10 3-7757-1550-9
ISBN-13 978-3-7757-1550-8(English)

You will find our complete list ofavailable titles and other related
information at www.hatjecantz.com
Hatje Cantz

Contains:
Projects by Will Alsop, Ruedi Baur, Florian Beigel, Chaos Computer Club, Crimson, ­Jeremy Deller, M. J. Ginzburg, Gordon Matta-Clark, muf, Hidetoshi Ohno, OMA, CedricPrice, ­ Andreas Siekmann, Robert Smithson, Superflex, Oswald Mathias Ungers, andmany more.
Essays by Ash Amin, Regina Bittner, Wolfgang Engler, Robert Fishman, Dan Graham,­David Harvey, Juan Herreros, Bart Lootsma, and many more.
864 pages, 478 illustrations, 369 in color

Volume 2 4Interventions

Volume 2 4 Interventions

Luminous Buildings
Night Architecture
Edited by the Kunstmuseum
Stuttgart
152 pages, 120 illustrations,70 in color, hardcoverISBN-10 3-7757-1757-9
ISBN-13 978-3-7757-1757-1(English/German)

In dealing with shrinking cities, classic urban design and city planning reach their limits.
In the face of this new challenge, new paths are taken: the “hard” tools of construction
and deconstruction are joined with the “soft” tools of political, social, cultural, and commu­
nicative interventions. This book provides an international overview and critical ­discussionof concepts and strategies for shrinking cities from the fields of architecture, landscapedesign, urban planning, the media, performance, and art. The approaches discussed
range from artistic responses and self-empowerment projects to architectural and land­
scape interventions, strategies of media communication, and city marketing, to new legal
regulations and utopian designs. A series of essays critically discusses current projects inNorth America, Europe, and Japan, as well as important historical positions in ­architecture
and art.