Environmentally-Friendly Planning for Urban Shrinkage

Urban shrinkage has become a widespread phenomenon in contemporary urbanisation. Shrinking cities present multiple shrinkage-connected problems, where the most acute ones are demographic and social decline caused by bad economic performance. These problems are usually mirrored in urban space and thereby matters for urban planning, which, predictably, proposes mainly economic- and demographic-based models and solutions for shrinking cities. The other factors, such as environmental issues, are not well-established both in relevant theory and practice. Generally, environmental issues play a minor role for shrinking cities. However, they can be the factors to cause or to display the consequences of urban shrinkage, but they can also contribute to overcome related challenges. Therefore, environmental issues are unavoidable in any future agenda or policy in urban planning towards shrinking cities.

The first step in the process of linking these two scientific fields – the concept of shrinking cities and environmental science – is certainly to check which environmental issues are relevant for the phenomenon of urban shrinkage. This is the main purpose of this research. It aims to collect and systematise the current knowledge about these links. The findings of this investigation bring new interrelations for the multi-face character of the concept of shrinking cities. Therefore, this research presents a new input how to strengthen currently weak links between the concept and shrinking cities and environmental studies, to facilitate a more adaptive planning for urban shrinkage.