Shrinking cities have been a stigmatized topic in spatial planning for a long time. The spectrum of strategies, which are applied in shrinking cities today, is diverse and reaches from substitute industries like tourism, right sizing (i.e. systematic demolition) to green infrastructure. The application of the right strategies seems to be decisive for the sustainable development of shrinking cities and leads to the assumption that planning in shrinking cities cannot function under the same preconditions as urban growth. Instead a paradigm shift is necessary which is different to the one of growth.

Different institutional and cultural factors have led to spatial planning systems which show general comparable characteristics but are specific to cultural, normative and spatial framework conditions. Despite the increasing demand to take into account these particular framework conditions in the scientific spatial research, the topic of planning cultures, is still a young research topic in the context of urban and regional development.

The basic hypothesis of this project is that the phenomenon of shrinking cities offers the opportunity to compare the principles on which traditional planning is based and by doing this, makes it possible to discover potential changes of planning cultures. The opportunities of shrinking cities seem to offer the potential to initiate changes, reforms, and if applicable even innovations in planning cultures.