Strategic planning for the long-term development of shrinking cities

Abstract

Urban shrinkage poses existential challenges to cities and dilemmas for urban policymakers. Over the last two decades, policy innovations and local experiments for dealing with urban shrinkage have been observed at various scales, but they are not without contradictions. Making policies as the symptoms arise is not the same as strategy-making. Focusing on problems risks neglecting essential challenges to the future. Scattered projects may not bring a coherent territorial development. Motivated by these understandings, this research is less about specific solutions for specific problems than it is about the strategy-making that connects the dots and opens new pathways. It aims to understand what shrinkage, as a path of development, means for planning, identify what strategic planning work is needed to steer urban development under shrinkage, and how strategic (spatial) planning can support this strategic work. At the core of this research is an international, comparative, in-depth case study of two medium-sized cities with long-term shrinkage — Den Helder (The Netherlands) and Zwickau (Germany). The case study examined their development strategies over two decades, analysed the spatialisation of the strategies, and identified the local factors contributing to the differences between the two cities, to map and compare their long-term development strategies and the spatial logic behind them, and to relate these key strategic features to institutional and spatial local factors. This study demonstrated that shrinking cities, with a combination of state support and local strategies, can not only stabilise themselves but also develop a positive long-term perspective by setting the terms of their course of shrinkage. To achieve this, they need to leverage localised growth and shrinkage as important dynamics for sustainable urban transformation. In conclusion, central to forming a long-term strategic perspective are the complementary goals of adaptation and transformation, structural objectives for qualitative development, and an approach to strategic processes that combines elements of both long-term planning and incremental adaptation. Strategic spatial planning as an instrument for strategy-making can take on the key function of integrating and synthesising policies at a level of long-term thinking, fundamental orientation, and action coordination, with a place-oriented emphasis. Meanwhile, the stability of population development, resource availability, and institutional capacity constrain the emergence of long-term strategies. It follows that to achieve meaningful long-term development, shrinking cities need sufficient support from higher-level governments to develop strategies at the level required to pursue long-term strategies for resilience-building. Otherwise, their piecemeal tactics might not effectively lead to necessary structural changes.