At the beginning of the 21st century, the shrinking cities phenomenon is widespread over Europe. To deal with the results of demographic, economic and physical contraction processes and to plan for the future of considerably smaller but nevertheless livable cities is one of the most challenging tasks for urban Europe in the near future.
Against this background, the action aims at fostering knowledge on regeneration strategies in shrinking cities across Europe. By promoting the exchange of scientific knowledge and the stimulation of new ideas in selected reference cities, the genderbalanced network with proposers from ten countries will act as a catalyst for new solutions to deal with demographic changes and to design the restructuring of shrinking cities in Europe.
Significant benefits at the European level are envisaged, resulting in a common framework of terminology and synopsis of published research in this field, exemplary regeneration strategies and a best practice database.
The action is carried out by a gender-balanced network of researchers from nine COST countries and UWS, Sydney (Australia). Its implementation is coordinated by a Management Committee (MC). The Action holds two meetings per year. Each will have a two and a half day duration allowing for plenary sessions, working groups, MC meetings, and field trips.
Four interwoven Working Groups (WG) will be launched. Based on an extensive review of published work on Shrinking Cities WG 1 will provide a Synopsis Report (task 1). WG 2 will prepare and organise the Theory-Practice Interface (task 2). WG 3 will set up the conceptual framework (task 3), whereas WG 4 will focus on assembling instructive cases of regeneration strategies as the major source for the Best Practice Database (task 4). Crosscutting tasks of all WG cover the preparation and wrap-up of the meetings, and the discussion of intermediate results via website.
To foster the collaboration and to assess and improve the outcome of the WGs, Short Term Scientific Missions (STSM) will be set up. They will allow young researchers (PhD students or post-doc) to visit institutions that actively participate in the COST Action. In particular the STSM are utilised to prepare the field trips in the four reference cities.
