Shrinking Cities. (Dis)cursos e práticas. Leipzig como pretexto para uma condição urbana da Alemanha de Leste.

Abstract

Urban territories have gone through high pressures for transformation in the last decades. Shrinking Cities lie in the very condition of this extreme instability and growing inequality, that leads to processes of decline which are the complex result from interlinked and overlapping demographic, economic and social negative dynamics which become apparent in the urban space. In the range of a decade, Germany has coped intensively with its consequences and becomes not only a forerunner of the debate, but also its most extreme evidence. The aim of this study is to give a comprehensive approach of the topic, and the analyse of the precise factors and causes for Urban Shrinking, and its ressonance in the urban structures and life of these cities. Moreover, it gives an insight on the challenges, strategies and models of action which have been the core of the planning discourse, questioning simultaneously its limits. Leipzig gives the concrete field of action to evaluate these leading questions.