Beyond Growth – Urban Development in Shrinking Cities as a Challenge for Modeling Approaches

Urban growth has been replaced by stagnation and shrinkage processes at many places in Europe during the last decades. Demographic changes and out-migration because of lack of jobs belong to the main impact factors. Urban planners are challenged by this new and dramatic development that impacts on housing markets, the utilization of infrastructure, local labor markets and the whole viability of urban structures. Urban Research is requested to elaborate new concepts and strategies for cities loosing population, facing a big amount of vacant building stock and a large-area re-use of brown-fields. The purpose of this paper is to analyze the chances and limits of urban modeling to explain and assess urban shrinkage processes in their quantitative and qualitative dimension. First, expertise of new shrinkage processes is investigated in order to explain the need for urban modeling concepts. Second, it is discussed to what extend often misrepresented ‘fuzzy’ social science knowledge about urban shrinkage can be brought methodically together with ‘sizable’-data-based urban models. Third, variables and a prototype model structure are presented to approach to an urban shrinkage model. Finally, novel scientific questions and recommendations for further cooperation of social science and urban modeling are presented.