Many cities seem to work under an unofficial mantra of "bigger is better". But that's not the case in the Sachsen-Anhalt region of eastern Germany, where the motto of an urban regeneration scheme, International Building Exhibition (IBA), is "Less Is Future".
Sachsen-Anhalt's population has fallen by 17% since Germany's reunification, and continues to fall. Today it is around 2.4m; Karl-Heinz Daehre, the region's minister for regional development and transport, predicts that it will fall to 1.5m by 2060 if policies remain unchanged. By 2050, 70% of the world's population is expected to be urban.
But while most cities are growing, one in every four cities is shrinking, according to Professor Philipp Oswalt, head of both the IBA and the Bauhaus Foundation in Dessau. But embracing shrinkage, the IBA argues, can be a stimulus for re-inventing cities that are smaller, and promoting their quality of life.
Professor Oswalt took the notion of shrinking cities as a potentially positive phenomenon to Detroit, Michigan, whose population has fallen from 1.85m in 1950 to just 790,000 today. In the autumn of 2010, Detroit's mayor, Dave Bing embarked upon a series of heated town hall meetings to present his controversial plan to demolish 10,000 of the city's empty homes by the end of 2013, and to revitalise the urban core by "greening" it.
With a budget deficit of more than US$300m, Mr Bing has closed more than 60 schools and cannot pay enough fire-fighters to combat blazing houses. Unemployment is officially around 28% and one in three lives below the poverty line. There is no hospital for the uninsured in downtown Detroit (although there are three casinos).
Sachsen-Anhalt faced similar problems, albeit on a less dramatic scale, and took earlier action to try to manage urban shrinkage in its cities—the inner cores of cities like Magdeburg and Halle had been neglected for decades, in favour of new town suburbs. Now politicians and planners have embarked on "re-urbanisation" of inner cities, with tower blocks knocked down to create "green corridors" linking hubs of collective activity, including small businesses, artistic communities and conference facilities. In the surrounding country reindustrialisation is encouraged through incentives such as solar and wind energy projects. The region plans to be wholly weaned off fossil fuels by 2060.
Eastern Germany has benefited from €1.5trn (US$1.9trn) in financial transfers from the federal government and EU since reunification in 1990 and unemployment is now, finally, below 10%. But this money is now running out—it is even becoming too costly to demolish housing—and it has not stopped shrinkage.
This has led to scepticism about longer-term prospects for some of these shrinking European cities. "Some of these cities will be abandoned completely, utterly devastated," says Regina Sonnabend, an urban planner at the Bauhaus Foundation.
But in the US, whose population is expected to grow by 140m by 2050, the outlook is more positive. Terry Schwarz, director of Cleveland Urban Design Collaborative at Kent State University, says that Cleveland, where she lives, has seen its population more than halve over the last 60 years. Now, she says, it is on the verge of a transformation unlike anything she has seen in her 20-year career.
"We have to find a way to accommodate this rapid growth while reducing our national carbon footprint," she says. "I think the gradual repopulation of post-industrial cities in the US must be part of this equation."
