Shrinking Cities. Concepts to Action

Essay, No Density, Open City, Philipp Oswalt, Territory and mobility, Urban Paradigms

Cities, City development, City evolution, City living, Collaboration, Collective Awareness, Communication, Community, Crisis, Design strategies, Economy, Emergent issues, Essay, Identity, Mapping, Political & Economic Approach, Population, Social city, Transformation, Urban Development, Urban planning, Urban Policy, Urban space, Wealth

Excerpt from Open City by Almudena Ribot, Enrique Espinosa, Diego García-Setién, Begoña de Abajo and Gaizka Altuna. Published by Actar Publishers.
-- https://actar.com/product/open-city/

How can the unplanned process of shrinkage be qualified? Strategies for action to date have failed to formulate a satisfactory answer to this question.

If we agree with the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu that social space translates into physical space, it must be said that social problems are reflected in the crisis of physical space in shrinking cities, and that without efforts to address this crisis, little of substance can be said about the transformation of cities. But that is not all. Not only are social constellations expressed in urban space —which can be read as a kind of mapping of them— but social problems are reflected in the conception of the models for action themselves (and their crises).