Shrinking Cities - Reinventing Urbanism

‘In January 2004 the Shrinking Cities Project, a project initiated by the Kulturstiftung des Bundes (German Federal Cultural Foundation), together with the magazine archplus organized the international ideas competition Shrinking Cities - Reinventing Urbanism. The competition’s goal is to ?nd new modes of action; new ideas of the city based on the speci?c peculiarities of shrinkage, and those, which ?rmly follow an interdisciplinary approach. Teams from around the world were encouraged to develop projects with the theme of shrinkage for one of the four locations under investigation (Halle/Leipzig, Manchester/Liverpool, Detroit and Ivanovo).

The current international process concerning the shrinkage of cities radically challenges the subject matter of the traditional disciplines of spatial design, architecture and urban planning.

Dynamics and growth were the formative dimensions characterizing the urban modernisation and a relatively balanced spatial development in the 20th century. The current spatial polarisation between islands of growth and places of decline, which leads to the dereliction of whole cities and regions, does not discharge the space-oriented disciplines from their responsibility to design. Symbolic strategies of revaluation via iconic architecture as well as the arti?cial urban hype via consumerism and entertainment are exhausted. The competition Shrinking Cities – Reinventing Urbanism does not only ask for the scope of designing shrinkage but also challenges the traditional tools of the space-oriented disciplines. Given the radical structural changes of urbanity spaces can no longer be functionally, socially, let alone aesthetically pre-programmed.

The chosen competition entries argue against this backdrop: Design begins at the ordinary activity of creating space and the production of spatial knowledge. And they refer to the complex spatial dynamics, in which places like Halle/Leipzig, Detroit or Manchester/Liverpool are embedded. New relations have emerged between space and society, between physical environment and social behavior that are to the greatest possible extent undetermined.
The chosen entries address these new spatial relations. The concepts they suggest formulate strategies how to deal with this new spatial indeterminacy:

Cow The Udder Way (Manchester/Liverpool)

Subject: Performance with a herd of cows in the inner city of Liverpool to discuss the scope of urban agriculture
Authors: Paul Cotter, Film maker; Gareth Morris, Architect; Heidi Rustgaard, Performance; Eike Sindlinger, Architect; Ulrike Steven, Architect; Susanne Thomas, Choreographer (all London)

Cow the Udder Way is an artistic-performance project which gives insights into the mental and psychological constitution of inner-city suburbia. A herd of cows is brought into the center of Liverpool for two weeks and, in addition, various (in part participatory) actions connected to the animals take place. These actions, and the reactions of passers-by and the local media to them, are to be videotaped. The theme of this entry is the symbolic selfpreserving and self-supplying system: the cow grazing on unused urban land as a supplier of different (and unusual) products, e.g. manure as a source of energy, urine as a cosmetic product, methane gas for burning, etc. Using an agro-urban bottom-up-method, the possibilities of an urban rethinking are visualized, in which the shrinking city is viewed as a new area for production and the public is invited to a discussion of alternative planning methods. The
jury liked the provocative character of the entry. The project’s potential for stimulating a cultural discussion about the transformation and the reprogramming of urban areas is especially convincing.’