Narratives of Crisis: How Framing Urban Shrinkage and Depopulation Shapes Policy and Planning Responses in Spain, Germany and The Netherlands
- Academic research on urban shrinkage and depopulation has advanced significantly in
recent years, mostly by attributing causality between the reasons and consequences of shrinkage in the
positivist tradition of planning research. This paper critically analyzes shrinkage and depopulation
as an issue of planning and policymaking in a broader institutional context. By applying a qualitative
interpretive policy analysis methodology to planning and policy narratives from Spain, Germany
and The Netherlands, this article highlights and scrutinizes how policymakers and planners have
framed shrinkage, and how this framing has justified some of the selected planning and policy
approaches. It is concluded that framing shrinkage in practice may only partially encompass the
scientific definitions. It is also concluded that framing shrinkage and depopulation as a crisis may be
determined by locally and temporally important issues as well as differences in planning cultures,
which in practice may distance the understanding of the phenomenon from the scientific definitions.
Debates on shrinkage conceptualization and the development of new planning concepts can become
more applicable in practice by incorporating insights from qualitative investigations. This can bring
them closer to planning practice and embed them in a wider planning system context, so as to
produce more applicable and contextually sensitive proposals for addressing shrinkage.
