This project, funded through the Joint Programming Initiative Urban Europe ERA-NET Cofund Smart Urban Futures (ENSUF) call, aimed to offer the best practice and most feasible solutions to the problem of urban shrinkage – a continuous population decline affecting more than 1,500 cities all over Europe.
By learning from the experience of the cities that once were on the edge of an abyss but have bounced back to life, by sharing the key ingredients of their success across Europe and beyond, the project aimed to enable as many shrinking cities as possible to adapt, transform, and thrive in the face of continuously and often dramatically changing circumstances.
Duration: 31 March 2017 – 30 March 2020.
Building on the state-of-the-art theorisation of the phenomenon, and applying a pioneering Future Performance Framework in combination with the Urban Futures methodology, this project aimed to:
– Tackle the key socio-economic causes of urban shrinkage;
– Future-proof sustainability actions in urban re-development and regeneration; and
– Enhance the role of long-term strategic planning.
With the explicit intention to ensure the relevance of today’s actions in the future, this project aimed to embolden civic leaders, national, and international stakeholders to embrace the best smart shrinkage practices and apply the most forward-looking urban resilience solutions. Shaping the inner peripheries of urban Europe to greater resilience, the project aimed to ultimately enable shrinking cities to adapt, to transform, and to thrive in the face of continuously and often dramatically changing circumstances.
The 3S RECIPE research consortium comprised the University of Oxford as the lead organisation (Dr Vlad Mykhnenko, Project Manager) and eight other European partners, including B Arts in the UK (Mr Trevelyan Wright, Beavers Arts Ltd), the Intercultural Institute Timisoara in Romania (Mr Calin Rus, Institutul Intercultural Timișoara), Normal Superior School in France (Prof Emmanuèle Cunningham-Sabot, École Normale Supérieure Paris), the University of Amsterdam in the Netherlands (Dr Marco Bontje, Universiteit van Amsterdam), the University of Birmingham in the UK (Dr Peter Lee), the University Lodz in Poland (Dr Szymon Marcińczak, Uniwersytet Łódzki), the University of Porto in Portugal (Prof Paulo Pinho, Universidade do Porto), and the West University of Timisoara in Romania (Dr Bogdan Nadolu, Universitatea de Vest din Timișoara).
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