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The Challenge
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How might we restore vibrancy in cities and regions facing economic decline?
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Mission #1
Explore Vibrancy
Share your definition of what vibrancy looks like where you live.
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Mission #2
Share Stories
Tell us about the cities and communities you know are currently struggling or in the process of revitalising.
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Mission #3
Get Active
Take some time to get active and explore your own community – then report back what you learned.
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Mission #4
Collect Insights
Interview someone living in a struggling city or region to learn more.
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Mission #5
Surprise Us
Got an Inspiration that doesn't fit the other Missions?
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Inspiration
Mission #5
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Shrinking Cities - Exhibition + Project
"Shrinking cities are a cultural challenge to us. In the Shrinking Cities project, architects, academics and artists investigate recent developments in Detroit, Ivanovo, Manchester / Liverpool and Halle / Leipzig - and make suggestions."
Drawing on existing research is an important way of reflecting on and further building upon ideas of others from the recent past. This is a project produced several years ago on shrinking cities that can be reinterpreted for our global social/economic context today.
Shrunken cities contradict the image, familiar since the Industrial Revolution, of the "boomtown", a big city characterized by constant economic and demographic growth. Shrunken cities spur a reconsideration not only of traditional ideas of the European city, but also of the future development of urban worlds.
The drastic changes in cities caused by shrinking thus present not only an economic and social, but also a cultural challenge. Urban shrinking can hardly be affected by city planning, and it brings numerous problems. New types of cities arise; we do not yet have ways of thinking or of using their specific character.
The Project /// (2002-2006)
Shrinking Cities, a three-year initiative project of Germany's Federal Cultural Foundation, seeks to expand Germany's city-planning debate - until now concentrated on questions of demolishing surplus apartments and improving residential quarters - to address new questions and perspectives.
The project also places developments in eastern Germany in an international context, involving various artistic, design, and research disciplines in the search for strategies for action.
The emphases of the research and exhibition project, Shrinking Cities, are, first, an international study of processes of shrinking (first project phase) and, second, the development of strategies for action for eastern Germany (second project phase)"
Mission #5
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December 05, 2011, 11:55PM
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