Shrinking cities have pushed urban design and classical city planning to their limits. This new challenge requires new approches in wich the ''hard'' tools of construction are joines by ''soft'' tools of political, social, cultural, and communicative interventions. This book provides an international overvieuw of experimental concepts for taking action in shrinking cities from the fields of architecture, landscape architecture, urban construction, the media, performance, and art. The approaches range from artistic intercessions and self-empowerment projects to architectural and landscape interventions, and from strategies of media communication and city marketing to new legal regulations and utopian designs. A series of essays provides a critical discussion of both succesful and failed projects of recent decades from such countries as the United States, Great Britain, the Netherlands, Austria, Russia, and Japan.