JPI Urban Europe ENSUF Smart Shrinkage Solutions - Fostering Resilient Cities in Inner Peripheries of Europe (3S RECIPE)

Smart Shrinkage Solutions - Fostering Resilient Cities in Inner Peripheries of Europe is a project that offers 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, this project enables as many shrinking cities as possible to adapt, transform, and thrive in the face of continuously and often dramatically changing circumstances.

i) Residents and communities: empowering residents and stakeholders to co-produce solutions
A core outcome is policies designed to increase economic and fiscal resilience, liveability and compact connected city outcomes - an inventory of potentially effective policy instruments for the creation of attractive and sustainable urban environments and the maintenance of vibrant local communities will be developed: The views of residents and communities will be sought through the local stakeholders' workshops in the seven 3S RECIPE cities; Webinars will include local residents and community representatives to capture the views of policy interventions designed to tackle shrinkage; A record of the webinars will be publish and podcasts made available on our dedicated webpage; Ongoing engagement and evaluation of 3S RECIPE solutions will be provided by (micro)blogging and online social media presence; Our partners have extensive experience of using art based approaches to community engagement a transportable exhibition space will be developed to engage communities with alternative interventions to tackle shrinkage innovatively; As part of our accredited postgraduate programmes in sustainable urban development, we will invite community representatives to share their experience of policies on shrinkage with other communities in the region.

ii) Practice and professionals: sharing ideas across the policy community
A core aim of 3S RECIPE is to calibrate policy solutions for different urban futures and trajectories, as delivering economically resilient, liveable and compact cities is highly dependent on context: We will use our policy networks at regional and national levels to host policy planning seminars with a focus on policy responses to shrinkage with the aim of developing outputs to be incorporated into guidance and continuing professional development to support planners, regeneration professionals and practitioners in addressing resilient solutions for shrinkage; Publication of at least two articles in the professional press (e.g, New Start, Planning Resource, The Planner) on resilience and planning for growth in the context of shrinkage; Work with urban regeneration companies, local enterprise partnerships, and regional development agencies in developing an understanding of resilience strategies by commissioning joint seminars hosted by the 3S RECIPE research organisations; Where relevant we will embed innovative solutions emerging from the project within the Knowledge Innovation Community issues of adaptability and resilience of cities through the Regional Knowledge Innovation Community and other pan-European and international platforms; Working with our international partners we will seek opportunities to promote a joint seminar on public policy implications of our foresight approach and policy innovation across the 3SRECIPE cities for resilience in China, Japan and elsewhere.

iii) Students and Researchers: teaching and training the place leaders of the future
As leading schools of geography, planning, and civil engineering, we have a responsibility for training and educating the future place makers and governance leaders: the mechanisms to engage residents and policymakers will be open to our postgraduate research and taught course student communities; theoretical and policy lessons will be utilised to inform postgraduate and undergraduate taught modules; students from our highly successful and accredited Masters programmes will go on to planning practice and our overseas students go on to senior positions in government and planning practice. Moreover, we will utilise our inventory of successful participatory planning mechanisms for generating urban resilience solutions in developing an inter-disciplinary focus on green infrastructure and Biophilic Cities. This will draw on the wider student community across Arts and Humanities, Natural, Applied, Interdisciplinary, and Social Sciences.