Doctoral thesis | Bettina Knoop

The PhD thesis explores the production of urbanity in shrinking cities which are characterized by vacancies and abandonment in the urban environment.

Based on a social sciences’ perspectives, an  understanding of urbanity as an expanded space of possibilities is developed. This understanding of urbanity was significantly shaped by modern urban sociology and is inspired by the rapidly growing cities of the Global North at that time. Despite its connection to urban space, urbanity is understood as a social quality that can fundamentally manifest at any given time and place where people engage in relationships with each other.

Despite decades of intensive scientific research on urbanity, shrinking cities have played a subordinate role in this research so far. When addressed, they are primarily discussed as places of deurbanization (Dirksmeier 2020; Häußermann and Siebel 1988; Lefebvre 1970). In contrast, there is a widely spread understanding of vacancies and abandoned buildings as spaces of possibilities, or as 'terrains vagues' in urban planning literature (Solà-Morales 1995; Lehner 2021). Between the assumption of deurbanization in the course of shrinkage on one hand and the emergence of new urban spaces of possibilities in contexts of abandonment on the other, an epistemological vacuum remains. This vacuum is discussed and reflected upon theoretically and subsequently empirically substantiated at the example of the shrunk city of Görlitz.