Social cohesion, neighbourhoods, urban shrinkage, socio-spatialinequalities, policy responses

Social cohesion always appears more frequently as a policy goal of the European strategy that promotes the integration of spatial, economic, and social dimensions of growth. This comprehensive approach also has to deal with social consequences of demographic change, to tackle urban poverty, and to guarantee access to am enities in isolated neighbourhoods.

Social cohesion always appears more frequently as a policy goal of the European strategy that promotes the integration of spatial, economic, and social dimensions of growth. This comprehensive approach also has to deal with social consequences of demographic change, to tackle urban poverty, and to guarantee access to am enities in isolated neighbourhoods. Such objectives represent specific challenges for shrink ing cities, where processes of population decline, job losses and economic constraints as well as financial restrictions create a much more complicated starting position and might make the achievement of the social cohesion even more difficult than in non-shrinking cities. Set against this background, this paper analyses the efforts of three shrinking cities (Ostrava, Genoa, Leipzig) to promote social cohesion under the condition of urban shrinkage, and examines which policies are being promoted to solve problems such as ethnic segregation, ageing, and socio-spatial inequalities. The results will show that even though shrinkage does lead to increased challenges for social cohesion, the attempts of policies to tackle them still appear to be secondary priorities, sectoral rather than comprehensive, and involve a certain delay.