Urban shrinkage is a new challenge for both land-use and biodiversity research. Currently, more than 370 cities worldwide, mainly but by no means exclusively in the developed western world, are experiencing population decline. Consequently, visionary urban biodiversity policy has to deal with the opposite phenomenon of growth: processes of de‐densification, depletion and land abandonment. This chapter will show that urban shrinkage appears in many different shapes and forms. It addresses the complex relationships between socio‐demography, infrastructure, land-use, ecosystem services and biodiversity in and of shrinking cities. The chapter gives examples of how to ensure both urban quality of life and healthy urban ecosystems under conditions of shrinkage. It places emphasis on how opportunities provided by shrinkage can be used to make cities greener and more diverse, while developing them in greater harmony with nature. The chapter shows how city governments might face shrinkage in terms of re‐thinking their visions, planning strategies and governance. Because shrinkage in cities and the relationship between shrinkage and ecosystems has been rarely discussed in scientific literature thus far, most of the empirical material for this chapter comes from the city of Leipzig, Germany, currently one of the best-investigated shrinking cities in terms of urban ecological processes and patterns. Due to the fact that shrinkage has been documented predominantly in the developed world, both discussion and conclusions of Chap. 12 relate to such types of cities and not to developing world-type megacities, though it may well be that urban shrinkage also needs to be considered as a challenge in the developing world. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.
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