Urban Planning 2024 • Volume 9 • Editorial 8815 https://doi.org/10.17645/up.8815 EDITORIAL Open Access Journal Urban Shrinkage, Degrowth, and Sustainability: An Updated Research Agenda Joop de Kraker 1,2 , Christian Scholl 1 , and Marco Bontje 3 1 Maastricht Sustainability Institute, Maastricht University, The Netherlands 2 Department of Environmental Sciences, Open Universiteit, The Netherlands 3 Department of Geography, Planning and International Development Studies, University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands Correspondence: Joop de Kraker (j.dekraker@maastrichtuniversity.nl) Submitted: 10 June 2024 Published: 11 July 2024 Issue: This editorial is part of the issue “Urban Shrinkage, Degrowth, and Sustainability: How Do They Connect in Urban Planning?” edited by Marco Bontje (University of Amsterdam), Joop de Kraker (Maastricht University / Open Universiteit), and Christian Scholl (Maastricht University), fully open access at https://doi.org/10.17645/up.i315 Abstract Shrinking cities and degrowth thinking share their parting from the dominant growth paradigm and seem to have much to offer to each other. Could degrowth be an inspiring and guiding paradigm for the sustainable development of shrinking cities? Could shrinking cities be suitable testing grounds to apply degrowth’s radical sustainability principles in practice? These and other questions regarding the connections between urban shrinkage, degrowth, and sustainability have hardly been addressed in the scientific literature thus far. This thematic issue brings together novel empirical contributions, taking stock of first attempts to connect degrowth to urban shrinkage, exploring in how far this potential unfolds in practice and what obstacles these attempts face, with a focus on the field of urban planning. In this editorial, we discuss the connections between shrinking cities, degrowth, and sustainability identified in the empirical studies and the dialogues that span across these contributions. We conclude with an updated research agenda for this field of study. Keywords shrinking cities; sustainable urban development; urban degrowth; urban planning 1. Introduction Urban shrinkage has affected an increasing amount of cities and towns in the past decades and has attracted the interest of urban studies and planning scholars as well as urban policy‐makers. Urban shrinkage can have several causes, but most often it is rooted in a structural economic crisis, resulting in population decline, vacant and decaying buildings, and underused infrastructure. While some cities manage to return to a growth path © 2024 by the author(s), licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY). 1