In: Urbanization and the Global Environment ISBN: 978-1-61470-127-9 Editors: Elen Turunen and Anton Koskinen, pp. - © 2011 Nova Science Publishers, Inc. Chapter 7 POSTSUBURBAN SPRAWL IN EUROPEAN CITIES: CHALLENGES FOR EUROPEAN URBAN POLICY AND RESEARCH IN THE 21 ST CENTURY Axel Borsdorf Institute of Geography, University of Innsbruck, Innsbruck, Austria. 1. FROM CENTRAL CITIES TO URBAN CRATERS? FROM “LAND”SCAPE TO “URBAN”SCAPE? “Where are the Innsbrucker’s?” tourists may ask themselves visiting the town centre of the Tyrolean capital. Among the thousands of people crowding the seven hectars the old city is occupying there are hardly some locals. Italian, French, English, Japanese, Spanish are the languages talken, and when the German language is used it is mostly High-German, not the local Tyrolean dialect. This phenomenon may be regarded as a consequence of the rise of city-tourism, to be observed in most European cities. It is not very clear to the tourists that in some cases – like in Innsbruck – they are visiting “living museums”. Without the visitors a lot of city centres would appear dead. The question, where the Innsbrucker’s are is strongly linked with the question why they should visit the city centre. The retail trade, once a powerful infrastructure of the central areas, moved out to peripherical locations. Some of the remaining shops belong to chains to be found in the outside locations with an identical offer and identical prices. And the “anchor stores” fled their central establishments years ago and fill the malls and shopping centres. Not only retail trade, even more functions left the city centres, followed by large parts of the urban population. Since three decades most German and Austrian cities are characterised by a remarkable loss of citizens. Between 1991 and 2001 Innsbruck for example lost about 10 % of its population. Much higher loss rates are to be observed in the new Federal States of Germany, where the process of urban shrinking and the rise of so-called “urban craters” is regarded to be an alarming result of urban out-migration, the loss of urban functions, and the powerful competition of peripherical locations.