Projects of becoming in a right-sizing shrinking City

Urban shrinkage, and more recently the rise of right-sizing and smart-shrinkage as responses to its challenges, have attracted attention among scholars and policy-makers while igniting controversy on how to interpret them. The paper argues that while recognizing the relevance of cross-scale patterns of uneven development in the determination of of urban shrinkage, research has to focus on the ways localized networks of actors respond through the mobilization of concrete policy situations and trajectories. Object of the study is the case of urban planning and policy experiments in land management and reuse, food production and local procurement in the city of Cleveland. Drawing from post-capitalism and social-innovation theories, the author posits that such experiments can represent as many “projects of becoming” towards a new community economy and concludes that right-sizing and smart-shrinkage are open, contested, fields of policy experimentation whose transformative potential has to be closely investigated by critical geographers, planners and policy-makers.