From Shrinking to Lean City

What does the increasing vacancy rate of apartments in East Germany have to do with the price of tea in China? It marks a paradigm shift that will affect the future of the world's cities, that will require a basic rethinking of architecture and planning according to the principle of less is more. At the initiative of the Bauhaus Dessau Foundation, the German state of Saxony-Anhalt has inaugurated the International Building Exhibition (IBA), whose principle aim will be to discover model solutions for this structural transformation by 2010. This first publication of the IBA explains the basic parameters of the project, describes its philosophy, strategies and working methods, and presents selected initiatives through examples from IBA cities.