With 70 of 240 downtown houses sitting empty, Tribsees in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern is a pointed case study in the failure of top-down urban renewal. In 2020, a team led by Tom Matton moved into this vacancy — literally — collaborating with residents to test new models of co-existence grounded in improvisation, local production, and individual responsibility. Slow Urban Planning is part documentation, part manifesto: it records the artistic interventions staged as part of the Tribsees Centenniale while arguing that performative, participatory processes deserve a place within formal urban planning frameworks. Essential reading for practitioners working at the intersection of spatial practice, community engagement, and shrinking-city urbanism.

Key Features

• 160 pages of project documentation, critical essays, and artistic interventions from the Tribsees Centenniale
• Led by Tom Matton in collaboration with artists, students, and Tribsees residents

What You'll Discover

• How a town with a 29% downtown vacancy rate became a testing ground for alternative models of urban co-existence
• The tension between regulatory planning structures and the improvisational, sometimes extralegal, processes that actually animate shrinking communities
• How artistic intervention can function as a planning tool — not merely as commentary, but as a mechanism for generating new spatial narratives with residents
• A framework for understanding how performative and participatory processes might be formally integrated into urban planning methodology

Editor: Ton Matton

Publisher: JOVIS

ISBN: ‎978-3868597691