While much attention is paid to urban development and to what is being built in general, much lesser notice has been given to the opposite phenomenon. While some cities are growing rapidly, many others are experiencing a population decline for various reasons. These include economic, environmental, and social changes to which urban societies and structures have to adapt. Significant outflow of population and decreasing population density are symptoms of these cities’ structural crisis. As a result, local urban centers are reorganized and parts of residential districts are demolished. The paper analyzes the neighborhoods of selected European cities in which a significant demolition of residential structures has taken place over the last 30 years and seeks to find the parameters that characterize the affected areas and embody the nature of „what and why“ we demolish in our cities today. On the other hand it is looking for characteristics that make these places different from one another. It also compares resulting quality of the respective areas after their adaptation to the new situation. The paper focuses mainly (but not only) on the physical impact of shrinkage on the selected cities structures and seeks for evidence and reasons of different vigour of studied phenomenon in diverse neighborhoods of cities. While shrinking cities is a worldwide spread issue, we focus on the European continent only due to the ability to compare European cities to each other and keeping the same urban structure framework at the same time.
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