FUTURES

Futures 40 (2008) 451–459

Population decline and the new nature: Towards

experimental ‘‘refactoring’’ in landscape development of

post-industrial regions

Matthias Gross

Department of Urban and Environmental Sociology, Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research—UFZ,

Permoserstr. 15, 04318 Leipzig, Germany

Available online 10 October 2007

Abstract

From an everyday perspective, a consequence of population decline and de-industrialization is the growth of natural

areas: less industry and less people means more nature in the future. In the real word, the situation is more complicated.
Using the development of a new lake district as a successor of brown coal industry and strip mining in the southern parts of
the city of Leipzig (Germany) as a touchstone, this paper will explore some of the challenges and future opportunities for
the design of ‘new nature’ in post-industrial landscapes. To discuss how fields such as ecology and engineering can fulfill
their role as innovative players in times of population decline, two seemingly contrasting strategies for making decisions
under conditions of depopulation in landscape development—called here scientific non-knowledge—are introduced:
refactoring and public experiments.
r

2007 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

1. Introduction

Population decline and de-industrialization are pressing phenomena especially in regions across the

formerly socialist east. Lower birth rates and out-migration often go hand in hand with an on-going economic
decline of regions. The east of Germany, for instance, has lost more than 10% of its population since 1990 due
to low birth rates and movement of labor to the West. Since the fall of the Berlin wall in 1990, more than 1.5
million people have left eastern Germany. Some demographers have predicted that only half of the 18 million
who lived in Eastern Germany when it imploded will be left in 2020

[1]

.

1

On a global scale, since 1990, every

fourth city has been shrinking, and this tendency is on the rise

[3]

. One of the most well-known examples for

these developments is the city of Leipzig and vicinity in Eastern Germany in the state of Saxony. Leipzig has a
long history as an important urban center in Germany and today has around 500,000 inhabitants. Since 1990,
after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the city has even lost over 12% of its population in comparison to the number

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1

Although population decline is extreme in regions such as eastern Germany, Italy and many eastern European countries, on a global

scale a reduction cannot be expected before the second-half of the 21st century

[2]

.

in the late 1980s. Despite ongoing tearing down of buildings and an increasing number of buildings listed for
demolition, this development has led to a residential vacancy number of 55,000 empty flats in 2006.

These developments are also a challenge for the future of science in the context of its application, since no

blueprints in terms of ecological implementations and engineering are available. In the first-half of this paper,
I will discuss some of these challenges illustrating the unique development of opencast mining areas in Eastern
Germany in order to subsequently suggest to combine two strategies, an experimental, as developed in relation
to their future scenarios in science studies during the last two decades

[4–6]

, and with the concept of

refactoring, derived from software engineering, where it describes a process of clarifying and simplifying the
design of an existing code, without changing its behavior. The two strategies are taken into consideration,
since the more the unexpected in research is anticipated, the more is the growth of expectations to control or
steer the surprising events properly or to even reverse some of them. Considering these uncertainties, I will
suggest an ‘‘experimental strategy’’ of ‘‘refactoring’’ that is able to grasp surprising events and is able to cope
with ignorance in scientific knowledge. Consequently, to come to grips with future events of such kind more
than ever curiosity and the fostering of surprises need to be unleashed and controlled in an experimental
modularization.

2. Depopulation and the future of post-industrial landscapes

In some debates on processes of population decline, the phenomenon is perceived as urban sprawl in

reverse. Although population shrinkage and lack of economic growth should be expected to operate against
urban sprawl, in many western cities the decline in population has not been accompanied by a proportional
reduction of households and buildings

[7,8]

. Instead, the consumption of the surface for new buildings in the

affluent suburbs has been rising so that the development of natural areas has become even more difficult.

Furthermore, less people should mean less pollution, which means cleaner air and water and thus a recovery

of the natural environment, especially since the shrinkage of industries after 1990 has been a major factor for
out-migration. The major industry in the southern parts and the wider vicinity of Leipzig was open cast brown
coal mining. Indeed, the former state of East Germany, the German Democratic Republic (GDR), was the
largest producer of brown coal in the world. Until 1989, averages of some 300 million tons of coal per year
have been extracted. Overall, more than 10% of the world’s brown coal production took place in this area
south of the city of Leipzig. More than 30,000 miners and energy workers and nearly 13,000 employees of the
chemical industry (chemical basics) and in power generation formed a gigantic mining-industrial complex

[9–11]

. In the years after 1990, now being exposed to world market prices, most of the surface mines were

closed since they could not operate efficiently. The southern surroundings of Leipzig experienced a break in
the economic and social structure, which is of no precedent concerning the abruptness and the speed in Central
Europe’s history. This meant for instance the closure of all chemistry factories based on brown coal, closure of
all 13-briquette factories and over 90% closure of the open cast mines. Nearly 40,000 employees lost their jobs
almost over night.

With the re-establishment of the natural water balance, some of the open cast mining pits have been

flooded. The aim of a water-network is to connect the region south of Leipzig to the European network of
waterways. The new water landscape is supplemented by lakes in the north of Leipzig as well as in the adjacent
state of Saxony–Anhalt. In short, in Leipzig’s so-called ‘‘New Lake District,’’ where until 1989, 60 million tons
per year of the 300 million tons of East German coal was extracted, today a complete new landscape can be
seen, which partly is still developing. I now turn to some of the development processes in the areas south of
Leipzig focusing on the question on how to cope with the unknown, since no blue print for post-industrial
landscape design in times of population shrinkage is available.

Although at first sight the assessments of population developments should be easy enough since numbers

can go up, go down, mortality and fertility rates can change, people can migrate, move to different areas, the
age structure can change over time. However, the lack of experience from similar cases makes it difficult to
estimate patterns of out-migration for future developments. Related to this is the problematique to make
feasible estimations about the spatial social organization of a shrinking region, which would include some of
the organizational structures of a society, especially its economic organization. The place and influence of the
natural environment is also not self-explanatory, since the post-industrial landscape will be completely

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452

different from the pre-mining landscape, which does not even closely resemble the surface of the early 20th
century. Whereas the faith in total control and full knowledge of ecological systems and social processes
implies an ability to act only when everything is known in advance, an experimental approach allows
accommodation of human and natural elements in spite of gaps of knowledge. They are a means to launch an
ecological design project in spite of uncertainties and uphold it without disrupting the overall process. In the
next section, I will highlight a few crucial elements and factors which foster as well as impede the experimental
design and the flooding with water of two mining lakes near the southern city limits of Leipzig, Lake
Markkleeberg and Lake Cospuden.

2

I conclude with a conceptual suggestion on how knowledge about the

unknown can be produced in small steps via iterative learning processes so—following the concept of
‘‘refactoring’’—a simplification and reduction of scale is possible without leading to a failure of the process.

3. Not enough people: the future of mining lakes and regional planning

Since the late 1990s, the step-by-step implementation of the project called ‘‘Regional Network

Neuseenland’’ can be called an experimental field unique of its kind. As a representative of Regional
Planning Office in the city of Leipzig put it: ‘‘For what we do here in the field of landscape reclamation, there
are no blueprints whatsoever. y In 1990, we simple stood here empty-handed. There were no concepts about
what we should do and what was going to happen’’ (interview February 2006). Furthermore, there is no
system for assessing beforehand whether or not re-naturalization, ecological restoration and other design
activities will be successful. The main target then was and still is to open up new development potentials for an
economically and ecologically sustainable combination of classical and technology-oriented industries, of
tourism and leisure economy as well as science and research

[12,13]

. The major challenge, however, is

population shrinkage. Until 2020, almost 20% decline in the population is expected in areas even as attractive
as the New Lake District

3

. Furthermore, Saxony is Germany’s oldest state in terms of its inhabitants’ age. This

aging population, combined with a high unemployment rate, is not a proper basis for the future of a
traditional tourist industry that focuses on sports and leisure facilities for an age group under 40 or even much
younger. Needless to say, especially the new shop owners and the new tourist businesses, who already have a
long record of ‘‘learning processes,’’ especially with the decline of the former brown coal mining industry after
the end of the socialist era, are not willing to give up their dream to become part of a new tourist attraction in
the near future.

In light of the extreme decline of population in former industrial regions of East Germany, the creation of,

as Dettmar

[14]

termed it, a ‘‘deserted post-industrial wilderness’’ is the challenge lying ahead. From an

ecological perspective this might not be so hard to reach since, as recent studies show

[15,16]

, wilderness areas

do only need to be minimally maintained to make them attractive for citizens—contrary to some of the nature
protection strategies that want to keep the public out of nature.

Despite the growth of forests and woodland in the southern area of Leipzig, still one third of the area is

officially approved as space for economic development, e.g., small businesses in the tourist industry and other
small-scale enterprises. The remaining shop owners and small businesses cannot easily be moved away in order
to officially change coherent areas to natural areas, although many of the lots between the modern office
buildings resemble ‘‘wilderness’’ because they are deserted. What is nevertheless suggested by the ecological
research station in the neighboring town of Borna-Birkenhain (O¨kologische Station Borna-Birkenhain), which
is an important actor in the design of the Lake District in the southern parts of Leipzig, is an alternative to
active usage areas back to the restoration and renaturation of former brown fields into ‘‘new nature,’’ new
natural habitats. This is done by focusing on investors, who might have an interest in implementing new
natural areas in the former mining areas. The ecological field station in Borna-Birkenhain thus not only shows

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2

The case in this paper derives out of a research project on the future design of post-mining areas. Data for this study were gathered

through document analyses, as well as 20 key and action informant interviews. The interviews from which I quote in this paper took place
mainly between April 2005 and June 2006. Together with the other material collected from planning- and work-meetings, such as minutes
and in-house publications of the ‘‘Regional Planning Department of West Saxony’’ as well as numerous field trips, the data were analyzed
via a qualitative codification system to identify recurring themes and patterns. I also collected newspaper clippings from the regions’ major
dailies and weeklies about the issue. I thank Manni Heumann for introducing me to the concept of refactoring.

3

Op. cit. Berkner, note 9, p. 223.

M. Gross / Futures 40 (2008) 451–459

453

that the public experiment of designing the lake district has the potential to initiate some natural scientific
research, but also to stimulate a new model for designing the landscape. When the purpose of the ecological
design strategy is to re-naturalize or restore a certain landscape, often any financial incentive is lacking.
Rather, the central government and local authorities are encouraged to support this type of natural design,
since it is understood as a step to a rising attractiveness of the area that cannot be evaluated easily in economic
terms. Future strategies need to be especially assessed as regards their experimental appropriation to
demographic change.

In the next section, I will further elaborate how in the concrete case of flooding an open cast mining pit via

an experimental strategy interspersed with phases of ‘‘refactoring’’ seems to be the most promising path. Two
factors for successful experimental strategies appear to be crucial: openness to surprises and acknowledgment
of non-knowledge.

4. Experimental strategies and the refactoring of research and development

An experimental strategy outside the scientific laboratory, as it has been developed in several

interdisciplinary fields

[4,5,17,18]

, refers to a performance in networks of collective actors. Experimental

strategies are founded on the insight that human actors (scientists, concerned citizens or other decisions
makers) do not know enough to manage urban systems, regional development or ecological implementations
with master plans of action. To differentiate experimental strategies from trial and error processes they are
regarded as a systematic process for continually improving knowledge and practices by learning from the
outcomes of processes. This includes a monitoring process and the analysis of the outcomes of a humble and
deliberate implementation of a plan of action designed to reveal the skills and knowledge that is currently
lacking. These results need to be incorporated into future decisions for experimental strategies. Experimental
strategies are grounded in the observation that planning, when forcefully pushed to innovation and economic
success has severe limits and uncertainties as well as unresolved questions tend to accumulate.

Unlike in adaptive management, which is sometimes also understood as an implementation of policies as

experiments, an experimental approach as presented here, does not only aim at retaining ‘‘essentially the same
function structure identity, and feedbacks’’

[19]

after a period of crisis—what Holling and co-workers

[20,21]

have labeled the resilience or the capacity to absorb disturbance. Rather, an experimental approach as
outlined in this article aims to develop a robust strategy into the future that is acceptable by as many of the
actors involved but moving away from the idea that the post-industrial area, which often goes hand in hand
with a ‘‘post-densely-populated’’ landscape, will or needs to have the same function, structure, identity and
feedbacks as the one before. Given the changes in shrinking societies the process can lead to a completely new
type of settlement organization and landscape design, which does not resemble the ‘‘pre-disturbance’’
appearance, to use the term from adaptive management. However, in many cases at least some basic
organizational elements and functions need to be maintained or reinstalled, but not via the addition of new
investments or a mere passive adaptation to new conditions. In order to describe a new way of organization in
landscape developments in regions with population decline, I will scrutinize the concept of refactoring. In
software engineering, the ‘‘refactoring’’ of a source code module means a modification without changing its
external behavior

[22]

. Sometimes refactoring is informally referred to as ‘‘cleaning up’’ of the computer codes.

Refactoring is undertaken to improve the understandability of the computer code or change its structure and
design to make it easier for future maintenance and usage. In particular, adding new behavior to a program
might even be difficult with the program’s given structure, so a developer might refactor it first to make it easy,
and then possibly add the new behavior.

In this sense, I would also like to suggest that the future development of new natural areas in post-industrial

countries should best be developed as a process of experimental refactoring, since no new additions or
investment to current developments can be expected, but at the same time the given conditions cannot be
understood well enough to make decisions on a firm basis. An experimental approach via refactoring appears
to be the most feasible path. Experimental refactoring can be understood as a strategy for making decisions
under ignorance that order existing conditions, what Collingridge

[23]

once called ‘‘flexing,’’ to achieve an

outcome, where the original decision can be changed and accommodated quickly and without great cost
(cf. Ref.

[24]

).

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Similar to the situation at Lake Cospuden in the 1990s, the decision to start to flood the open cast pit near

the city of Markkleeberg on the southern outskirts of Leipzig, was based on a large amount of, as I will call it,
non-knowledge. Unlike the term ignorance, non-knowledge as a literal translation of the German Nichtwissen,
points to a symmetry between knowledge (Wissen) and knowledge about what is not known, but which is
specified enough so it can be taken into account for future planning. The ambivalence of the term ignorance,
with its occasional meaning of actively ignoring something, makes non-knowledge more precise as a specified
form of the unknown

[25–31]

. Ignorance can be used as a generic term about the limits of knowledge in a

certain area. More generally, attempts to grasp notions such as ignorance are spurred by the well-known
paradox: whenever new knowledge arises, the perceived amount of non-knowledge increases at least
proportionally, since every state of knowledge opens up even more notions of what is not known.

In this way, the experts in the year 1998 estimated that the end of flooding of Lake Markkleeberg would be

sometime between the years 2004 and 2013. However, nobody knew exactly when the lake would be finished
so that it could be opened for leisure activities, for introducing new species in the process of ecological
restoration, or to attract new investors for the land that was contracted out as commercial zone and industrial
areas. In general, the process of flooding, of course, is not a static process. Elaborated models are useful, but
they are always based on assumptions. Computer simulation models often leave questions about processes in
the real world unasked. A dry year or a very wet season as a boundary condition can very well mean that the
end of a flooding takes place a year earlier or later. However, implementing can be done in an experimental
fashion, since the actors involved explicitly knew that to wait for final knowledge that could be used as a basis
for precise assessments on when the lake would be flooded was not available. Normally there are three possible
options: (1) doing nothing, (2) to wait for proper scientific knowledge or (3) simply trying it out.

In 2000, 2 years after flooding was begun, the experts revised their estimation. By this time, the year 2008

was set as the expected date. However, by summer 2005 it was re-estimated that in early 2006 the lake will be
finished, which it was. After several temporal postponements, the official opening ceremonies and festivities
finally took place in July 2006. Thus, the actors involved planned in spite of ignorance—which was specified
into non-knowledge—and were open to surprises. A surprise occurs when events turn out to be sharply
different than what was conceived

[32–34]

. However, an event is never surprising in itself, but only in relation

to a particular set of convictions about certain occurrences. Furthermore, we should add that a surprise is a
surprise when it is registered by an observer as a communication that utters perceived reality as qualitatively
different from a previous expectation. Given the expected surprising events, they need to be continuously
coped with and be re-examined and accommodated by the wider society, not only scientists, engineers and
landscape planners. The overall integrity of such a process can only be upheld, when its experimental design is
able to accommodate revisions and modifications to issues that changed, although they were previously agreed
upon. Furthermore, an experimental strategy allows steps to be taken in a flexible process in which
stakeholder participation leads to accommodations in the implementation in the next phase of the process
without undermining the principal goal, that is, to design a more ‘‘natural’’ landscape for its people. New
knowledge can develop out of ignorance and non-knowledge, which is fed into the next step of the process to
expose it to further observation.

5. The robustness of experimental refactoring

In the beginning of most developments many options are given, albeit more often than not chance is an

important factor in the direction of a certain development in ecological design. Historian of technology
Thomas Hughes

[35]

has elaborated the connection and feedback loops between innovation, implementation

and the observation of aberrations in research and development. In his view, sometimes a process is no longer
able to break out of a lock-in, that is, a process where innovative technologies can no longer be considered
given the current infrastructure or network externalities. For the field of technology development, it can be
shown that ‘‘lock-ins’’ can be resistant against improvements. Lock-in effects point to processes where early
successes can pave the path for further development as usual, which eventually lock-in to sub-optimal
outcomes. In the development of new landscapes, the actors involved have gradually maneuvered themselves
into a lock-in where only ever increasing efforts can keep the system operational

[36,37]

. These effects

have been detected as a pivotal challenge especially in so-called post-socialist transformation processes.

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A ‘‘lock-out,’’ however, can be forced by an innovation that makes the network effects of the prevailing
technology obsolete

[37]

. However, in landscape development the problem of lock-ins is different from

technology development and breakouts are based on different prerequisites. Nevertheless, the general pattern
also holds true for our case of landscape development in former mining areas in the southern parts of Leipzig.
The integration of research into the development process is prerequisite for a dynamic system. It contains the
tendency via increasing control of its environment to increase its internal reliability as well as its extension.
However, as has become clear in the case of Leipzig’s New Lake District, the promising new directions from
the early stages in the 1990s have become consolidated. The time since 2005 resembles a certain final stage in
the development of the lakes, although there are many new questions and challenges lying ahead—from the
natural sciences, social aspects, to economic and legal issues. However, today it seems that the focus is on risks
and uncertainties and not on chances. This has slowed down the development considerably. Since the
beginning of the new millennium, planning has led to a stage where problem thinking has eclipsed to see the
chances and possibilities. Given the challenges and the prerequisite to take an open planning approach in
the face of no blue prints or historical templates, this appears as a major hindrance for innovative landscape
development in shrinking regions. As a representative of the city of Leipzig’s planning department put it:
‘‘I am sure, perhaps I should not say I am looking forward, that in the near future, we will face quite a few
more challenges and surprises that will reach us’’ (interview February 2006). However, the same person also
stated that his is a lonely cry in the woods. Preparedness to these unavoidable surprises and the possibility to
act has become miniscule since the dawn of the new millennium.

To illustrate the development from the early 1990s to the current stage,

Table 1

below can be understood as

a summary on how a robust process can turn into a lock-in situation that is waiting for a break out. In the
context of dealing with surprising events and experimental strategies of science in public, the notion of
robustness is to be understood not as a feature of correct knowledge

[38]

or the quality measure from the

engineering perspective, where robustness aims at a design that is built in one most assertive way

[39,40]

, but

rather as a characterization of developing ecological research and implementation strategies that include the
attainment to produce both scientifically reliable and socially accepted ecological design and remediation
process, that is, a ‘‘refactoring’’ of existing research processes and not a new type of knowledge production.
One reason for the problematique of integrating scientific reliability and social robustness in the sense of a
sensitive contextualization has been the unsolvable dilemma of not knowing before the implementation
whether the social and ecological risks are acceptable. This is an important point since in many large scale
ecological projects political and science experts are often forced to play down the implicit experimental
character of research-based restoration strategies by emphasizing rhetorics of security and trust, because
possible loss of public acceptance is anticipated. To deal with this, an informed consent about the unknown is
a prerequisite to welcome surprises

[41]

. Like knowledge, ignorance and non-knowledge are conceptualized

and constructed as a fundamental part of social life. Robust strategies accept ignorance and surprises, and
take advantage of them by turning them into opportunities for desired developments. Experimental
refactoring thus points to a strategy where the dynamics of a process are rendered desirable despite changes of
its component parts or its environment. It is an outline for a strategy that is robust enough to ‘‘listen’’ to both
different interest constellations and unexpected natural changes.

With the notion of experimental refactoring and the goal to reach robust strategies where both scientific

reliability and social acceptance are possible, a basis for a clearly defined coping with surprises appears to be a
promising path to be taken in the future. Especially in landscape design projects, where uncertainty of the
social conditions of the future is high, an experimental framework that includes heterogeneous actors can be
seen as a step to more robust strategies. However, today the lock-in situation in the southern parts of Leipzig

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Table 1
Phases of experimental refactoring in Leipzig’s ‘‘New Lake District’’

Phase 1 (1990–1995)

Success of experimental refactoring was high

Phase 2 (1995–2005)

Success of experimental refactoring was declining

Phase 3 (2005 to ?)

Success of experimental refactoring is low and further declining

Phase 4 (future lock-out?)

Success of experimental refactoring might rise (again)

M. Gross / Futures 40 (2008) 451–459

456

has generated a kind of inertia. What is needed might be a radical political or economic change that can lead
to a lock-out. The table shows how benefits of experimental strategies have decreased with their decreasing
scope of preparedness

[42]

and lack of openness for surprises. When analyzing the lake flooding and lake

design in Leipzig it appears that the tension between the openness to surprising events and the
acknowledgment of ‘‘non-knowledge’’ is crucial. These two major elements, the openness to surprises and
the acknowledgment of non-knowledge, can be combined to a matrix for understanding processes of
successful ‘‘refactoring’’ in time of population shrinkage.

Many key actors involved in the redesign of the new Lake District talk about three phases in the

development after 1990. In the first phase after 1990 followed the second that began ca. 1995, and the third one
around the year 2005. In the first phase, the expectation of surprises and the acknowledgment of non-
knowledge after the political turmoil in the post-1989/90 era has been very high. In this phase, we can speak of
a process that has become robust by establishing practices that were open to surprises and the
acknowledgment of non-knowledge. Between 1995 and ca. 2005 acknowledgment of non-knowledge was
still high, but not much openness to different voices a.k.a. surprises was included. During the first-half of the
new millennium the amount of non-knowledge was increasingly bracketed out and not included in any
meaningful way for future action. The scientists and engineers involved believed that enough knowledge was
available to act, and if not, no action was taken. The openness to surprises and the acknowledgment of non-
knowledge have been locked-in. The prior knowledge base and clear knowledge about what is not known
(non-knowledge) has been a good prerequisite for robust strategies, but increasingly the denial of surprises has
led to a declining robustness.

Although the openness and realized non-knowledge was high around 1990–1995, the legal regulations,

master plans of actions, or simply waiting for more knowledge have led to a decline of robustness since the
mid to late 1990s and have moved to phase 2 since the early 2000s where many developments moved into
different sometimes opposing directions. This has been the case with the development of the second post-
mining lake south of Leipzig, Lake Markkleeberg, as was discussed above. Today, the ecological design
project for building a new lake district has already lost the robustness in its refactoring strategy. However,
recently at a prominent meeting for a new mission statement and the future of the New Lake District in
Leipzig the call for a less surprise-averse view and the will to act in spite of uncertainties was uttered and made
an official statement by Leipzig’s Regional Planning Office. Thus, the question marks in phases 3 and 4.

6. Outlook: environmental science and its publics

Science in the real world is always unique, with heterogeneous actors involved and special institutional

embeddings. However, in the idea to design them in a robust fashion there lies a structural frequency of
occurrence. The notion of robustness thus should be understood in a particular meaning. Robustness most of
the time referred to the quality of a research and design strategy, both in everyday life as well as in more
academic or ‘‘scientific’’ contexts. Robustness is needed in order to reach a goal even when surprises,
unintended consequences, or decision making under uncertainties are the norm. Contrary to the notion of
robustness in the field of engineering and cybernetics, in the usage here robustness is not to be treated as an
absolute target, but it needs to be able to be reified and accommodated in an iterative process. Robustness in
this meaning rather encompasses the stability and reliability of this iterative dynamic of experimental practice,
even if unanticipated occurrences lead to surprises, scientific knowledge turns out to be insufficient, the
original interests have changed, and societal factors such as new patterns of shrinkage intervene. In short, it
refers to a process of refactoring, which can be understood as a process of experimentally reorganizing given
conditions.

On a medium-term, the transition of usage as well as restoration and rehabilitation strategies in post-brown

coal mining areas from a federal state support to a sponsorship mainly based on private investors, community
and local authority is unavoidable. Thus, from the side of scientific research, stakeholder interests and
concerned citizen groups, it is clear that a resource bundling and effectiveness is necessary in order to cope
with the new financial and sponsorship networks—called here refactoring. After all, the intact research
structure in these new landscapes can only be supported and build up when research institutions can deliver
results that are relevant for real world problems. This also means that in successful and in this sense robust

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457

projects of ecological design in times of population shrinkage, the wider public simply must become part of
ecological implementation, something that still has to be learned in Leipzig and vicinity. A task for a next step
could be to turn concerned citizens into participating actors, since the project in the Southern parts of Leipzig
continues to develop as it moves out of one phase into the implementation in response to changes in actors,
policies and natural factors. To a large extend, for the most time the citizens living in this area had to remain
passive and adapted to decisions. To be sure, people where informed by the local media, but information was
mainly transferred in a one-way direction and was done after major decisions were already been made. Given
the enormous uncertainty as regards population development, social organization, the dynamics of natural
environment and the development of alternative industries, acting in spite of ignorance via the
acknowledgment of non-knowledge will become increasingly important in the future. However, the integrity
of the design process of the New Lake District south of Leipzig can only be merged into a robust process,
when openness and non-knowledge are skillfully used in planning and implementation based on the
integration of all stakeholders and strategies to turn concerned citizens into active agents. A prerequisite for
pursuing such a goal is that a community needs to be ready to engage in knowledge production relevant to
shaping their lives and environments. This is not self-evident. In a political climate that fosters the belief in
certainty through science, experimental strategies to refactor given conditions will not work. Especially
ecological design projects are often undertaken on a tight monetary budget, but they cannot be postponed
until every detail of future planning is precisely known. Thus, before an experimental refactoring strategy can
be rendered successful, the community needs to be aware that no action is action as well. If the members of the
community wish to wait for the ultimate scientific truth, it misuses science as a source for political non-action.
If science proposes to deliver reliable knowledge, it overestimates its methodological competence.

References

[1] C. Dienel (Ed.), Abwanderung, Geburtenru¨ckgang und Regionale Entwicklung: Ursachen und Folgen des Bevo¨lkerungsru¨ckgangs in

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