A Research Pilot for Shrinking Cities

In 2018, the Ministry of Finance began receiving dozens of unwanted apartments donated by their owners in East Estonia — a genuine surprise, given interest rates were low and national housing prices were rising 5.7% year-on-year. The debate on shrinking cities was already open, but this was the turning point that opened a new line of investigation into the relationship between demographic decline and the built environment.

A year after that surprise, SPIN Unit and TalTech launched a research pilot for the Ministry of Finance in Ida-Viru county, aiming to design a methodology for mapping shrinkage and assessing its risk to socio-economic development. The core challenge: finding a reliable data source to understand vacancy at the individual building level.

The team tested all available data sources and ultimately produced a method for turning electricity consumption data into a meaningful proxy for building-level vacancy rates — cross-validated against population register, building registry, business registry, and debt records. The findings also fed into a landscape/townscape analysis guide and municipality-specific adaptation strategies for Lüganuse and Kohtla-Järve.

Delivered as a set of Estonian-language technical guidelines and case-study review documents in early 2021, alongside municipality-specific strategy decks.