Ida-Viru County Shrinking Cities Analysis

The 2020 pilot proved a method in two Ida-Viru municipalities. This project took that method county-wide, mapping shrinkage across all of Ida-Viru — Estonia’s post-industrial, oil-shale heartland and its most severely shrinking region.

Won through public tender (“Ruumilise kahanemise analüüs”) in mid-2021, as a joint SPIN Unit and TalTech bid, running through mid-2022 — positioned between the original 2020 Ministry of Finance pilot and the 2022 national-scale study that followed it.

Extended the same population-registry and electricity-consumption vacancy-proxy methodology used in the 2020 pilot to full Ida-Viru county coverage, producing per-municipality reports for Narva, Kohtla-Järve, Sillamäe, Jõhvi, Lüganuse, and others.

Fed directly into national policy: findings from this and the parallel pilot work were folded into a February 2022 national webinar with the Ministry of Finance and Ministry of Economic Affairs, alongside an OECD study on smart shrinkage adaptation, and into national guidance for municipalities on analysing and adapting to spatial shrinkage.