Shrinkage is understood as the process of population decline in an area which is the result of different processes such as deindustrialisation or demographic change. Local stakeholders in shrinking cities are faced with a contradictory task: they have to ensure a good living quality under conditions of shrinkage with fewer funds for this purpose and become increasingly dependent on external sources. Set against this background, the paper analyses different ways of how local stakeholders are involved in developing empirically founded rules to model local trajectories and decision-making heuristics of urban shrinkage. After the introduction of research objectives (1.1), the paper provides an insight into the challenge of urban shrinkage from the perspective of local stakeholders (1.2). Next materials and methods for modelling local pathways of urban shrinkage by involving local stakeholders are presented (2.). A third part introduces different research projects/ approaches working with stakeholder involvement and modelling techniques (3.). By means of these case studies, we show how stakeholders are enabled to participate in knowledge creation. The last part of the paper discusses what the impact of local stakeholders in the presented cases really is. (4.) Thus, we argue that stakeholder processes have generated new knowledge and valuable insights into drivers and relationships of the shrinkage process, and have also supported the generation of more comprehensive future development trajectories.