Shrinking rural areas constitute the backside of urban mobility and of current urbanization processes in Denmark. The new rural paradigm prioritizes spatial development through strategic investments utilizing local strengths and opportunities. Questions about how to activate place-based resources, qualities, and potential for strategic purposes require new ways of architectural thinking. Based on teaching experiences in landscape architecture education at the University of Copenhagen, this article proposes working with strategic design in declining rural areas as a translation process of observed site conditions into future site conditions. Guided by actor-network theory, the article outlines a conceptual framework for strategic design, presents and discusses the applied educational procedure and results, and concludes
with some further development perspectives. The teaching experiences show that on-site studies of recent physical changes, emerging new activities and uses, and people’s ideas and desires for future development can be a pertinent starting point for strategic design. Furthermore, a clearly defined programming phase where design problems are formulated by different representational media proved helpful in the process. The produced design work and the student evaluations and feedback from practice partners suggest that translation offers a framework for strategic design which can contribute to architectural education, practice, and research.