We present a very general framework for the construction of structured, possibly compactly supported Banach frames and atomic decompositions for a given decomposition space. Here, a decomposition space D Q, L p , ℓ q w is defined essentially like a classical Besov space, but the usual dyadic covering is replaced by an (almost) arbitrary covering. Special cases include the class of Besov spaces and (α-)modulation spaces, as well as a large class of wavelet-type coorbit spaces and so-called shearlet smoothness spaces.Assuming that the covering Q is of the regular form, we fix a prototype function γ ∈ L 1 R d and consider the structured generalized shift invariant systemwhere Lx and M ξ denote translation and modulation, respectively. The main contribution of the paper is to provide verifiable conditions on the prototype γ which ensure that Ψ δ forms, respectively, a Banach frame or an atomic decomposition for the space D Q, L p , ℓ q w , for sufficiently small sampling density δ > 0. Crucially, while the decomposition space D Q, L p , ℓ q w is defined using the bandlimited family Φ, the construction presented here usually allows for the prototype γ to be compactly supported in space. We emphasize that the theory presented here can cover the whole range p, q ∈ (0, ∞] and not only the case p, q ∈ [1, ∞] of Banach spaces.An important feature of our theory is that in many cases, the system Ψ δ will simultaneously form a Banach frame and an atomic decomposition for D Q, L p , ℓ q w . This implies that for frames of the form Ψ δ , analysis sparsity is equivalent to synthesis sparsity, i.e., the analysis coefficientsand only if f is an element of a certain decomposition space, if and only if f = i∈I,k∈Z d cThis is very convenient, since for many frame constructions-like shearlets-one only knows that the analysis coefficients for a class of "nice" signals are sparse. This, however, only entails synthesis sparsity with respect to the dual frame, about which often only limited knowledge is available. Using the theory presented here, one can derive synthesis sparsity with respect to the primal frame, for which one has an explicit formula and whose properties like smoothness and time-frequency localization are well understood.As a sample application, we show that the developed theory applies to α-modulation spaces and to (inhomogeneous) Besov spaces. In a companion paper, we also show that the theory applies to shearlet smoothness spaces.