Concrete walls still standing but hollow inside. Abandoned infrastructure across Europe's forgotten postwar zones

When a city stops being repaired, it does not die all at once. It begins with a pothole that becomes a sinkhole, a closed school that never reopens, a main street where one by one the shop lights go dark. This book examines the slow mechanics of urban decline through cities that lost their economic reason to exist: Youngstown, Detroit, Liverpool, and Halle-Neustadt. Each case reveals how infrastructure, once neglected, accelerates abandonment in ways that policy alone cannot reverse.