Each city has a particular story to tell, with its own place in the history of its country and the development of its wealth. The pattern of industrial collapse is alarmingly similar, but the local political crises it spawned are particular to each setting. For this reason, we decided to include seven case studies to provide flesh and bones to the broad canvas we have so far offered.

The lived experiences of each city, its local setting and cultures, its changing leaderships and operations, its position in the European urban context, is specific, detailed and revealing. Although each case study offers highly abbreviated accounts, it summarises the main ups and downs of urban industrial growth and decline, and then regrowth after crisis, to mirror in particular places the story so far.

Three years of visiting the cities and meeting with city actors provided us with a wealth of material including observations, quotations, local reports, photographic records and evidence collected at events, in visits to new industries, local universities, public spaces and local monuments. We learned to know and recognise local landmarks, to ‘get under the skin’ of problems and progress, to move alongside the local people who knew so much about their city and whose voices are so rarely heard.

The record provided by the case studies offers concrete evidence of change and progress, direct accounts of what really happened and insights into the patterns that we uncovered by linking up ground experience from each place with the bigger picture of urban change, so often described by academics and urbanists.

The seven cities were chosen as typical examples of post-industrial crisis and recovery efforts within each country. However, as our understanding grew, we recognised four groupings within our sample:

• • cities in political turmoil represented by Belfast in Northern Ireland and Bilbao in the Basque Country;

• • cities of mono-industrial manufacturing production, represented by Sheffield in England and Saint-Étienne in France;

• • regional capitals with historic leadership roles, represented by Torino in Italy and Bremen in Germany;

• • cities in the former socialist countries of eastern Europe, represented by Leipzig in Germany.

Readers can choose the case studies they want to know more about in Part Two or can simply move on to Part Three, which pulls together the evidence from all seven cities to provide a framework for measuring recovery and an overall assessment of their progress.