Progress out of the ashes of war and industrial collapse

This final part of Phoenix cities links the threads of growth, decline and recovery within ex-industrial cities to bigger trends and patterns that underpin their history, progress and future trajectories. First we look at the main strands of progress of the cities. We then consider the lessons from their industrial collapse, subsequent recovery and current constraints. Lastly we assess the future prospects of the cities.

Densely populated European industrial cities, with their long urban roots, gradually took on a new lease of life over the late 20th and early 21st centuries, as they worked their way through political crises, economic meltdown, social disarray and physical degradation. In spite of all their overhanging problems from a disintegrated industrial past and the over-exploitation of the natural and human resources on which they depended, cities were still at the heart of the economic and social systems of the five countries we studied: the UK, Germany, Italy, France and Spain. The seven former industrial cities with so much stacked against them began to make a comeback in the first decade of the 21st century, helped by strong public interventions and a burgeoning European economy, leading to a new climate of confidence. This is now in question at the end of the decade.

The strong actions that all seven cities took to recover built on the urban welfare tradition of European societies dating from the harsh social consequences of the first industrial revolution. There is a broad social consensus that no city, region or nation should be allowed to fall too far behind the average, in order to build the wealth of the whole society on foundations of social equity. Since raw materials, energy, human labour and land had been used collectively to produce vast wealth on which whole nations and eventually the global economy had come to depend, so whole societies became responsible for picking up the pieces in the places that suffered the greatest impacts. The damage left behind by the collapse of older urban industries was so far reaching that it too became a heavier responsibility than the local cities could shoulder.