A study of urban decline in the late twentieth century, told through the story of Liverpool.

In the latter decades of the twentieth century, many cities in the Global North were shrinking while those in the Global South were growing exponentially. Cities in Western Europe and North America were reaching crisis point, leading some to question the viability of several major urban centers. This book uses the city of Liverpool in the northwest of England to explore how and why this urban crisis unfolded. Liverpool, a city built on the profits of the transatlantic trade in people and goods, became an archetype of urban crisis after losing its global economic role. The crisis was typified by falling populations, ingrained poverty, rising unemployment, physical decay, public disorder, financial collapse, and political discord.

Taking the “rediscovery of poverty” in the 1960s as its starting point, which turned public and political attention back to the city as a locus for entrenched inequality, the book examines the history of the urban crisis in Liverpool at its height. Covering the city’s economic collapse and the impact this had on people and the built environment, and foregrounding the histories of the minoritized and marginalized neighborhoods and communities at the center of the transformation, Aaron Andrews shows what Liverpool’s distinct story can tell us about globalization, deindustrialization, and decolonization in the late-twentieth-century urban environment.