The quiet cities rebuilding themselves around the people who stayed

Nobody left Leipzig in a hurry. The plant closed on a Friday in 2013, and the leaving took four years — a family at a time, a shop at a time, until the street that had fed two thousand shift workers had a butcher, a bar and a great deal of silence.

What happened next is the part the delegations come to see. The city did not chase a replacement employer. It spent the money on the street instead: on housing above the empty shops, on a tram that runs every seven minutes, on cutting three lanes of traffic down to one and giving the rest to anyone on foot.

The arithmetic of staying

The bet was that people do not leave a place because there is no work. They leave because there is no reason to stay, and work is only the most obvious of the reasons.

We stopped asking what would bring people here, and started asking what would stop the ones already here from going.

It is a distinction that sounds like semantics until you look at the numbers. The population fell for eleven consecutive years and has now risen for four. Nobody has opened a factory.

What the capitals want to copy

Delegations arrive most months, and the mayor has learned to disappoint them politely. There is no single policy to take home. There is a decade of small, boring, expensive decisions, each one of which was unpopular at the time and none of which would survive a single election cycle on its own.

The towns that copied one piece of it — the tram, usually — got a tram, and nothing else.