Detroit is a vital lens through which to observe and engage with the layered textures of post-industrial life in the Rust Belt. While the term 'Rust Belt' suggests a shared condition - of deindustrialisation, decline, and reinvention - it also risks flattening the unique histories and futures of cities like Detroit, Cleveland, or Buffalo into a single, rusted-over narrative. Detroit resists this generalisation through its own enduring cultures of resilience, mutual aid, and aesthetic innovation, from grassroots urban farming to experimental music scenes. As a site of situated observation, it reveals how decline can also be a terrain for emergent possibility where alternative economies, relational geographies, and creative survival take root. Listening here, we learn to attend not just to what is lost, but to what is being composed, quietly and collectively.

Salford, like East Cleveland, occupies a complex relationship with its larger neighbour, Manchester, often eclipsed in profile, yet integral to the region’s identity. Once labelled a “dirty old town” by Ewan MacColl, Salford has since become the North West’s greenest council and a growing hub for cultural regeneration. Its evolution reflects broader post-industrial shifts: from industrial scars to revitalised potential. Salford Quays, once a derelict docklands, now home to Media City, stands as a modern, mixed-use district combining housing, commerce, and arts. While Manchester is seen as the UK’s cultural capital beyond London, Salford’s continued investment in arts and cultural opportunities is central to its place-making strategy and commitment to quality of life. Observing from Salford offers insight into how industrial legacies and creative futures collide, tracing global patterns while remaining distinctively local, shaped by proximity, inequality, and imaginative resistance to erasure, homogenisation, and the commodification of place.

Berlin resonates with post-industrial character in many ways through its entanglement of decay, reinvention, and cultural resistance. However, its path is shaped by distinct historical fractures: war destruction, Cold War division, and abrupt reunification which created large zones of vacancy, particularly in the former East. These urban voids became fertile ground for informal cultural uses: squats, artist-run spaces, and autonomous social projects flourished in the cracks of state neglect. Unlike more gradual post-industrial transitions, Berlin’s regeneration has been dramatic and state-involved, leading to both celebrated cultural innovation and aggressive gentrification. The city thus exemplifies how rapid transformation can amplify tensions between creative freedom, affordability, and the commodification of urban identity. Berlin's story highlights that regeneration is never neutral, it carries the weight of history, policy, and uneven power. Berlin fits into the network of cities reimagining themselves in the wake of economic, spatial, or political collapse. The city purposefully stands slightly apart in cause and tempo here. Consider it as a counterpoint that sharpens the research framework.

Bolton, one of several satellite towns to Manchester, is remarkably different to its regional cultural capital. Once emblematic of the North’s textile might, Bolton now carries the layered story of post-industrial Britain: mills both reimagined and derelict, high streets challenged and communities negotiating heritage and change. While not always foregrounded in regional narratives, Bolton remains a crucial part of Greater Manchester’s identity, balancing tradition with reinvention. Its landscapes, marked by Victorian grandeur, terraced resilience and green moorland edges, speak to both industrial legacy and potential renewal. Investments in education, health and town centre regeneration reflect a broader ambition: to be more than a commuter shadow, but a thriving town in its own right, shaped by its own histories and futures. From this vantage, Bolton reveals how place-making in the post-industrial North is both a cultural and political act, negotiating memory, inequality and the risk of becoming peripheral. Its story, like others across the UK, resists simplification: local yet global, familiar yet shifting, defined as much by its proximity to power as by its determination to assert its own.