Let the City Fall Apart: Urban Decline Beyond Preservation and Revitalization
Document Type
Journal Article
Role
Author
Published In
Urban Eidos
Volume
7
First Page
39
Last Page
42
Publication Date
6-11-2026
Abstract
This essay reconsiders urban deterioration not simply as failure, loss, or civic abandonment, but as a critical category through which the moral authority of preservation, repair, and revitalization can be questioned. While urban decline is often inseparable from racialized disinvestment, structural neglect, and unevenly distributed harm, the essay argues that not all forms of preservation deserve affirmation, and not all forms of falling apart are destructive. Against an anti-deterioration ethos that equates civic value with permanence, growth, and maintenance, this essay examines how declining urban spaces may interrupt harmful built inheritances, open cities to nonhuman lifeways, and disclose alternative forms of inhabitation. Abandoned lots, deteriorating infrastructures, and weathered surfaces are read not only as signs of vacancy or disorder, but as sites where ecological processes, informal uses, and other modes of urban life emerge. The essay does not romanticize abandonment or deny the violences of disrepair; rather, it calls for a more discriminating civic ethic capable of distinguishing imposed neglect from necessary unbuilding, harmful collapse from generative decomposition. Urban decline, in this account, becomes a way to ask when repair is care, when persistence is violence, and when allowing certain forms to decompose may be necessary for more just and ecological urban futures.
Suggested Citation
Croteau, Jessica (Environmental Studies). (2026). Let the City Fall Apart: Urban Decline Beyond Preservation and Revitalization. Urban Eidos, 7, 39–42. https://doi.org/10.62582/UE7005o
