Martin Sustrik

And as the night closes in, they can't escape the thought, when's my turn?

Maybe they shouldn't have come at all.

Asterisk, asterisk, asterisk.

The instinctive approach, that vain attempt to grow and repopulate, is often counterproductive.

It leads to building infrastructure, literal bridges to nowhere, waiting for people that will never come.

Subsidies quietly fizzle out, leaving behind nothing but dilapidated billboards advertising the amazing attractions of the town, attractions that closed their gates a decade ago.

The alternative is not to fight the decline, but to manage it.

To accept that the population is not coming back and ask a different question.

How do you make a smaller city livable for those who remain?

In Yubari, the current mayor has stopped talking about attracting new residents.

The new goal is consolidation.

Relocating the remaining population closer to the city centre, where services can be still delivered, where the pipes are still the right size, where neighbours are close enough to check on each other.

Germany took a similar approach with its Stadtumbau-Ost, a federal program launched after reunification to address the exodus from east to west as young people moved west for work, leaving behind more than a million vacant apartments.

It paid to demolish nearly 300,000 housing units.

The idea was not to lure people back but to stabilize what was left, reduce the housing surplus, concentrate investment in viable neighborhoods, and stop the downward spiral of vacancy breeding more vacancy.

It was not a happy solution, but it was a workable one.

Yet this approach is politically toxic.

Try campaigning not on an optimistic message of turning the tide and making the future as bright as it once used to be, but rather by telling voters that their neighbourhood is going to be abandoned, that the bus won't run anymore and that all the investment is going to go to a different district.

Try telling the few remaining inhabitants of a valley that you can't justify spending money on their flood defences.

Consider the España-Vaciada movement representing the depopulating interior of Spain, which has achieved some electoral successes lately.