Cities have lived through large job losses before: coal, steel, the car industry. This page gathers what can be learned from past and ongoing upheavals, and asks what it means at a time when AI and robotics are also changing office work.
The pattern
Comparing the well-documented cases reveals a recurring pattern. Regions fared better when they shaped change early instead of letting it happen, cushioned those affected, diversified into many sectors rather than a few large employers, and built universities and other anchor institutions.
Two caveats belong with this. First, success usually showed only after 20 to 40 years. Second, flagship projects and property development raised cities' image and economic output, but did not by themselves close internal gaps or make up for lost well-paid industrial work.
This summary is an interpretation of the case studies below, not a law of nature. Every city starts from its own conditions.
Old industrial regions
The classic cases come from the period when mining, steel and car making shrank. They show what cushioning costs, how long recovery takes and where strategies reached their limits.
For each city it is worth asking four questions: what was the starting point, what was done, what came of it, and what can be learned?
Ruhr: expensively cushioned, broadly rebuilt
Hard-coal employment in Germany fell from about 607,300 (1957) to 9,600 (2015); the last Ruhr mine closed in 2018. Over decades there were support programmes, new universities, the IBA Emscher Park and early retirement without compulsory redundancies. Social disruption was largely avoided, but at very high cost; the north of the region still has high long-term unemployment. The study's lesson: shape change actively, diversify broadly and release industrial land.
From the 1970s, competition and automation hit the steel city; the number of unemployed rose from 89,000 to 212,000 between 1981 and 1983. Universities became engines of research and talent, the city and universities agreed a joint strategy in 1985, and family foundations funded civic institutions. Today health care, robotics and higher education shape the economy. The opinion piece also stresses that not all population groups benefited equally.
Regeneration of the industrial port began about ten years before the Guggenheim Museum (1997), with a metro (commissioned 1988) and a masterplan for industrial land (1989). The museum claims €4.2bn of value added and more than 5,000 jobs over 20 years; an economist quoted doubts the job figure. Metropolitan unemployment was still nearly 18 per cent in 2017. Lesson: a landmark does not replace good jobs.
Manchester: growth in the centre, gaps at the edges
According to an analysis by researchers published on an LSE blog, Greater Manchester did not pull away from other British core cities in economic output. Gaps between the centre and northern boroughs such as Oldham and Rochdale have barely narrowed since the 1980s. Between 1998 and 2008, more than half of new jobs were in the public sector. The authors recommend focusing on the foundational economy rather than property growth: care, housing, transport, living wages.
Detroit had about 1.8 million residents in the 1950s and went bankrupt in 2013. According to US Census Bureau estimates, its population grew in 2023 for the first time in decades, from 631,366 to 633,218. Lesson: a city can lose about two-thirds of its population before it stabilises, and recovery takes decades.
Steel towns are going through a second transition right now: from blast furnaces to electric arc furnaces or hydrogen-based direct reduction. An electric arc furnace needs far fewer workers than a blast furnace. The outcome depends heavily on public money and on a stable owner willing to invest.
Linz, with voestalpine, is in the middle of this shift. The examples below show the range, from state-supported transition to shutdown and insolvency. Where figures have a date, it is given; later developments have not been checked here.
Linz: electric arc furnace from 2027
voestalpine plans to commission an electric arc furnace powered by green electricity at its Linz site in the first half of 2027. According to the company, more than 500 suppliers have been contracted, over 90 per cent of them in Austria. The page gives no figures on the effects on the workforce.
In January 2024 Tata Steel announced up to 2,800 job losses in the UK, about 2,500 of them within 18 months. The UK government is contributing £500m to the conversion and Tata £750m, plus a £100m Transition Board for workers and the region. The electric arc furnace was due to operate in 2027. Results of the transition fund have not yet been documented.
As of late July 2026, blast-furnace production at the former Ilva plant is to end; after a court ruling, the hot area must close within 90 days unless asbestos and emissions are dealt with. Unions speak of about 20,000 direct and indirect jobs. A new owner would need at least three years to build electric furnaces. The metalworkers' union Fiom-CGIL is calling for an extraordinary transition plan.
At the Liberty Ostrava steelworks, the energy supplier cut off power from 21 December 2023 over unpaid bills, and production stopped. In February 2024 the restructuring administrator declared the company insolvent; the company disputed this. The case shows that the biggest risk is often not the technology but ownership and financing.
Gary, Indiana: an investment pledge with a condition
In December 2024 Nippon Steel pledged about $1bn for Gary Works, on condition that its takeover of U.S. Steel went ahead. On that occasion the mayor stressed how long the city had borne the economic and environmental consequences of the plant. Whether and how the pledge was carried out has not been checked here.
In April 2024 POSCO's HyREX hydrogen pilot plant produced about 24 tonnes of molten iron a day, but quality did not yet meet the company's own standards. A full-scale plant was due to start construction in early 2025 and be completed in 2027; POSCO aims to switch to hydrogen-based production by 2050. Nothing was found on the effects on employment in Pohang.
Stellantis put 1,074 workers at its Mirafiori plant on short-time work (cassa integrazione) from 19 to 30 October 2026. Output for 2026 is expected at about 80,000 vehicles, against a plan of more than 100,000. High energy costs are cited; unions criticise the plant's dependence on a single model.
According to a post on voestalpine's corporate blog (October 2023), the company plans to take on around 200 additional employees in Linz alone to set up and run the electric arc furnace: 125 in production, 60 in mechanics and 15 in electrics. When the first blast furnace is later decommissioned, the company says there will be no loss of jobs. A two-and-a-half-year qualification programme has been running since 2022, initially as a pilot for electrical engineering.
These are the company's own statements. For the construction phase, voestalpine cites around 6,200 jobs secured in Austria, up to 3,800 of them in Upper Austria. We found no overall forecast of employment at the site after the switch, either from the company or from the Province of Upper Austria.
Earlier waves of automation mainly hit factory regions. Generative AI changes the picture: it touches office and knowledge work, which is concentrated in large cities.
That does not mean jobs are disappearing there. Exposure only describes how strongly tasks are touched by AI, not whether they are replaced or complemented. The research found no city strategy anywhere with published results on how AI is changing the urban labour market.
OECD: cities more affected than the countryside
According to the OECD's first regional analysis of generative AI (November 2024), the share of exposed workers ranges from 45 per cent in urban regions such as Stockholm or Prague to 13 per cent in rural regions. On average it is 32 per cent in cities and 21 per cent in rural areas. The OECD expects the regional divide to widen and recommends digital infrastructure, digital literacy and support for small and medium-sized businesses.
Many levers lie with national governments. But cities use some instruments themselves: cooperatives and purchasing by local anchor institutions, agreements about time, public spaces for learning and making, and municipal income experiments.
The findings are mixed. In studies, cash support usually improves wellbeing and security; the effect on paid work depends heavily on design. Cooperative models create local ownership but, except in Mondragón, remain small.
Mondragón: cooperatives at scale
The Basque cooperative group Mondragón reported sales of €11.3bn and 71,415 jobs for 2025, 1,346 more than the year before. It is described as the largest employer in the Basque Country. The example shows that employee ownership can work on a large scale.
At the time of the ten-year review (around 2021), about 320 people worked in the Evergreen Cooperatives network; at least 80 per cent of each cooperative is owned by its workers. Key customers are the city's hospitals and a university. The review also names problems: one business is being wound down, and the anchor institutions' purchasing did not always match the cooperatives' needs.
With its Time Agreement, the City of Barcelona, together with trade unions, cooperative and business associations, committed to a healthier, fairer and more sustainable organisation of time. Goals include sharing care work more fairly, creating more time for participation and reforming working and opening hours, with 2025 as the target year. Results are not documented here.
Oodi, the central library, opened in December 2018 at a cost of €98m. A whole floor is a kind of urban workshop with 3D printers, sewing machines, studios and music and media rooms. The building sees itself as a platform for learning and public debate, a place where people can be active without having to buy anything.
Since July 2022 Seoul has been testing a model similar to a negative income tax, with 2,076 households and a control group. According to the city's press release on year two (October 2024), 8.6 per cent of households left welfare and 31.1 per cent increased their earned income. However, the release is internally inconsistent about the effect on taking up work, so the figures should be read with caution.
In Stockton, California, 125 people received $500 a month unconditionally from 2019 to 2021, funded by philanthropy. According to the evaluation, in the first year they were about twice as likely as the control group to find full-time work and reported less anxiety and depression. Other experiments, such as in Barcelona, found less paid work in the short term, so the employment effect is contested.
In the Global South, the new wave mainly affects formal service-export jobs, for example in IT and call centres. It sits on top of large informal and platform economies that already offer little social protection.
Responses so far come mainly from national level or from industry. The research found no city-level programmes.
Bengaluru and India's IT sector
In July 2025 the IT company TCS announced more than 12,000 job cuts, about 2 per cent of its workforce, mostly at middle and senior level; the company cited skill mismatches rather than AI. India's IT sector employed about 5.67 million people in March 2025. One analysis firm estimates that 400,000 to 500,000 professionals could be at risk within two to three years.
The Philippine IT and business-process outsourcing sector employs about 1.9 million people and aims to grow to 2.5 million by 2028. In February 2026 a senator filed a resolution calling for a review of how prepared the country is for AI, and urged upskilling. The report describes no industry reskilling programme.
A study of ride-hailing drivers in Lagos finds some advantages over informal taxis, such as insurance and credit. But the work remains informal, without social protection and with longer hours. The drivers are well organised; the authors propose using platform data to help formalise their work.
Linz combines both waves: with voestalpine's electric arc furnace, its industry faces a transition like the one Port Talbot is going through now. At the same time the city has a lot of office and service work, exactly the kind of tasks the OECD finds most touched by generative AI in cities.
A successful small-scale example already exists: the Tabakfabrik shows what can happen when a city buys a disused site and opens it to many users. This matches the lesson from the Ruhr that releasing land is what makes renewal possible.
The open question is whether Linz prepares a transition before it is needed. A thought experiment: what would a Linz transition fund look like if it were set up before 2027 rather than after?
Tabakfabrik: from 284 to more than 1,700 jobs
The Tabakfabrik closed in 2008; the City of Linz bought it in 2009 and invested a total of €38m, €17m of it for the purchase. About 284 people worked there before closure. Today there are about 250 companies with roughly 1,700 to 1,800 workers, depending on the source; private investment amounted to €155m.