Most urban planning is implicitly optimistic. It assumes more people, more demand, more tax base, more reason to invest. The literature on city governance — the conferences, the white papers, the case studies — is overwhelmingly written by and for cities that expect to grow. Shrinking cities are treated as edge cases, cautionary tales, or problems to be solved by attracting more residents.
Plovdiv does not have this luxury. Bulgaria's second-largest city has lost something in the range of twenty percent of its population since 1989. It is not alone — this is the condition of much of post-communist Eastern Europe, where emigration to Western countries has hollowed out mid-size cities for a generation. But Plovdiv is interesting because of how it has responded: not with denial, and not with despair, but with a kind of infrastructural pragmatism that I find genuinely instructive.
Planning for fewer people
When you plan for fewer people, certain things become possible that are not possible when you plan for more. You can consolidate services rather than expand them. You can be honest about which neighbourhoods will be maintained and which will not. You can design public transport for the population you have rather than the population you hope to have.
This sounds obvious. It is not obvious. The political economy of urban planning pushes almost everywhere toward optimism — toward projections that assume growth, toward investments that promise future returns, toward announcements of what will be rather than honest accounting of what is. Plovdiv has had to become honest because it had no choice. The numbers made dishonesty impossible.
The cities that matter to the future are not the ones on the conference circuit. They are the ones that have had to figure out how to function without abundance. — Daniel Fadlon, Infrastructure & Cities newsletter
What they built
In 2019, Plovdiv was a European Capital of Culture. This brought investment, attention, and some genuinely good public space improvements — the riverside area in particular. But what interests me is not the Culture Capital period, which was exceptional and temporary. It is what happened before and after: the steady, undramatic work of maintaining a city that cannot afford to perform for outside observers.
The trolleybus network. The district heating systems, inherited from the communist period and expensively maintained. The water infrastructure, which serves a declining but still substantial population. The street-level decisions — about where to repair and where to leave — that add up, over time, to a kind of policy. None of this was announced. None of it appeared in a TED talk. It just continued to function, in a city that needed it to function and could not afford the alternative.
What this has to do with quiet infrastructure
Plovdiv illustrates something I keep trying to articulate in my writing about quiet infrastructure: the cities that are most interesting are often the ones that have been forced into honesty by circumstance. They cannot afford to announce. They cannot afford to fail. They build what they can sustain and they sustain what they build.
This is not romantic. The trolleybus network is often old and unreliable. The district heating is expensive and inefficient by modern standards. There is no smart city layer, no dashboard, no real-time data visualisation of municipal services. It is infrastructure in the most basic sense: things that were built to serve a population, still serving that population, still being maintained by people who know that if they stop, something breaks.
I find this more interesting than the latest sensor network in a Dutch city. Not because I am against sensors, but because sensors are easy when you have money and a growing tax base. The hard problem — the one that most of the world actually faces — is maintaining functional urban systems in conditions of constraint.
The lesson
If I had to extract a single lesson from Plovdiv, it would be this: the assumption of growth is a kind of planning subsidy. It lets you defer hard decisions. It lets you promise things you cannot yet afford. It lets you optimise for the future population rather than the present one. When you lose that subsidy, you are forced to make decisions that are better — more honest, more calibrated, more respectful of existing residents — even though they feel worse.
The cities that will matter in forty years are not the growing ones. They are the ones that figured out, under pressure, how to function without growth. Plovdiv is one of those cities. I have been thinking about why this story is so rarely told in English — and what it would mean to change that.