Speaking for the US many populated arid areas are completely unsustainable as population centers (ironically also where most people in the US have been moving for awhile now), especially because water resources haven’t been managed rationally in many arid areas. This story will absolutely be a global one though, see Tehran for one massive example, Lake Mead for another. No water and deadly heat waves are going to make for limitless ghost town tourism attraction opportunities!
The future is bright for abandoned building photography communities!
In the Alps, there are already quite some ghost towns. Small towns either turned into touristic villages or disappeared over the last 50 years. Others were border towns that slowly went out of business. So many are hanging in by a thread, with increasingly old population.
I read something that villages in the alps are looking for new residents. But most of them are bankers or other people with office jobs, and they are like: no, we don:t need better wifi, you guys are useless in the real world.
It happens everywhere.
Current structures favour moving to cities. Farming and mining (which are the biggest job sectors that require people living in rural areas) are getting more and more automated, which means that there are fewer and fewer jobs in these fields. At the same time, huge, automated businesses win financially against smaller businesses operated with manual labour, so the small farmers are dieing off as well.
Manual jobs are often seasonal (e.g. picking fruit), and they are filled with seasonal foreign workers who don’t live in the rural areas either.
WIth fewer people living in rural areas other jobs (e.g. factories) also move to the cities, further removing rural jobs.
All of that push more people to move to cities and so on.
The impending demographic change accelerates that trend too.