The idea for this project began with a spontaneous photowalk in my hometown. It was an unusual route for me: less concerned with the familiar streets and more with the spaces behind them. I passed through backyards, narrow passages and rows of houses that are rarely noticed from the main road.

Many of these places appeared neglected. Facades were stained, gardens overgrown, fences damaged, windows obscured or broken. The overall impression was one of decline and disregard. None of this is unusual in the Ruhr area. Comparable places exist in many densely populated regions, and I have seen similar streetscapes elsewhere: in northern England, London, Brussels, Berlin, New York, Vancouver and Calgary.

The photographs below were not initially planned as a project. Only after returning home from my spontaneous photowalk did I begin to see them as a connected body of work. Looking for a title, I remembered the German interior-design magazine Schöner Wohnen—literally, “living more beautifully.” Its English equivalent, Better Living, seemed appropriate.

The irony is deliberate. It is not intended to expose, embarrass or judge the people who live in these places. Nor is it an attempt to look down on them. A photograph of a neglected building cannot explain the lives lived behind its doors, the choices available to its residents, or the circumstances that brought them there.

Instead, the project is meant to raise a broader question: how do we, as a society, accept the existence of such living environments? There may be many explanations—economic pressure, absent owners, inadequate public investment, shifting neighbourhood structures, political neglect. Yet none of them feels sufficient when confronted with the visible consequences.

The images shown here do not depict the lowest end of the scale. They are not images of extreme deprivation or catastrophe. That may be precisely what makes them difficult: they show ordinary urban spaces that have been allowed to become unappealing, neglected and, in some cases, barely dignified.

Better Living is therefore not a verdict on individual residents. It is an invitation to look more closely at the places we usually pass without seeing—and to consider what they say about shared responsibility, housing and the standards we are willing to tolerate.

The photographs that follow are the beginning of that question.

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