In the face of a cost of living crisis, widespread industrial action and mounting inflation, this book offers an incisive analysis of the UK’s problems and a new approach to tackling them. Economic growth and higher wages alone will not fix these problems. Behind the ‘cost of living crisis’ is a deepening crisis of foundational liveability: not only squeezed residual incomes but also failing public services and decaying social infrastructure. The only way out of the crisis is through a political practice of adaptive reuse which works around the constraints that frustrate mainstream policies. Setting out a new model for the three pillars of liveability, When nothing works challenges the assumptions of left and right in the UK political classes and offers a fresh approach to the economically visible and politically actionable.