“Even here in the US, when you travel outside of any big urban area, you find a depopulated land and some abandoned former urban areas that literally look as if a neutron bomb had dropped on them.”
I live in fairly rural central MA and nothing could be further from the truth. In fact I would say that this applies to urban areas like in Detroit not the suburbs or rural areas.
Have you been to Roxbury, in Boston?
You’re still in the NE corridor, the Boston burbs and a place where people from NYC and Boston have vacation homes.
Go to Upstate NY and it’s a wasteland; go to the Northern Midwest, and you’ll only see the big cities and their immediate suburbs. But even a lot of these, including Detroit, are at about 50% of their former populations, and once you get beyond the MW cities, you’re not going to see much of anything for over a thousand miles.
There were never huge population centers in most places outside of the NE corridor and the West Coast, but now the wide open spaces probably haven’t been this wide open in at least 60 years.