This article investigates how demolition has been tested as a strategy to address the problem of half-emptiness in a post-industrial town. Focusing on a state-led pilot project in Kohtla-Järve, it examines how the removal of semi-vacant, privately-owned apartment buildings was framed as a tool for regeneration and governance reform.

The research combines ethnographic descriptions, interviews with local stakeholders, and materials from various policies, work on project coordination, urban design guidelines and consultation meetings with both state and municipal institutions. Through observant participation in the design and implementation of the project, the article analyzes how different stakeholders—state officials, municipal authorities, and residents—interpreted and negotiated its aims.

Conceptually, it develops ‘half-emptiness’ as an analytical lens for understanding urban decline not as absolute collapse but as a condition of suspended partiality, where infrastructures, governance, and everyday life persist in incomplete and uncertain forms.

Keywords: Politics of partiality; Experimental planning; Infrastructural endurance; post-industrial Europe; post-socialist shrinkage; Observant participation