
photo right:
Don Valley Brick Works
Photo credit: Randolph Croft, License to use provided through Creative Commons,
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/
Deindustrialization’s
Long Shadow
How has the understanding of deindustrialization’s drivers and its consequences evolved over the past 50 years?
In what ways do geographic patterns of deindustrialization reflect flows of urban disinvestment and reinvestment, and how do the enduring effects of deindustrialization continue to ripple outward and onward, from the hyper-local to the transnational?
It has been 50 years since the global recession of 1973 significantly accelerated the process of deindustrialization, what Bluestone and Harrison (1982) defined as “the widespread and systematic disinvestment in the nation’s basic industrial capacity.” Since then, as sociologists Tim Strangleman and James Rhodes among others note, deindustrialization has fundamentally remade the economies of the global North, redefined urban design, and restructured work, society, community institutions and social life itself.
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Initial research on the causes and consequences of deindustrialization has raised important debates pertaining to critical political, economic and social tensions involved in deindustrialization’s wake, including the role of global versus local, public versus private, manufacturing versus a service economy, and the relationship between ‘community’ and ‘capital’ (see Bluestone and Cowie, Alice Mah, Saskia Sassen, and Sharon Zukin).
Over the past 20 years, deindustrialization studies developed a deeper understanding of the cultural consequences of the post-industrial economy, often focusing on the impact on working-class communities directly affected by industrial closures. However, there is comparatively little research on the relationship between the redevelopment of industrial heritage properties and gentrification.
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Deindustrialization is a process of “historical transformation that [marked] not just a quantitative and qualitative change in employment, but a fundamental change in the social fabric on a par with industrialization itself."
Jefferson Cowie and Joseph Heathcott, Beyond the Ruins: The Meanings of Deindustrialization