Introduction: theories of urban development and their implications for policy and planning Numero 4 despues de Malenni

Declining industrial centers. The departure of industry has resulted in declining manufacturing centers afflicted with high levels of unemployment. Although some of these cities have maintained active CBDs, they all manifest vast empty tracts of abandoned industrial space. The causes of their plight are manifold. Competition from other advanced industrial countries, especially Japan, has displaced many of the mature industries of the US and Britain, particularly in the electronics and automobile sectors. Industry has departed to suburban areas and peripheral regions both at home and abroad, so as to take advantage of cheaper land and labor, less burdensome regulation, weaker or nonexistent unions, and government incentives. Whereas until recently less developed countries specialized in the provision of raw materials, under the new international division of labor many perform the role of platform economies that import capital goods and export finished products at prices lower than manufacturers in the developed world can meet. As markets for goods grow more rapidly outside the old core countries than within them, producers increasingly open factories close to the sources of the new demand. When industry has remained in place but modernized it has substituted capital for labor, allowing it simultaneously to increase production and reduce its workforce. The industrial cities of Europe and the United States have all felt the impact of these changes. Especially striking is the suddenness with which they have been affected; many cities lost as many as a hundred thousand or more manufacturing jobs in the decade 1974-1984. They have sought to compensate through nurturing growth in the service sector, but increases in service employment have not compensated for the losses.