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5 - Industrial restructuring versus the cities

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 November 2009

Lila Leontidou
Affiliation:
National Technical University of Athens
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Summary

Why, in a rationally organized society, ought London to remain a great centre for the jam and preserving trade, and manufacture umbrellas for nearly the whole of the United Kingdom? … Why should Paris refine sugar for almost the whole of France? Why should one-half of the boots and shoes used in the United States be manufactured in the 1,500 workshops of Massachusetts? … The industries must be scattered all over the world; and the scattering of industries amidst all civilized nations will be necessarily followed by a further scattering of factories over the territories of each nation.

P. Kropotkin (1974 edn: 155)

As industrial capital becomes more mobile, the 1970s have been a period of radical transformation of cities and regions. Powerful trends in the direction of decomposition of the production process of many once vertically integrated industries, tend to reverse the trend towards integration which characterized the first decades of the twentieth century in the fordist drive for mass production and consumption (Scott and Storper 1986: 11). The consequent restructuring toward flexible accumulation creates new core/periphery hierarchies, which have much affected the NICs. In Southern Europe, restructuring involves both the formal sector, in which certain industry groups decline while others emerge, and the informal sector. Researchers have focused heavily on the latter. Informal activities have always been growing in the Mediterranean, but recently flexible accumulation revitalized small industry and articulated it in the capitalist economy.

Analysis up to this point has illustrated the transformation of Greater Athens and Salonica into the principal productive centres of Greece during the 1960s and the rise of the working class in urban society and urban growth processes.

Type
Chapter
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The Mediterranean City in Transition
Social Change and Urban Development
, pp. 172 - 208
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 1990

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